Past Times
When I tell people, with a straight face, that one solution to our mental health problems would be a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they commonly cite all the horrible things that were once humanity’s lot, such as high infant mortality, predation, warfare, and disease.1
“Yes ok fine,” I usually respond impatiently. “But when those things weren’t happening, I bet life was much better.”
One time, one of my friends couldn’t help himself. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
I had to laugh; but I’m also serious. For example, Rob often talks about the joy of spending one’s entire life around close friends and family. I sometimes fantasize about being immersed in an untarnished nature or unquestioned belief system. Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, argues that hunter-gatherers “spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways” and ate better than their farming descendants.2 Many anthropological studies have suggested that hunter-gatherers had plenty of leisure, perhaps more than today’s average worker.3 Plus, our ancestors’ work was largely outside, often communal, and arguably play-like.
To this “grass is greener” list we can add that the hunter-gatherer experience of time might have been much better.
Time is an odd phenomenon because in one sense we totally understand it, and in another we totally don’t. When Stephen Hawking tells me that time is a fourth dimension, or that time did not exist before the Big Bang, I feel stupid. In fact, as he graciously concedes a bit later in A Brief History of Time, the human brain is incapable of understanding these concepts. Similarly, our brains routinely distort time. Fifteen minutes of a boring lecture feels like hours. We run into a friend we haven’t seen in a decade, yet it feels like just last year that we were close.
On the other hand, I can usually judge to within a minute how much time has passed in a therapy session. Sometimes, when I wake in the middle of the night, I know the hour to within five minutes without looking. And who hasn’t woken up just before an alarm set for an early flight, paranoid the plane has left without them?
It makes sense that humans would have evolved an adaptive understanding of time. The idea that time is a fourth dimension isn’t relevant to my reproductive success, but understanding that if I release an arrow now, some interval will pass before it reaches that deer, most certainly is. This evolved sense of temporality is presumably out of sync with our modern environment and experience. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here is another example of evolutionary mismatch. We are programmed to understand, engage with, and participate in time much differently than we do now, and this predictably leads to unhappiness.
The Beginning of the End
When did the human relationship to time begin to change? In Work, James Suzman nominates a common culprit: agriculture.4
When humans transitioned to an agricultural mode of living roughly 10,000 years ago—a transition that was by no means uniform, wholesale, or entirely intentional—they upended a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had been the norm for millions of years.5 The gain was obvious—more food per acre—but the costs were manifold. Agriculture ushered in a new era for disease (due to malnutrition and sedentary living), class and war (due to the possibility of accumulating wealth), and environmental degradation (just look outside).6
Another byproduct of the agricultural revolution was our relationship to time.
To provide some context, let me tell you about myself as an undergraduate. I couldn’t decide in my first year between English or Anthropology as a major, so in my second year I took a graduate-level anthropology course to see if I could hang. I quickly discovered that I could not, but I wasn’t going down without a fight. So, for the final paper, I wandered the library stacks looking for something to salvage my grade. I stumbled upon a classic in the field, Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics.
Sahlins took issue with the assumption that hunter-gatherers’ lives were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”7 He wanted to show that if affluence was understood as the ability to acquire wants, then hunter-gatherers were extremely affluent. They procured everything they wanted or needed in around four hours of work per day. Since then, the general finding that hunter-gatherers tend to work less than farmers has held fairly consistent.
According to Suzman, farming not only necessitated longer hours, but also required manipulating time in new ways. Farmers couldn’t simply grab a few berries when they were hungry. Instead, they had to plan months in advance to ensure a good harvest. Then they had to plan months in advance of that to store their surplus. They also had to reach far into the past to remember what had worked well last year, and the year before that, and ten years before that.
