Technology, Part II: A Wrinkle in Time

Where’d it all go, the time technology was supposed to save us?

In the first post of this series, I asked the reader to imagine me as a homemaker in the 1950s who had just purchased a washing machine. Initially, this acquisition was a positive development because it made me better off than my prior self and many of my neighbors. Wind the clock forward to the 1960s, though, and things have changed. Not only have I long adapted to my washing machine, but by now everyone else has one too. So, I don’t really feel any which way about it. Mostly, I don’t think of it at all.¹ But the washing machine’s presence in everyday life has had ripple effects. For example:

1. Higher standards for hygiene and fashion

2. Need for machine advertisement, display, delivery, repair, and disposal

3. Increased demand for household electricity and space

4. Higher cost of living (i.e., a laundry machine is now part of the “basic package” of living a normal life)

The most important ripple, though, is actually a wrinkle—a wrinkle in time. Something that used to require hours of my week now requires minutes. Recall Jean Twenge’s observation that in the 1920s and 30s, “household tasks like washing and cooking took so much time and effort that much of the population could do little else.”² Once I had a washing machine, though, I could do more than a little else. The question was what. Should I make more elaborate meals for dinner? Attend more of my children’s events? Pick up a hobby? Have an affair? Get a paying job? If the principal effect of most technologies is to put time back in people’s pockets, we can’t really say whether this surplus is good or bad until we know how it’s spent.

Each person will do something different with their time, of course, but if we step back and look at the net effect of extra time on human activity, we’ll notice that some portion of that surplus has been reinvested into more technology. But surely you see the conundrum? If technology saves us time, some of which we spend to make more technology (which will save us more time), then why—after tens of thousands of years of this process—are we still working? Why aren’t we all reclining on a bed of clouds, having grapes popped into our mouths by robots? Indeed, how is it that I routinely find myself advising clients to “do less”?

Keynes and Confucius

Thinkers throughout history have recognized technology’s potential to solve “the economic problem,” or the meeting of our basic needs, and thus provide a plethora of leisure. In his famous essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), economist John Maynard Keynes argued that due to the power of compound interest and technological innovation, “the economic problem may be solved, or be at least in sight of solution, within a hundred years” (i.e., now). What did Keynes think would happen then?

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Lol, nice try.

Keynes was no dummy, though, nor was he alone in thinking that technology would eventually make subsistence easy, paving the way for loftier pursuits. In The Analects, written around 2,000 years earlier, the disciple Ran You puts a question to Confucius as they drive through the populous city of Wei: “When the people have multiplied, what more should be done for them?” “Enrich them,” Confucius responds. “And when they have been enriched, what more should be done for them?” “Instruct them.” Similarly, later in the text, another disciple Zixia says: “The various craftsmen occupy workshops in order to complete their tasks, but the gentleman studies in order to develop his Way.” The gentleman being, of course, one free from the economic problem, and the “Way” being something like how to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” Both Keynes and Confucius assumed—understandably so—that people would work less, and meditate more, as the effort to put food on the table diminished.

One part of this prediction, that material requirements would be more easily met, has turned out to be almost eerily accurate. For example, Keynes predicted an eight-fold boost in productivity; we are on track to meet that by 2029 (!). “There is evidence,” Keynes speculated furthermore, “that the revolutionary technical changes, which have so far chiefly affected industry, may soon be attacking agriculture. We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport.” Considering that 1-2% of the American workforce is currently needed to grow more food than the rest of us need, I’d say Keynes nailed that one, too.

There is also evidence that as technology improves worker productivity, working hours decrease; that richer countries (with access to better technology) tend to work less than poorer ones; and that working hours across the world have been steadily declining since the Industrial Revolution. But from the vantage point of thousands of years, this sequence of better technology —> easier time meeting basic needs —> more leisure hasn’t panned out. In fact, according to many anthropologists, hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society,”³ requiring only a few hours of work per day to satisfy material wants.⁴ Somehow, then, after millennia of time-saving technology, modern people are working more than their ancestors who slept outside and had to procure dinner with a pointy stick.

And how about those pie-in-the-sky notions of what people would do once the bare necessities were met? That they’d study their “Way” or contemplate “how to live wisely or agreeably or well?” They were nice ideas, but poor predictions. Plenty of people in the modern world have simply continued along the path of material enrichment, pursuing what they want about as urgently as their ancestors pursued what they needed. In fact, in America, the top 10% work more than the bottom 10%. What did Keynes get so wrong?

