Productivity of Excess

When Working More Stops Improving Life

We begin this text with a scene many Brazilians know in the body.

A person wakes up early. Organizes the house. Prepares coffee. Takes a bus, subway, van, motorcycle, bicycle, car, or walks. Enters the flow of other bodies that also left their homes. Each one carries a story, a concern, a tiredness, a hope, a bill coming due, a child to care for, an elder to visit, a dream kept inside.

In this movement, even before work begins, true Jiwasa can appear.

We feel this when transportation allows dignity. When there is space to breathe. When someone offers a seat. When looks recognize each other. When the route has safety, light, shade, human time, and a city that works. When the body perceives that it is moving with other bodies inside a shared territory.

The commute can be suffering.
It can also be belonging.

Everything depends on how the State organizes the territory.

Work can also generate true Jiwasa. We feel this when colleagues cooperate, when one person teaches another, when the team solves something together, when there is trust, when leadership serves the group, when the environment allows rotation, learning, respect, and creation. In these moments, working with other people can expand our Body-Territory. We feel that we are producing something with meaning.

But there is another kind of work.

There is work that moves the body through abstraction. The person commutes, follows schedules, obeys goals, sells time, delivers vital energy, and performs movements they might never choose naturally. The body moves less through living desire and more through the need for money. External timekeeping begins to dominate inner spaces. The company clock overlaps the rhythm of the body.

Here an essential difference appears.

There is true Jiwasa, when the body moves with meaning, belonging, and real cooperation.

And there is captured Jiwasa, when the collective strength of workers is used only to produce financial value distant from the concrete life of those who work and from the territory where production happens.

Working for someone can generate value. It can sustain families. It can create important services. It can produce food, technology, care, health, education, energy, and infrastructure. But when work organization captures the body only as a production piece, life loses fruition.

A person receives a salary, but loses sleep.
Receives a salary, but loses time with their children.
Receives a salary, but becomes ill.
Receives a salary, but sees the territory being destroyed.
Receives a salary, but feels that their vital force serves a project that impoverishes the world where they themselves live.

This is the drama of productivity of excess.

It brings people together, but can empty the “we.”
It pays wages, but can destroy territories.
It organizes teams, but can produce fear.
It creates goals, but can break bodies.
It generates profit, but can leave the city more tired, more indebted, and more distant from itself.

We learned to call this productivity.

But perhaps it is organized excess.

Excessive demands.
Excessive debt.
Excessive commuting.
Excessive screens.
Excessive targets.
Excessive fear.
Excessive comparison.
Excessive work without belonging.
Excessive wealth leaving the territory where the body remains.

The central question is born here:

what kind of productivity should the Brazilian Constitution protect?

The Constitution speaks of the social values of labor and free enterprise. This opens a beautiful possibility. Work and enterprise can walk together. Companies and workers can generate life together. Production and territory can strengthen each other. But for this to happen, productivity needs to be measured by what improves concrete life, and also by what preserves the vital energy of the bodies that produce.

Constitutional productivity needs to move away from cold counts of volume, profit, and gross growth. It needs to feel the body.

The question changes.

Instead of asking only “how much did we produce?”, we begin to ask:

did this production improve our life in the territory?

Did it increase health?
Did it increase lifetime?
Did it increase rest?
Did it increase housing?
Did it increase safe water?
Did it increase clean energy?
Did it increase good food?
Did it increase education?
Did it increase safety?
Did it increase belonging?
Did it increase municipal sovereignty?
Did it increase biome preservation?
Did it increase citizen autonomy?
Did it increase added value in Brazil and Latin America?

This question needs to become a rule of State.

The first constitutional proposal would be to include the principle of Vital Productivity of the Body-Territory.

Article 170-A — The Brazilian economic order shall observe the principle of Vital Productivity of the Body-Territory, understood as the production of goods, services, technologies, food, energy, data, knowledge, and infrastructures capable of expanding health, sovereignty, well-being, belonging, environmental regeneration, national added value, and the population’s lifetime.

In simple language: producing well means producing better life.

The economy gains meaning when it strengthens the body, the territory, and the future.

The second proposal would be to measure development through indicators that appear in real life.

Article 174-B — National planning shall use, in addition to traditional economic indicators, indicators of territorial well-being, mental health, commuting time, quality of work, food security, access to housing, water, energy, education, connectivity, preservation of biomes, territorial carbon, and community belonging.

In simple language: Brazil needs to measure what the population actually lives.

A country can record economic growth while the body loses sleep.
It can increase production while the forest falls.
It can increase exports while the city loses water.
It can increase profit while the family loses lifetime.

This is why we propose the IPB: Internal Product of Belonging.

The IPB measures what increases concrete life in the territory: housing, water, electricity, health, food, education, clean energy, secure data, living biomes, shorter commuting time, healthy work, stable income, care for children and elders, safety before tragedy, culture, science, and belonging.

The third proposal would be to protect work against predatory forms of organization.

Article 7-A — Work, in all its forms, shall respect the physical, mental, family, and territorial health of the person, prohibiting forms of productive organization that generate systematic exhaustion, collective illness, humiliation, extreme insecurity, abusive exposure to excessive working hours, or permanent transfer of economic risks to the worker.

In simple language: productivity needs to fit inside life.