In short, an agricultural mode of living forced humans to live less in the present and more in the future and past. This trend has only intensified. Despite the ubiquitous mantra to “live in the moment,” the fact of the matter is that our minds, efforts, and infrastructure have never been as deeply involved in the past and future. Hell, just the other day I sketched out my will, which I hope won’t be relevant for about 60 years (i.e., longer than the average hunter-gatherer would have lived). For this article, I studied people who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. You get the point.
My argument is that our increased awareness of and emphasis on time, beginning with the transition to agriculture and intensifying from there, has exacerbated many of the inherent tradeoffs that time represents. Time has become almost palpable in the modern environment, with our 40-hour work weeks, 20-minute HIIT classes, six-minute billable segments, and five-year plans. But time might turn out to be one of those things, similar to romance, that is best if not thought about too directly or consciously.
Time’s Major Tradeoffs
I didn’t get a good grade in that anthropology class, but I did get a job after college as a textbook salesman. This involved walking in unannounced to a professor’s office—ideally someone who taught a large section of something like Introductory Psychology or American Government—and convincing them to use my company’s book instead of the competition’s.
I was nearly two years into the job, and enjoying it, when my manager was abruptly fired. He had been a true mentor to me, so I took the news pretty hard, and I became more indignant once I got to know his replacement. Of the many things my new boss did that rubbed me the wrong way, one stands out: he encouraged me to do more interesting things with my free time so that I could raise my “interesting person quotient.” What a dick, right?
Unfortunately, he had a point.
Personal vs. Social
My new boss’ recommendation to do more noteworthy things with my leisure was irritating because my free time was, literally, none of his damned business. But a friend sent me an email recently, after she read The Need for Social Insulation, that reminded me of how “thoroughly social” humans are, even when they are alone.
“The article reminded me of how happy I have been lately, but also how little I have to talk about when people ask me what I’ve been up to.”
This need to “report back” to the group, to have something to say when someone asks what you’ve been doing, is fascinating. We feel accountable to others, as if we must justify how we have been spending our time, even when that time is our own. Put another way, there is pressure to make our personal time socially exchangeable. To create through our leisure or solitude some form of social currency or capital.
Fortunately, what my new boss was doing with his personal time was making himself more interesting to another employer, so I was soon rid of him. But I’ve never forgotten his shameless appeal to constantly improve myself in the eyes of others.
Present vs. Future
To put the personal/social tradeoff in the proper context, we need to zoom out. Large strokes, there are two things we can do with our time: consume it or invest it. There are many instances of this binary. One is personal/social. If I spend my free time doing what I want, then I’m consuming it, whereas if I do something to raise my “interesting person quotient,” then I’m investing it.
The most common instance of the binary is present/future. When I dedicate an hour to cleaning my apartment, I have invested in a better future—one in which I won’t have to clean my apartment, at least for a little while.8 When I dedicate an hour to playing video games, though, then I have consumed that hour. My future hasn’t been made better—and in some cases, it’s been made worse—but I enjoyed myself in the meantime.
Consuming and investing time are not mutually exclusive. Some activities seem to have a little of both, such as going to the gym (for Crossfit people like Rob), working, playing a sport or instrument, or being social. These would fall in the middle of the Venn Diagram below, as activities that are—at least somewhat—enjoyable in the moment and beneficial for the future.
For me, writing Living Fossils articles is a good example of the middle section. I used to write these sorts of articles before I had an audience, but now that I have one, I can enjoy both the process of writing and the fruits of publishing. Yet the basic tradeoff between consuming and investing time is always there, even for activities that have elements of both. For example, my first draft of an article is always the most enjoyable because I write it however I want. With each subsequent draft, I become more aware of creating a valuable product for readers. This reduces my present and personal gratification while (usually) raising my future, social payout.
The extent to which we document vacation is another example. Taking a picture removes us from the moment, but it also preserves that moment for the future and others.9 Ditto for posting to social media.
Bottom line, a tradeoff will almost always exist between the various instances of consuming and investing time for the simple reason that incentives rarely align perfectly. Our individual interests won’t overlap entirely with the group’s. Our current desires aren’t identical to future ones. So it goes.
