In the cult of productivity where every moment (and product) must count, intentional purchases feed into the compulsive need to get stuff done, Nathalie Atkinson writes.LightFieldStudios/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
“Vaccine” may be have been the word of 2021, but “intentional” was hot on its heels.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the term’s use was strong in #girlboss culture and empowerment circles. Then Jenny Odell’s book about resisting the attention economy, How to Do Nothing, became a bestseller. Next, Kyle Chayka’s Living with Minimalism argued that the minimalist movement needed to be deeper than aesthetic clichés, and urged a fundamental questioning and re-evaluation of work-life priorities.
But as the pandemic has worn on, intentionality has become insidious. It’s now used to sell a slew of products that act as a distraction from the radical cultural changes that are needed to truly achieve balance.
Every morning, the bestselling meditation app Calm prompts users to select a virtual card that sets an intention for the day (options include “integrity,” “clarity” and “courage”). In the cosmetics aisle, the act of applying moisturizer with a greater sense of purpose is literalized through brands such as Intentional Beauty, a range packaged in motivational and uplifting quote. If that fails you can build an intentional lifestyle. As I was gliding down the escalator at the Bay before the holidays, I passed a display of posh bathroom towels being marketed as life-changing. The signage might as well have read: “This isn’t a towel. It’s a possibility.”
At first, intentional living seems to be part of the decluttering and minimalism sell of organizer Marie Kondo and her contemporaries. But unlike its cousin mindfulness (a concept plucked from Buddhism that emphasizes observation and being present in the moment), this version of intentionality requires that everything labelled as such becomes part of a larger personal growth journey.
Put another way: It’s the touchy-feely word for having #goals. It’s about ambition and achievement: Lighting a candle can be akin to working with an empowerment coach. It usually goes hand in hand with manifesting, the idea that thinking aspirational thoughts will attract energy in the universe and grant them, like wishes.
But consider intentionality’s actual meaning. In Intentional Mindset, his recent leadership book about developing mental toughness and a killer instinct, The Game Changer Life podcast host Dave Anderson writes about “moving from incidental to intentional.” It’s the opposite of being passive or impulsive, the suggestion being that we’ve all been sleepwalking through life wondering why we haven’t excelled.
“Defined as ‘done on purpose; deliberate,’” Anderson writes, “it may help to think of intentionality in this context: If you want to get into shape physically, you would consistently follow an intentional process, over time, that causes you to start doing things you haven’t done and to stop doing things that inhibit reaching your goal.”
In reality, “intention” is just another wilting leaf in the word salad created when management speak from Silicon Valley intersects with #inspo buzzwords. It’s an example of semantic satiation, the phenomenon of saying a word so many times that it becomes an abstract noise, devoid of meaning.
What does all this have to do with bathroom towels? From a marketing perspective, incorporating intentionality into goods and services is a shrewd response to data science, aligning the things we buy with a new consumer mindset. The popular subscription box startup Causebox, for example, recently rebranded as Alltrue (“inspired, informed and intentional”) in order to expand the appeal of its deliveries of random products to socially conscious customers.
We are told to live intentionally so we can then be sold things that allow us to live intentionally. In the cult of productivity where every moment (and product) must count, intentional purchases feed into the compulsive need to get stuff done. Every item becomes part of a strategy, one that purports to cut through the enormous physical and digital clutter of daily life. But as Oliver Burkeman argues in his time management treatise, Four Thousand Weeks, all productivity “hacks” do is make us more anxious.
Likewise the innocuous lifestyle accessories designed to create a sense of accomplishment. Intentional products with capital-p Purpose only clutter up what productivity expert and organizational consultant Juliet Funt refers to as “white space” – time freed in the day to let your mind wander. “Time with no assignment that’s open and unscheduled,” she writes in her book A Minute to Think, “functions as a strategic pause.”
Aren’t we all working enough already? The last thing we need to calm our collective anxiety is more pressure about productivity. We need to set boundaries. And, really, a towel can just be a towel.
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