The Kellogg Story

As it happens, the missing dynamic in Keynes’ analysis was playing out in the real world in the same year his essay was published, 1930. W.K. Kellogg, owner of the cereal company, decided to reduce workdays from eight hours to six. At the time, this was something of a win-win-win. Employees won by working less and earning more per hour. The company won because productivity increased. And society won because Kellogg was able to employ more workers during a time when jobs were especially needed. However, “[b]y 1985, every department had returned to eight-hour days.”⁵

Proposed reasons for this reversion include:

• leisure became a new “problem” the workers had to solve

• male workers felt inadequate compared to other men about town who worked the traditional eight-hour day

• over time, the six-hour workday became associated with women and the disabled, causing men to distance themselves from it even more

• even though workers made more per hour, many still made less in total than they once did, and therefore couldn’t consume as much as their prior selves or neighbors

• many of the men resented being around the house so often (so did their wives)

• apparently unions asked for too much considering the good deal workers already had

The Kellogg story drives home that there are two considerations in life. There is, as Thoreau says, “keep[ing] the vital heat”—i.e., surviving. But there is also “keeping up with the Jones’.” While technology has made it easier to meet our absolute needs, it hasn’t done the same for our relative position. (If anything, as we’ll see, it’s made it worse.) Keynes missed what clinical psychology is still missing—the evolutionary perspective—which would have suggested that because evolutionary success is relative, staying alive is only half the battle. We are also motivated to win. To do better than. And if the expectations for getting ahead—or requirements for keeping up—outstrip the savings technology provides, then we might be in a worse position. The key consideration is the net effect.

Consider what Noah Harari says in Sapiens about the transition from letters to email:

Previously it took a lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do I live a more relaxed life?

Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate…Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.⁶

It's not a given that technology ends up costing more than it saves, though. I find it easy to imagine a world in which the net effect of something like email is still positive. That is, I send off more communications and spend less time doing so. Maybe I even enjoy it more because striking a key is easier than drawing out a letter, and this allows me to more thoroughly articulate what I want to say. Similarly, returning to me as a homemaker in the 1960s, if I spend my extra time doing something that improves my life, then my washing machine is a huge boon—not only initially, but for as long as I use my extra time well. It all comes down to which horse is winning the race, the time gained by technology or the inflation of keeping up with the Jones’. Borrowing from the logic of “real wages,” we might call this “real leisure.”⁷

image by Irene Chung, who has been lovely to work with

The Role of Comparison Vectors

What influences the inflation rate for keeping up with the Jones’?

To answer that, we need to take a few steps back. Recall from our Overview that at Living Fossils we consider the brain to house a large number of specific modules, each designed to adaptively respond to a problem or opportunity that would have been important over human history. Thus we have a hunger module, a sleep module, a sex module, and so on. Sometimes, these modules respond to internal stimuli: if there is no food in the belly, sound the hunger alarm. Other times, they respond to external stimuli: there is food in the belly, yes, but those doughnuts smell delicious…surely we can make a little more room…

Now, given that reproductive success is relative, the human brain undoubtedly contains comparative or competitive modules, too.⁸  These systems measure our relative standing in a group and motivate appropriate action, making us feel relaxed and carefree if we are ahead of the curve, and agitated and discontent—even envious—if we are below the curve.⁹

In the modern world, these comparison modules are in overdrive for three main reasons. The first is the proliferation of technologies that broadcast other peoples’ performance, from what a person just ate to where they just traveled. I think of these as comparison mediums. Examples include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and yes, even Substack. Similar to doughnuts, which stoke our hunger even when our belly is full, these technologies stoke our competitive juices, even if we would otherwise be content with our lot. But it’s not just social media. It’s the Internet in general, which in a few short decades has robbed countless people of the impression that they had an original thought, or were good at something. Airplanes should count, too, as should as anything that has contributed to flattening the world or putting more people in touch.

Second, we should not discount the active role of certain technologies in hooking people on their product. Content is curated to look appealing (which creates an unrealistic standard of success) or prime negative emotions (such as moral outrage). If powdered sugar hijacks our appetite system, these strategies hijack our comparative system. Some estimates suggest that teenagers spend four to five hours per day on social media. That is, teenagers spend about a third of their waking hours observing others who appear to be better off.

Finally, independent of technologies that put humans more in touch, there are just a lot more people milling around in the modern world:

anyone else find this terrifying?

