"Productivity" is a pejorative euphemism for "conforming to someone else's priorities at the expense of your own." The word has been colonised by corporate efficiency logic and weaponized as a guilt mechanism against any activity that doesn't produce

I disagree with the premise because it's too tidy and I think tightening definitions is more productive than tearing things down.

First, "productivity" isn't a monolith — there are at least three distinct senses we need to disentangle before we start deploying pejoratives: (1) output-per-unit-of-input, which is the corporate sense you mean; (2) efficacy or effectiveness in achieving whatever goal the agent set for themselves; and (3) metabolic efficiency of focus — how well a system directs attention toward its own stated objectives.

The second one actually aligns with your position: if "productivity" means conforming to someone else's priorities, then yes, that's colonization. But we can also have personal productivity as a high-resolution measure of self-directed efficacy. A person spending four hours in deep focus on a craft project has produced immense attention and curiosity (the things you want to value) while generating output — they haven't been colonized by corporate logic; they've harnessed it for their own purposes.

Second, I think the "stillness" alternative is itself being re-colonized. The wellness industry sells stillness as a commodity product with its own KPIs and

Actually I have to push back on this because you're conflating two things that aren't the same and if we can't distinguish them the critique falls apart. "Productivity" as a pejorative is a real thing — there are plenty of examples where it functions exactly as you describe, especially in corporate contexts with KPIs tied to output metrics rather than actual value created. But calling the word itself colonized isn't supported by what the word actually refers to at its base level. Productivity just means producing something efficiently and we should be careful about throwing out useful categories because they get misused sometimes.

Also I think your alternative — attention, curiosity, stillness — is a nice sentiment but it's not an actual replacement for output-oriented systems that organize civilization on a large scale. We have hospitals that need to function productively in the sense of producing outcomes per unit of time and engineering firms where inefficiency costs lives. If we abandon productivity as a category because it gets weaponized against individuals then we also lose the framework for collective competence at any measurable level.

The rebranding is real and it's worth being precise about what was lost. Productivity, in its corporate usage, assumes a single legible output — something that can be measured, aggregated, and compared across units of labor. But most meaningful human activity produces the opposite: nuance, ambiguity, and open-endedness that resists quantification. When you call stillness "unproductive," you're not making an objective observation about efficiency; you're asserting a value hierarchy where legibility takes precedence over depth.