The Experiencing and Remembering Selves
When it comes to how to spend our time, personal/social and present/future may not be the only tradeoffs. But they are undoubtedly the main ones, and they overlap quite a bit. Together, they remind me of the distinction Kahneman draws in Thinking, Fast and Slow between the experiencing and remembering selves. Basically, our experience in the moment differs from our experience in retrospect, which is also the perspective from which we evaluate it and share it with others. As Kahneman says, “people’s evaluations of their lives and their actual experience may be related, but they are also different.”10
It’s kind of strange, but humans don’t remember an event as the sum total of their experience of it. This explains how we can have a positive recollection of a mostly-negative event, and vice versa. Take my annual backpacking trips as an example. These trips are typically four to six days and involve around eight hours of hiking a day with everything needed for survival on my back: tent, sleeping bag, clothes, food, water purification, and so on. On the trip itself, every year, I am reminded how miserable it is. The trip has awesome moments, too, don’t get me wrong, but the modal moment is unpleasant: sweating, bug-riddled, exhausted, and sore. Yet I always manage to forget this in the intervening year because my evaluation of the trip is far different from what it was like to be on it.
Other examples of things that improve one’s evaluation of life, but not the experience of it, are parenthood and educational attainment. We can think of parents as “buying” a more secure sense of their life’s value and direction with higher levels of moment-to-moment stress, frustration, and other negative feelings. As for education, Kahneman writes: “More education is associated with a higher evaluation of one’s life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress.”11
The opposite is possible, too. As my friend indicated in her email, we can have lovely moments—some of our life’s best—and emerge without much to remember or report. A few years after my great boss was replaced with a shitty one, I moved to western Massachusetts to live as much as possible like Henry David Thoreau. Many of my afternoons were spent on a blanket, lying in a secluded field or forest, reading, birding, or doing nothing. All I remember of these moments is that they were wonderful. I can’t recall anything specific—not the books I read, nor the birds I saw, nor the pattern of the clouds as they floated idly by.
In fact, the only specific memory I have of these afternoons is of once finding a huge spider perched a few inches from my head.
The reason our memory of an event is different from our experience of it is that only certain information is relevant to our reproductive success. The particulars of when and where I saw the spider have obvious adaptive value, but the armadillo I imagined into the clouds on that dreamy July day…well, that’s not gonna propel my genes forward. So it goes.
The Time Environment
There is a final aspect of time to consider, and that is how it fits. Time can be thought of as a sweater, which we hardly notice if the size is right. But if the sweater is too tight or loose, it’s hard to notice anything else. In fact, one of the easier ways to define happiness is: time in which we aren’t aware of time’s passing.
There’s a lot of cool research about how our time environment affects well-being. It turns out that the happiest people have just the right amount of time, neither too little nor too much—although if you had to choose, you should choose too little. For many people, in fact, becoming busier is a solution to their problems. My hockey teammates in high school usually had their best academic semesters during the season, i.e., when they had the least amount of time for schoolwork. For therapists, “failure to launch” clients can often benefit from more time pressure, too.
But being under too much time pressure, as Kahneman notes, is no picnic either. It’s one of the main factors that negatively influences job satisfaction (along with the immediate presence of a boss).12 Likewise, when I am under the gun to finish one of these articles, going near the computer becomes pretty much the last thing I want to do. On the other hand, as my dad likes to say, “anything can be fun when you’re not in a rush.” Thoreau, in Walden, a book that took him a leisurely nine years from start to finish, renders it this way: “In an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter.”
