It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL,
“In Praise of Idleness,” 1932
WE ANSWER WORK EMAILS on Sunday night. We read endless articles about how to hack our brains to achieve more productivity. We crop our photos and use filters before we post them on social media to earn approval. We read only the first couple paragraphs of the articles we find interesting because we don’t have time to read them in their entirety. We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. We are members of the cult of efficiency, and we’re killing ourselves with productivity.
The passage at the beginning of this Introduction was written in 1932, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, which caused the Great Depression. Russell’s description of the “cult of efficiency” predates World War II, the rise of rock and roll, the civil rights movement, and the dawn of the twenty-first century. More important, in my mind: It was written before the creation of the internet and smartphones and social media.
In other words, technology didn’t create this cult; it simply added to an existing culture. For generations, we have made ourselves miserable while we’ve worked feverishly. We have driven ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten where we are going, and have lost our capacity for “light-heartedness and play.”
Here’s the bottom line: We are lonely, sick, and suicidal. Every year a new survey emerges showing more people are isolated and depressed than the year before. It’s time to stop watching the trend move in the wrong direction while we throw up our hands in despair. It’s time to figure out what’s going wrong.
All my life, I’ve been driven. That word has been used to describe me since elementary school.
Driven isn’t always a compliment, especially when it’s used to describe a woman. It’s not quite the same as ambitious, and it has a slightly different meaning than aggressive. Honestly, I think driven fits me fairly well. I’ve always viewed all forward progress as inherently virtuous and good.
Even as a child, I made long to-do lists in my daily planner (I had a daily planner by the ripe old age of twelve) and made sure I finished more tasks than I added every day. When I was dieting, I motivated myself by saying I would weigh less tomorrow than today, even if it was only by a fraction of an ounce. If I spent an afternoon watching monster movies on TV, I felt guilty. I was terrified that someone would see me sitting idly on the couch and call me lazy.
My drive has helped me succeed in life. It sustained me through single parenthood, layoffs, and physical injury. I’ve pushed myself to accomplish incredible amounts of work both at home and in my career. But at some point, drive became inextricably intertwined with dread: dread that all my work and effort would never be enough.
Eventually, I got lucky. I achieved much of what I wanted by the time I hit my forties, and I had time to stop, take a breath, and reexamine my way of life. While I’d always been driven, I’d also been exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed. I assumed depletion was a natural side effect of being a single parent with multiple jobs and not enough money to cover all my expenses. My underlying assumption was that when I achieved financial stability, my stress would end.
That assumption, like so many assumptions, was wrong. My long-dreamed-of moment finally arrived a few years ago: I reached a level of stability that should have made me more comfortable, and I paid off my student loans (at last!). In fact, I paid off every debt I owed. I even had a respectable amount in savings and a real retirement account. I looked forward to nights of relaxation and relief. I expected to feel a lift, an easing of the stress I’d suffered for two decades, but that relief never came.
My daily planner (still an old-school one with paper pages) was as packed with tasks as it was before I’d paid off my debts, if not more so. My workload was as heavy with one job as it was when I had four. In the evenings, I was as worn out and exhausted as ever.
I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits. While my list of duties got shorter at the office, I found new duties to fill the empty space and called more meetings. At home, I decided I finally had time to make my own bread and learn Spanish. Instead of cooking the tried-and-true favorites in my recipe book, I searched the internet for new and exotic dishes that required an hour of driving in order to gather the ingredients. I agreed to serve on two advisory boards and chose to start writing a blog. And every week, I collapsed onto my couch on Friday night and thought about how I used to meet my friends for drinks, but now I didn’t have time.
I had some tough questions for myself. Why? Why do I do this? Why do any of us do this?
For the past several years, I’ve searched for the answer to those questions. Reading that eighty-seven-year-old essay from Bertrand Russell brought a flash of insight. I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive. Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.
We search for the best method of doing everything, from holding meetings to exercising to barbecuing, and we are lured by the “ultimate tools” to improve our lives. We are like mechanics who build a car by assembling the top-of-the-line parts, focused only on finding the best of everything and not on whether those parts work well together. The end result is a car that struggles to start and keeps stalling out.
What is the cult of efficiency? It’s a group whose members believe fervently in the virtue of constant activity, in finding the most efficient way to accomplish just about anything and everything. They are busy all the time and they take it on faith that all their effort is saving time and making their lives better.
But they’re wrong. The efficiency is an illusion. They believe they’re being efficient when they’re actually wasting time.
