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Make things better by making better things.
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins noted that our ancestors worked two to three hours a day to survive. Juxtapose that with today, and we’re arguably working four times as hard. Why is that?
The washing machine promised to end the dreadfulness of scrubbing a shirt. The microwave championed convenience. The refrigerator works once we plug it in—I don’t have to sit there and baby it. The same goes for a range or a thermostat: I just need to set the temperature and walk away. And that’s just advances in home technology. We can say the same for travel, for the internet and online shopping, for Amazon’s delivery network, and on and on and on.
If our lives are supposedly getting so much more efficient, then why are we working so hard?
There are a bunch of reasons:
1. Humans always find a way to fill their time. We just don’t always get to pick what we fill it with. While we could use discretionary time for something else, culturally we’ve decided to fill it with a 40-hour workweek. (Even when we don’t need 40 hours to complete the actual work.) We don’t own our time. We’re on the boss’s time.
2. Our incentive structures don’t lead to more freedom, possibility, discretionary time, or leisure and recreation—they lead to profits. We maximize and optimize for something that pulls us away from our communities and toward the interests of central institutions.
3. We’ve been told, over and over, that to create meaning in our lives, we must consume. And when we inhale this story, we clamor for more status symbols and artifacts to show others that our lives are worth envying.
4. We use false proxies. We measure the wrong things. Money is, indeed, a story. But it also sends a signal—if the digital bits go up at the end of the quarter, we feel better about our situation.
None of these things are as definitive as gravity. They’re choices. Unfortunately, we’ve built a culture (or a cage, for that matter) in which no one is directly accountable for the system or the way things are. That makes it even harder to change anything—we’re fighting an invisible force that controls the operating system: how we should think, how we should feel, how we should live.
Once we can put our finger on it—once we can see the world as it really is—we can make a second choice: to push back.