What’s the impact of all these extra people on our comparison modules? Consider Company A with a hundred employees and Company B with a thousand. All else equal, in which company would you expect people to work longer hours? Company B, because each additional person represents another comparison point. Each additional person raises the likelihood that the “price” for being successful will rise. If both firms start out, formally, at 40 hours a week, Company B is more likely to increase its informal standard to 45 by the end of the year—50 if you want to get ahead.

The more opportunity for comparison, the more people will compare. The more people compare, the most time and energy they will spend on behaviors meant to keep abreast or get ahead, and/or the worse they will feel about their own standing. “Don’t get mad; get E-Trade” captures this nicely.

The Interest on Leisure

I don’t want to give the impression that technology has been a purely negative force; nobody would take me seriously if I were saying that. Technology has accomplished many truly wonderful things. But people ought to be confused by how little leisure all our time-saving technology has provided. Someone present at the ribbon-cutting of the first piece of technology—which, being fire, would surely have been a barbecue— would likely have foreseen a happy end. Yet technology’s blessings have been mixed because while it’s helped us more easily meet our basic needs, it’s also supercharged our instinct to compete. Technology has made it easier to survive and harder to win. The proliferation of comparison mediums explains how, in the ultimate ironic twist, time has become a scarce resource in today’s first world, which contains more time-saving technology than ever before.

Here’s another way to think about it. In a low-comparison environment, the opportunity cost for enjoying time—for using it however we see fit—is low, but in a high-comparison environment, leisure is expensive. We can’t afford to just let it sit there, otherwise we’ll fall behind the Jones’, whose success has never been more in our face. So, we’ve got to write a Substack, fix up a house, or create an Instagram for our cat, all in addition to having a job and managing a life. I think this explains why many of my well-off, first world clients consider the main activity of their life to be stressful optimization, even though they never reach the land where optimization is supposed to take them—one of time-rich, carefree, relaxation. The world that Keynes and Confucius imagined.

As technologies continue to save us time and expectations for that time continue to inflate, the bare necessities—the basic economic problems—shrink to a smaller and smaller portion of people’s effort, in the same way that farmers have become a smaller and smaller portion of the American workforce over the past century. But this doesn’t mean people spend less time working. It just means that the emphasis moves from man v. nature to man v. man.

Let’s return to Twenge’s quote for a third and final time: “little of the population could do anything else…” We hear that as modern readers and think, thank heavens for technology! We rarely stop to consider that when everyone is doing the same thing, nobody else is doing a better thing. The cost of keeping up with the Jones’ remains low. Inequality is kept in check. And when people are more or less in the same boat, their comparison modules are quiet.

Getting to Mismatch

In the first article, I made the argument that technology doesn’t make us happier in the long run. We have all this amazing stuff, and yet don’t report any greater life satisfaction. In this article, I argued that technology hasn’t saved us much time either, even though that is explicitly what most technology is designed to do. In the last 100 years, the average American worker has become vastly more productive, and yet works pretty much the same number of hours. This is because we have reinvested much of the time technology has saved us into competition with others. I don’t think this is inevitable, though, and later in the series I return to how we can do technology and culture better.

You might have noticed in the meantime that I haven’t mentioned evolutionary mismatch. Well, allow me to correct that. Absent from our discussion of the time saved and expectations inflated by technology is that evolutionary mismatch is silently accruing in the background. It would be one thing if technology were making us happier and dividending time, but since it’s not, shouldn’t we be more upset about its negative externalities? The main one being, at least from a therapist’s point of view, that the world around us—and how we interact with it—is increasingly foreign to the organ processing it.

In the next article, I show just how far evolutionary mismatch has spread, and ask how much more suffering we’re willing to endure for our technology to make us neither happier nor freer.

1. As Jon Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis: “Vast increases in gross domestic product led to improvements in the comforts of life—a larger home, more cars, televisions, and restaurant meals, better health and longer life—but these improvements became the normal conditions of life; all were adapted to and taken for granted, so they did not make people feel any happier or more satisfied.” (89)

2. Generations, p. 5.

3. A phrase coined by Marshall Sahlins in his 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ essay.

4. And it’s unclear whether these hours should be considered “work” or “play.”

5. https://theweek.com/articles/454364/what-happened-sixhour-workday

6. p. 87-88

7. The Red Queen Hypothesis is a similar, biologically-inspired way of thinking about it.  

8. It might rather be that a comparison-based way of thinking is part of other modules, not a module itself.

9. Hence why I found the byline for an article on the Kellogg saga pretty self-evident: “The desire to keep up with our richer peers drives us to work harder.” Uh, yeah.