Paying close attention to how the sweater of time fits can lead to some surprising insights. For example, in Outlive, a great book about longevity, Peter Attia discusses the importance of emotional health in addition to physical health, using himself as an example. Attia has long dealt with anger issues, but it was only after rubbing elbows with mental health professionals that he began conceptualizing his anger as the result of childhood trauma. Specifically, “helplessness masquerading as frustration.”13
It’s clear from reading Attia’s book, though, that he places an enormous amount of time pressure on himself. The number of things he does, and the standards at which he wants to do them, create a fragile life: if one minor thing goes awry, his whole day is thrown off. Isn’t it possible that time pressure is a bigger—or at least more proximate—factor in Attia’s anger, rather than something that happened to him over thirty years ago? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but it seems possible, and the solution is presumably much easier. Or at least more straightforward.
I find this is true in my life. One of the nice things about being a therapist is that my schedule is pretty much identical from week to week. This has allowed me to observe that I’m a miserable grouch on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and an absolute delight otherwise. Since I schedule most of my clients on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I long chalked this up to emotional transference: my clients were infecting me with their foul mood. But eventually I realized this wasn’t true. First, I was usually irritable and overwhelmed on these days, not anxious or depressed as my clients were. Second, I really enjoy my sessions. I am hardly ever irritable or overwhelmed in them. But before, between, or after session, that is when the mountain of other things I have to do piles on and causes me to feel angry. Or, more specifically, territorial of my time.
On days without clients, this pressure is released—not only because I have more time, but because I can flex my schedule if need be. I might even work longer on these days and yet feel less pressure, because I’m working at my own pace. This difference, between proactivity and reactivity, is possibly the main determinant in whether I am happy in a given day, and I have found the same is true for many of my clients. People want at least some ability to chase their day, rather than be constantly chased by it.
The Modern Sweater
The most common form of advice I find myself giving to clients, in one way or another, is to do less. Says something about my caseload, doesn’t it? But I also think it says something about the modern environment. By all indications, hunter-gatherers did less and operated under looser time schedules. Without agriculture prompting them to think far into the future and past, they probably didn’t have a five-year plan. They probably didn’t even know what they were doing next Tuesday at 4:30. Tuesday wasn’t even a thing! Instead, prehistoric peoples were likely regulated by less distinct aspects of time, such as internal mechanisms (hunger), external events (changing of the seasons), and interaction of the two (circadian rhythm).14 All this, I think, led them to be “present” in a way that modern people so desperately crave.
If I had to give some general advice to readers, then, and I didn’t care about plagiarizing, I would copy a little framed list of “Cabin Rules” that my friend and I find at our annual fishing Airbnb:
1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Do it slowly and completely.
3. Leave space between things.
4. Don’t do too much.
In other words, mimick the hunter-gatherer experience of time.
Although this might be goal-worthy, modern humans face considerable challenges in pulling it off. It’s hard to stay engaged in a task when we are constantly distracted from it. It’s difficult to lose track of time when we are constantly reminded of it. It’s nearly impossible to remain in the present, what with our infrastructure so steeped in the future and past. “Do you know your retirement goals?” a commercial guilt-trips me. “Photos from this day last year,” my phone rejoices.
Still, I think people have plenty of room to negotiate a better fit, especially if armed with some of the insights here.
In the end, I really enjoyed writing this article for two reasons. First, writing allows me to have a foot in all camps: I contribute to my future while enjoying my present, and I achieve a sense of personal achievement that converts into social currency. Second, writing engages me enough that I lose track of time while doing it. Hopefully it was the same for you.
Coda: Mowing the Lawn on Saturdays
I was routinely flabbergasted as a kid that my dad seemed to enjoy mowing the lawn. The guy would work Monday-Friday and then get behind the John Deere first thing Saturday morning. At the time, I thought he must be deeply depressed, bored, or both. But now I totally get it. I, too, find my preference slowly but surely shifting toward investment activities over consumption activities. Furthermore, I am beginning to require an ante of investment in order to enjoy my consumption, as in: “If you mow the lawn, then you can have a beer.”