Imagine that you need to learn how to swim. You read books on swimming, you buy a DVD series on the subject, you participate in a webinar about it. Maybe you install several apps on your phone that track your swim time and help you find the nearest pool. You do everything you can to learn how to swim except get into the water.
More and more, this is our approach to problem-solving.
We are investing our time and energy and hard-earned money in things we think will make us more efficient, but those things end up wasting our time, exhausting us, and stressing us out without bringing us closer to our goals. We take extraordinary measures to become more productive, only to become less so. Is there a good explanation?
The human drive to constantly improve and grow is innate and, in most ways, commendable. The modern human has been around for only about 300,000 years (compare that to the 66 million years or so that dinosaurs existed), and yet we’ve come a long way from the mud huts of the first Homo sapiens.
We have endured incredible hardship and unspeakable tragedy, but we developed a coping mechanism to prevent us from slipping into despair. It’s called the hedonic treadmill. It’s a tendency in our species to adjust our mood so that no matter what terrible things happen, we quickly return to the same level of happiness we enjoyed before the traumatic event.
There’s a catch, though: It also works in reverse. In other words, if an incredibly happy change occurs in our lives, we don’t move forward as happier people. Instead, the hedonic treadmill brings us right back to the state of mind we were in before the raise in pay, new house, or lost weight. It means that, for many of us, we are never satisfied.
Imagine you finally earn a million dollars. Euphoria ensues, right? Wrong. Your mind will adjust and send you right back to your happiness set point. As Dr. Alex Lickerman, author of The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self, explains, “Our level of happiness may change transiently in response to life events, but then almost always returns to its baseline level as we habituate to those events and their consequences over time.”
That makes us all vulnerable to those who promise more happiness and a better life through the use of their product, system, or software. We crave more joy and satisfaction. No matter what we achieve, no matter how many extra hours we work, we remain unfulfilled. As the nineteenth-century economist Henry George wrote, a human is “the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.”
For the past five hundred years or so, we’ve searched for external solutions to our internal problem. We have been deluded by the forces of economics and religion to believe that the purpose of life is hard work. So every time we feel empty, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled, we work harder and put in more hours. This trend can be traced to Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Christopher Columbus, and the Age of Discovery. With Luther, laziness became a sin, and with Columbus and the Age of Discovery, the developed world’s eyes turned to new and unfamiliar places, to novelty as an end goal.
These obsessions became widespread during the industrial age and they have only strengthened in the more than two centuries since. Our time periods are not named for human development anymore, like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We are currently in the jet age, the information age, the nuclear age, and the Digital Revolution. We measure our years in work products, not personal development.
Ultimately, the solution is not digital. It is as analog as the human body. Technology can do many things for us—extend our lives, keep us safe, expand our entertainment options—but it cannot make us happy. The key to well-being is shared humanity, even though we are pushing further and further toward separation.
We don’t seem to trust our human instincts. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, we search for the right tech, the right tool, and the right system that will solve the issue: bulletproof coffee, punishing exercise, paleo diets, goal-tracking journals, productivity apps. We think our carefully designed strategies and gadgets will make us better. My goal is to dispel that illusion and help you to see that we are not better, but in many cases, worse.
I know it feels as though we don’t have a choice in the matter, that we would work less if we could, but that’s not entirely true. Here in the States, we’re particularly bad about taking time off. We chose not to take 705 million vacation days in 2017, and more than 200 million of those were lost forever because they couldn’t be carried over to the next year. That means Americans donated $62 billion to their employers in one year. The number of vacation days we use has declined over the past three decades, even though those who use all of their time off report being 20 percent happier in their relationships and 56 percent happier in general.
Since the nineteenth century at least, we’ve learned this behavior from the previous generation and then added to it before passing on the lessons to the next generation. We are teaching this mind-set to our kids and inculcating them into the cult. When asked, most parents say they just want their kids to be happy. And yet research reveals that what most parents actually want is high GPAs, because they think success in school will make their kids happy.
Let’s take a breath. Consider for just a moment what we know about the essential nature of humankind. Superficially, we are upright, talking great apes. According to where we live, we look different, speak differently, and value very different things, but is there such a thing as a true human nature that spans all continents and cultures? Are there qualities that we share from birth, regardless of our nationality, faith, or income? Just how much of our behavior is controlled by biology and how much by individual circumstance and environment is a long-standing topic of fierce debate among scientists.
