Everything from reading
to swimming to cooking can now be tracked or optimised. What is this quest for
perfection doing to our free time?
By Anthony Cummins,
22/07/18, The Guardian
Extracts:
If you spend much time
mooching around the internet, you will probably have come across articles on
sites such as Quartz and Forbes called things like “17 habits of highly
successful people”. Life hacks of the rich and famous have become the
capitalist equivalent of the tales of hardworking coal miners that were once
impressed upon Soviet schoolchildren.
Invariably, these people
wake up at 4.30am; (...) As lifehack.org puts it: “The weekends can often be
busier than weekdays, with [people] attempting to cram chores, exercise, family
commitments, social engagements and more into a 48-hour period.” (...)
Increasingly, our leisure time is not leisure as our parents or grandparents
might have enjoyed it: time away from the productive demands of work for
pottering, ambling, collecting, socialising. It is leisure with an imperative,
self‑imposed or otherwise, to maximise relaxation yield, compete over hobby
production and co-opt every activity – exercising, meditating, making Halloween
costumes for the kids – into a dynamic of human perfectibility.
It is hard to say
precisely when this shift took place. The “like” button had something to do
with it. (...)
One reason leisure has
become more competitive is that it is increasingly quantifiable. Smartwatches
keep track of your movements, from steps walked to kilometres skied; platforms
such as Strava allow you to compare times with peers. The principle works
beyond exercise, too. Apps such as SleepScore help you measure how
productive your sleep is; Calm and Headspace gamify mindfulness and meditation,
so it is no longer an antidote to work but a way of preparing yourself for more
work.
Yet these activity
counters are basic compared with what the finest minds in Silicon Valley are trying
to create. Bryan Johnson, a co-founder of PayPal, is now leading the neurotech
company Kernel, the aim of which is to bring the brain “online” to track
what users are thinking about. “Think of it as a step counter for the
brain,” he said recently. I can’t see any potential dystopian downsides to
that… (...)
The culture of metrics
has migrated from the business world into our leisure time via education and
public services. Schools have become more results-oriented. “In an attempt
to make the important measurable, we have instead made the measurable important,”
was how the Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins recently summed it up. This has
helped to create a generation who see learning as a numbers game, while
Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook have done the same with popularity.
This has changed the way
we view our time off. In a recent essay, In Praise of Mediocrity, the author
Tim Wu shared his hunch that we are now afraid of being bad at things: “We are
intimidated by the expectation ... that we must actually be skilled at what we
do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies’, if that’s even the word for them any more,
have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious
about whether you are really the person you claim to be.” (...)
We could turn to art and
literature for some perspective – but these are subject to the same
imperatives. Apps such as Joosr and Blinkist condense books into 20-minute
versions; Instagram is full of great works distilled to one inspiring quote.
Even if you manage to read the latest Karl Ove Knausgaard, well, it would be a
waste if you didn’t flaunt your erudition with a #shelfie. On Reddit’s
podcast forum, a number of users report listening at 1.5x speed, so as
to maximise consumption, and express regret that they can’t do the same for
Netflix shows. (...) Some used a “trim silence” filter to cut out the natural
pauses in speech, shaving 30 minutes off a three-hour podcast. Presumably,
you could use the same technology to make Beethoven’s Ninth symphony up to 23%
more efficient.
What would John
Maynard Keynes make of it all? In Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren (1930), the economist expressed hope that, by now, we would all
be working three-hour days and spending the rest of our time enjoying our
leisure in a more leisurely fashion. Karl Marx hoped that redistributing
the gains of industrial production would enable workers to spend their days
like 19th-century aristocrats: writing, fishing and hunting.
In those days, it was
the poor who worked all hours, while the upper classes flaunted their leisure
as a status symbol – take those Parisian flâneurs who used to take their
tortoises for walks.
The members of the early
labour movement battled hard to claw back their time and they were successful
at it: we have them to thank for our largely work-free weekends. The postwar
period was arguably a golden age for the hobbyists. Now, if
anything, the 19th-century paradigm has been reversed: automation and
associated forces mean those at the lower end of the labour market often don’t
have enough work to do, while the rich are time-poor. Busyness is worn as a
badge of honour; idleness is condemned as a vice.
For Rutger Bregman,
the author of Utopia for Realists and a proponent of a shorter working week,
something is seriously awry. “Right up until the 1970s, philosophers,
sociologists and economists were predicting that the biggest challenge of the
future would be boredom: what the hell would we do with our time?” he says. “Isaac
Asimov predicted that the biggest profession would be psychiatrists,
treating people for the symptoms of boredom.” There are plenty of psychiatrists
around, but boredom doesn’t tend to be high on their priority list. “We’re
almost suffering from the opposite,” Bregman says.
From an economic point
of view, the decline of leisure is not as illogical as it first appears. It was
the US economist Gary Becker who first explored this, in A Theory of the
Allocation of Time (1965). Time is money. The more money you earn, the more
valuable your time is. The more valuable something is, the less inclined you
are to waste it. That is why people in London walk faster than people in
rural Cornwall. It is why a banker is more likely to ask you to sponsor their
ultramarathon effort than, say, a fisherman.
But Bregman feels there
may be nonmaterial factors at play, too. “We live in a sort of
inverse welfare state, where the most important jobs – the nurses, the
teachers, the refuse collectors – are paid the least. It’s actually the
least important jobs – the management consultants, the financiers; the
bullshit jobs, in other words – that pay the most. So, my hypothesis is
that the elites have demanding jobs in terms of energy and effort, but they
provide them with no meaning. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures. If you’re
sitting in the office all day sending emails to people you don’t like, writing
reports that no one will read, designing financial products that only destroy
wealth, building algorithms that make people click on more ads … it’s a pretty
depressing existence, isn’t it? So, the less meaning you find in your
70-hour-a-week job, the more extreme you will get as you pursue your leisure
time.”
As Bregman points out,
busyness is not a society-wide phenomenon: “It’s more something you see among
the elites in the big cities, applying the high standards of their working
lives to their leisure time, too.” Quality leisure, like quality work, is
unevenly distributed. (...)
But I sense a backlash.
In Ottessa Moshfegh’s recently published novel, My Year of Rest and
Relaxation, the young female narrator resolves to spend a year in complete
retreat from life, doing precisely nothing. The only person she sees is her
friend Reva, who is constantly trying to interest her in self-improvement. But
no, our narrator just wants to lie in bed. (...)
When I surveyed my
friends, I discovered that quite a few had hobbies that they keep quiet about –
usually something cultivated as an antidote to screens, “likes”, metrics and
doing. One takes photographs on film and puts them up on a Tumblr, the URL of
which she never shares. One mother I know finds time for pottery, chess and
DJing. (...)”
No comments:
Post a Comment