The Brazilian body can work with dignity, rest, cooperation, and a possibility of future. Work can be a place of learning and creation, and it also needs protection against predatory leaderships that turn command into pleasure of domination.

Every productive organization creates an emotional climate.
There is a climate that opens trust.
There is a climate that closes the body.
There is leadership that organizes the group.
There is leadership that captures the group.
There is command that serves the common objective.
There is command that extracts pleasure from the submission of others.

A Body-Territory Constitution needs to recognize that the workplace is also territory.

The fourth proposal would be to link public incentives to real benefit in the territory.

Article 170-B — Companies, sectors, or activities that receive subsidies, incentives, public credit, conditional tax benefits, or State support shall demonstrate concrete benefit to the impacted Body-Territory, including the generation of healthy work, national added value, environmental protection, innovation, technical training, local improvement, and traceability of public resources.

In simple language: whoever receives State support needs to return concrete life to the territory.

The fifth proposal would be to stimulate a high-value economy for Brazil and Latin America.

Article 219-C — The State shall foster strategic production chains oriented toward Brazilian and Latin American needs, including clean energy, production of healthy foods, maintenance of servers and data centers, public artificial intelligence, health, education, sanitation, reforestation, water technologies, territorial carbon, living biomes, and digital sovereignty.

In simple language: Brazil can produce what we truly need, with more added value, more technology, more sovereignty, and more territorial care.

Here productivity stops being a blind race.

It becomes direction.

Producing clean energy to feed homes, schools, hospitals, agriculture, servers, and smart cities.
Producing food with technology, living soil, protected water, and local value.
Maintaining data centers and servers with digital sovereignty, security, and renewable energy.
Developing public AI for health, education, territorial planning, and transparency.
Reforesting to generate carbon, water, climate, income, and belonging.
Creating high-value services for Brazil and Latin America.
Transforming surplus into knowledge, technology, care, culture, and sovereignty.

The sixth proposal would be to place lifetime as a constitutional value.

Article 6-B — The State shall recognize lifetime, rest, family care, community coexistence, mental health, and cultural fruition as essential dimensions of the well-being of the Body-Territory.

In simple language: living well also means having time to exist.

Time to breathe.
Time to care for children.
Time to look at the sky.
Time to learn.
Time to sleep.
Time to visit one’s mother.
Time to cook.
Time to walk through the neighborhood.
Time to feel that life belongs to the body.

Productivity of excess steals existential time.

And when it steals time, it steals consciousness.
When it steals consciousness, it steals participation.
When it steals participation, it weakens democracy.
When it weakens democracy, it opens space for capture.

This is why this text speaks of productivity and also of sovereignty.

An exhausted people participate less.
An indebted body accepts more humiliation.
A family without housing lives in survival mode.
A worker without time loses belonging.
A city without biome loses future.
A country that measures only growth can forget life.

Jiwasa helps place life back at the center.

We work to live.
We produce to care.
We create technology to free time.
We organize the economy to strengthen territory.
We measure productivity by what increases well-being, sovereignty, and future.

Brazil has enormous power. It has sun, water, wind, forest, soil, biodiversity, youth, creativity, science, farmers, engineers, teachers, researchers, artists, Indigenous peoples, workers, and a living Latinness capable of creating solutions for the world.

Vital productivity is born when this power finds constitutional direction.

The question stops being only: how much money circulated?

The question becomes:

how many bodies became healthier?
how much stronger did the territory become?
how much water was protected?
how much clean energy was created?
how much good food reached the table?
how much lifetime was returned?
how much forest remained standing?
how much knowledge stayed in Brazil?
how much added value stayed in Latin America?
how much sovereignty was born in the Body-Territory?

We can improve the Constitution so that work becomes more than survival and the economy becomes more than extraction.

The Body-Territory Constitution can affirm that economic growth needs to fit inside life.

Productivity of excess makes the body run until it forgets why it runs.
Vital productivity makes the body walk with meaning, belonging, and future.

When working more improves our life, there is Jiwasa.

When producing more strengthens the territory, there is Jiwasa.

When commuting allows a dignified encounter among bodies, there is Jiwasa.

When coworkers cooperate with trust, there is Jiwasa.

When leadership rotates, listens, and serves the group, there is Jiwasa.

When time returns to the body, there is Jiwasa.

When the economy protects water, food, energy, data, forest, health, education, and rest, there is Jiwasa.

We can transform productivity into vital energy.

And perhaps this is one of the most important constitutional changes of our time: measuring Brazil by the life it can sustain, and also by the life it allows to flourish.

References and Foundations for Further Development

World Health Organization — burnout as an occupational phenomenon related to chronic workplace stress.

International Labour Organization and World Health Organization — long working hours associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Agência Brasil and Brazilian Social Security — growth of work leave due to mental and behavioral disorders in Brazil.

IBGE — informality, self-employment, income, employment, and conditions of the Brazilian labor market.

Bruce McEwen — allostatic load and the physiological cost of chronic stress.

Antonio Damasio — body, homeostasis, feeling, decision-making, and consciousness.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum — freedom as the real capability to be and to do.

Elinor Ostrom — governance of commons and collective organization around shared resources.

Body-Territory thought and Indigenous knowledge — territory as life, care, belonging, and continuity.