Still, there are a few things that all humans can learn to do well without training: play, think, connect socially, react emotionally, count, and think about ourselves. Perhaps we take them for granted, since we don’t often invest much energy in those activities. Perhaps, because they are inherent to most of us, we assume our ability to fit into a community is a given. So over the past decade, we’ve found “better” things to do with our time.
Few of our daily activities are focused on helping us become more naturally playful or thoughtful or, god forbid, social. Our social networks are no substitute for the intimate connections we have made for 200,000 years, and our work schedules don’t allow for play.
Essentially, we are working our way out of happiness and well-being. We’ve lost the balance between striving to improve and feeling gratitude for what we have. We’ve lost touch with the things that really enrich our lives and make us feel content. We’ve spent billions of dollars in the past decade or so finding replacements for what we as human beings already do well.
At this point, this toxic trend has gone too far. What began a couple hundred years ago has taken ahold of our lives both at work and at home. We are digging deeper and deeper into a hole that will eventually bury us if we don’t stop. The stakes could not possibly be higher. We are talking about the loss of our own humanity.
According to numerous surveys, social isolation has doubled among many adults since the 1990s, and social isolation is deadly. The United Kingdom created a new government position in 2017: Minister of Loneliness. Suicide rates among teens in the United States were on the decline for years but started rising dramatically in 2010 and are still on the rise. How is this possible in a world that is more connected than ever? In an age in which even the most remote areas of the world can generally get a package from Amazon in a few days’ time?
Part of the problem is that we’re cutting out expressions of our basic humanity because they’re “inefficient”: boredom, long phone conversations, hobbies, neighborhood barbecues, membership in social clubs. We smile indulgently at the naivetés of the past, when people had time for things like pickup basketball and showing slides of Hawaiian vacations to their friends. How quaint, we think, that our grandparents had time for things like sewing circles and lawn bowling.
But wouldn’t our ancestors have had less time than we do? After all, we have microwaves and dishwashers and gas lawnmowers and the internet! We can order just about anything and get it delivered to our door. We have robot vacuums and AI assistants that tell us the weather and set our alarms. If you add up all the time saved through technological advancement over the past one hundred years, shouldn’t we have hours of excess time in which to do as we please?
Why are we so efficient and yet so overwhelmed? Why are we so productive with so little to show for it?
I think we have engineered our way further and further from what we do best and what makes us most human. In doing so, we’ve made our lives harder and infinitely sadder. “I can hunch over my computer screen for half the day churning frenetically through emails without getting much of substance done,” writes Dan Pallotta in the Harvard Business Review, “all the while telling myself what a loser I am, and leave at 6:00 p.m. feeling like I put in a full day. And given my level of mental fatigue, I did!”
Many of us are exhausting ourselves this way, working very hard at things that accomplish very little of substance but feel necessary. To a large extent, the solution to this problem is to correct our misperceptions. In the way that those with body dysmorphia see something other than the truth in the mirror, the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something. The truth is, overwork reduces productivity. The Greeks work more hours than any other Europeans, according to data from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Yet they rank twenty-fourth out of twenty-five nations for productivity.
Perhaps some of the systems we adopt are unnecessary. After all, humans do many things beautifully without assistance or intervention. Without medication or yoga, we can relieve stress and induce feelings of happiness. Research shows you can lift your mood simply by taking a walk; no need to track your steps.
I’d like to inspire a new consideration of leisure and a new appreciation for idleness. Idleness in this sense does not mean inactivity, but instead nonproductive activity. “Leisureliness,” says Daniel Dustin of the University of Utah, “refers to a pace of life that is not governed by the clock. It tends to run counter to the notions of economic efficiency, economies of scale, mass production, etc. Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.” That’s the kind of leisure I hope we can all make time for. It’s what humans were meant to enjoy and what we need in order to function at our highest levels.
To embrace leisure, we don’t have to let go of progress. My argument is not that we are moving too fast or changing too quickly. In fact, I’m saying quite the opposite. I believe our constant pushing is now impeding our progress.
We work best when we allow for flexibility in our habits. Instead of gritting your teeth and forcing your body and mind to work punishing hours and “lean in” until you reach your goals, the counterintuitive solution might be to walk away. Pushing harder isn’t helping us anymore.
We can and must stop treating ourselves like machines that can be driven and pumped and amped and hacked. Instead of limiting and constraining our essential natures, we can celebrate our humanness at work and in idleness. We can better understand our own natures and abilities. We can lean in not to our work but to our inherent gifts.