Highlights
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In 1930, in a speech titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our new-found leisure time without going crazy. ‘For the first time since his creation,’ Keynes told his audience, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.’13 But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.
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(Until we get them onto schedules, babies are the ultimate ‘task-orientated’ beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the other-worldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.)
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The Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock.
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Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.
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As this modern mindset came to dominate, wrote Mumford, ‘Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.’11 In its place came the dictatorship of the clock, the schedule and the Google Calendar alert; Marilynne Robinson’s ‘joyless urgency’ and the constant feeling that you ought to be getting more done.
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This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived – but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities.
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Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. Take those services – on which I’ve relied too much in recent years – that let you design and then remotely mail a birthday card, so you never see or touch the physical item yourself. Better than nothing, perhaps. But sender and recipient both know that it’s a poor substitute for purchasing a card in a shop, writing on it by hand, and then walking to a postbox to post it, because contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort – which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.
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I’m embarrassed to admit what an outsize negative effect such minor frustrations have had on my happiness over the years. Fairly often, they still do; but the effect was worst at the height of my productivity geekhood, because when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook.
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It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.
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‘The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,’ Bergson wrote, ‘and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.’
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But to describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals – such as food, money and electricity – are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.
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This was why Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, came down so hard on his fellow Romans for pursuing political careers they didn’t really care about, holding elaborate banquets they didn’t especially enjoy, or just ‘baking their bodies in the sun’: they didn’t seem to realise that in succumbing to such diversions, they were squandering the very stuff of existence.
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The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
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In the case of conversation, this generally takes the form of mentally rehearsing what you’re going to say next, as soon as the other person has finished making sounds with their mouth.
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The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.
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Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigour: Take education. What a hoax.3 As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.
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Friends of mine live in an apartment building on the historically Jewish Lower East Side of New York that’s equipped with a ‘Shabbat elevator’: step inside it between Friday evening and Saturday night, and you’ll find yourself stopping at every floor, even if nobody wants to get on or off there, because it’s been programmed to spare Jewish residents and visitors from having to violate the rule against operating electrical switches on the Sabbath.
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Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work.15 The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ‘It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.’ This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation – at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.
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And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching – and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfilment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any ‘later’ left?
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But it’ll come as no surprise, presumably, to learn that he doesn’t seem all that happy. In Oppenheim’s short film, The Happiest Guy in the World,
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The problem, I think, is that his lifestyle is predicated on a misunderstanding about the value of time. To borrow from the language of economics, Salcedo sees time as a regular kind of ‘good’ – a resource that’s more valuable to you the more of it you command. (Money is the classic example: it’s better to control more of it than less.) Yet the truth is that time is also a ‘network good’, one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours. Telephone networks are the obvious example here: telephones are valuable to the extent that others also have them. (The more people who own phones, the more beneficial it is for you to own one; and unlike money, there’s little point in accumulating as many phones as possible for your personal use.)
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That finding echoed other research, which has demonstrated that people in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost when the weekend arrives, just like employed people relaxing after a busy workweek, though they don’t have a workweek in the first place.5 The reason is that part of what makes weekends fun is getting to spend time with others who are also off work – plus, for the unemployed, the weekend offers respite from feelings of shame that they ought to be working when they aren’t.
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Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings
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