What’s going on here? Economically, at least, it doesn’t make sense to favor investment activities the older we get, for the same reason financial advisors recommend that younger people save and older people spend. From the economic perspective, toddlers should be mowing the lawn and reading Plutarch, their fathers should be mulching and then enjoying a beer, and their grandfathers should be playing with blocks all day long. But this doesn’t happen because, while it might make sense economically, it doesn’t make sense evolutionarily. Kids play in order to learn vital skills. Adults don’t play as much because they’ve learned those skills and have different fish to fry, e.g. frying fish for their kids to eat. It may be that evolution helps nudge us toward age-appropriate activities by changing our preferences for them. Thus, in the same way that many adults enjoy coffee but few children do, many adults enjoy mowing the lawn, cleaning the kitchen, and power-washing the garage.
The experience of this shift in preference is a bit different, though. At least to me, it seems as if it’s being driven by a desire for emotional stability. For example, when I think about playing video games for a few hours, I can anticipate that my emotions will be high while I’m playing, and then low when I’m done: I’ll be frustrated that I can’t continue playing and perhaps guilty that I played for so long. There is far less emotional volatility if I just stick with investment activities. Even better if I can ensure the future and somewhat enjoy myself in the present (the shaded green area). I think this is what mowing the lawn was for my dad. It wasn’t doing taxes, which is just pure torture; it had some elements of present enjoyment. But it also had to get done eventually.
Anyway, the emotional consistency of a shaded-green activity helps explain why, for some people, it’s the only activity they want to do.
REFERENCES
Attia, P. (2023). Outlive: The science and art of longevity. Harmony.
Harari, Yuval N. (2018). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books.
In a future post I will explore what we know about how prevalent these miseries actually were.
“The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.” – p. 79
What most people who fantasize about quitting the city and living on a farm don’t quite appreciate enough—myself included—is that they are hoping to trade an industrial perspective on time for an agricultural one. They should really just go whole hog and wish for the hunter-gatherer one.
Jared Diamond is my farming guy. I recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel for an excellent account of humans’ transition to agriculture. A shorter summary can be found in the chapter “Agriculture’s Mixed Blessings” in The Third Chimpanzee.
Along with the Industrial Revolution and the “Great Leap Forward” circa 50,000 years ago, the transition to agriculture ranks as a Top 3 moment in human history, at least in my book.
A line from Thomas Hobees’ Leviathan that was often used to describe life as a hunter-gatherer.
The feeling of productivity, in fact, might be measuring the extent to which you have gained a return on your time investment. The more productively you cleaned, the longer you can go without cleaning again.
One of my favorite examples of this is the blog written by AtHome about hiking the Continental Divide Trail. Somewhere along the way he admits: “Writing stress. It always comes back to writing stress. I must admit if I may speak candidly, that writing this blog is a consistent source of stress on the trail, in town, when I wake up in the morning, and when I go to sleep. Managing that stress and the other priorities of the trail, the actual hiking, resupplying, my relationships, is a complicated balancing act that I have yet to totally nail.” Writing a blog while hiking the trail removes AtHome from experiencing the trail, at least a little.
Kahneman, D. (2011), p. 397.
Kahneman, D. (2011), p. 396, my italics.
Kahneman, D. (2011), p. 394.
Attia, P. (2023), p. 391.
“The lives of hunter-gatherers are orchestrated by a host of natural rhythms of which they must be keen observers: the movement of herds of game (deer, gazelle, antelope, pigs); the seasonal migrations of birds, especially waterfowl, which can be intercepted and netted at their resting or nesting places; the runs of desirable fish upstream or downstream; the cycles of the ripening of fruits and nuts, which must be collected before other competitors arrive or before they spoil; and, less predictably, appearances of game, fish, turtles, and mushrooms, which must be exploited quickly.” – Against the Grain, p. 88-89.
Great article! I really enjoyed it.
GM: about the transition to agricolture, are you familiar with "Against the grarin" James C. Scott (2017)?