Is technology hurrying us along?

It amazes me that Davies penned Leisure in his time. If he noticed a lack of leisure back then, what would he have had to say now? We seem to be hurrying along like never before. Office hours are no longer fixed. Company executives routinely say that don’t want people looking for a mere 40 hour week. People expect replies to email within hours, if not minutes. We expect goods to be shipped to us in days, not weeks.

What is going on? Surely, the earth is not spinning any faster than it did before. Why are we spinning faster and faster in our little worlds? Is it the competition? Is it the relentless march (gallop?) of progress? Is it globalization? Or Capitalism?

Isn’t it a bit of all the above? A business can’t afford to go slow for fear of competition. Global workforces have no option but to collaborate across timezones. We carry our office whereever we go in the form of a laptop and a phone. This despite the notion that no one ever said on his deathbed, “wish I spent more time in office”.

We also feel hurried because we are spending more time communicating, commuting and travelling than ever before. More communication than actual work. This, coupled with a loss of individual agency (Crawford) results in constant unease. (and later disease). But all this isn’t necessarily the way it should be.

A lot of better technology is about improved effeciency. More output for the same input. Or, less input for the same output. Unfortunately, the logic of captialism and consumption-driven economies is based on the premise of never ending growth. This means, business owners and economists always choose the option of increasing output over that of reducing input. Labour is one such input. We could ask people to work less and still get the same output because of better technology. Instead we ask less people to work! This is dictated by the logic of improving efficiency/productivity.

As a typical private business owner, I’d want to reduce the cost and hassle of employing labour by employing better technology. I’d want to recover the captial expenditure as soon as possible by increased production/sales. So I won’t think of keeping output the same. But a state could behave this way. It can transfer the gains from increased technology into the hands of the workforce by handing it more leisure. Seldom does this happen.

What is more common is better technology leading to greater productivity and produce leading to a fall in prices leading to greater consumption leading to a bigger market, more players, competition, research, better technology and the cycle repeats. This is referred to as Jevon’s paradox.

While we may be limited in what we do about the big picture, we could very well try to extricate ourselves out of this loop. Typically we earn our as our career progresses and we consume more calling it the enjoyment of the fruit of our labour. But then we are now hooked to a certain level of consumption and condemned to circle the loop of higher income -> greater consumption -> greater need for income growth. Instead, if we limit consumption, we may have the opportunity to work less and enjoy greater leisure. note: greater leisure does not mean greater consumption although modern society would have us behave so. So yes there is an implicit assumption in all this talk of leisure. Namely, that we know how to enjoy leisure without necessarily ending up consuming more. (topic for a later post)

Could it just be that we are falsely alarmed? That it just feels like we have less leisure when in fact we do have more? Take the weekend trip for example. Thanks to aviation, faster cars, better roads etc, we take less time to reach there and get more time to enjoy. Better supporting infrastructure means that we are able to pack in more leisure activitities within the same amount of time. Catch a movie if you have a couple of free hours, read a book while in transit.

We have also shortened some activities that seem boring in their old long form. The leisurely 5-day test match gave way to the one dayer and now to 20-20. Traditional 4-day Indian weddings are now mostly a one and half day affair (is that bad?)

We also seem to be indulging in a greater variety of leisure activities than our ancestors. Just think of the various options under travel, sport, arts, infotainment and shopping.

We also perform a greater variety of chores. Pay so many sorts of bills unheard of before: internet, mobile phone, cable TV, credit card, loan repayments, other subscriptions etc. Does the mind suffer fatigue from having to keep track of all these commitments? Is our leisure punctuated by little alarms of “Have I taken care of this or that?”

Modern life can only afford us quantum leisure, two day weekends and annual two week vacations. Unless we are careful, even this can waste away in chores and worry.

Why we hate practice

Many skills are attained only through long and regular practice e.g. playing a musical instrument, meditation. Many of us just give up after a brief struggle. I wonder if this has always been the case or if it is more so now. I suspect the latter.

We are used to instant gratification. City dwellers can instantly satisfy most regular desires: be it for food, entertainment, shopping, communication or transport. Consumer culture makes you expect prompt service. Minor delays cause irritation. Impatience is seen as a virtue in the corporate workplace.  Could this contribute to our attitude towards attaining skills? Is it why we expect a serene state of mind even during the initial stages of practicing meditation? Why we expect to be able to play our favourite songs within a month of learning to hold the violin?

There might be another reason. This is the tendency to act only when absolutely essential. We report to work on time as unpunctuality is frowned upon.  We take garbage out regularly because it will stink otherwise. We eat food, have sex regularly because it is instantly gratifying. However, not exercising regularly doesn’t present immediate consequences. So we let it slide.We attend to the urgent and forget the important. Isn’t it a sad commentary on us so called free beings that we only respond to the figurative whip?

Someone offered yet another excuse. We don’t care for regular practice because it doesn’t suit our style. We don’t like routine. We don’t like enforced structure. We like flexibility. We say to ourselves, progress is more important than regularity. It is okay to practice irregularly as long as we still make progress. Slippery slope. A Japanese saying goes, “When they are young, give them deep roots. When they grow up, give them wings.” It is often counterproductive to acquire wings early on. Few soar. Most crash.

Unhurried Music

Have you ever listened to a beautiful song and felt like savouring its after-taste for a few minutes after it finishes playing? Only to be hurried on to listening to the next one in your play list? The one feature I’d like very much to have on such players is a configurable interval between songs. It is like eating at a feast. You like to take your time with each course.

Multitasking is another thing I can’t handle with music. I don’t like my mind to be actively occupied when I listen to music. So maybe it is a good companion on a leisurely walk (not a commute) or while travelling in a bus or a train or while cooking. Activities like reading and surfing the internet engage the mind. So does music. In a sense, isn’t having to do them in parallel a sign of a hurried life?

Need a prison to savour breaking free

I’d like to share some delightful lines from The Ode Less Travelled – a book that promises to help you unlock the poet within. There is a chapter about the iambic pentameter – a simple set of rules governing the most widely used metre in English poetry. The author says that you sometimes need to bend the rules to achieve dramatic effect. So we have techniques called enjambment and caesura – crucial liberators of the iambic line.

They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter.

…

It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energizes much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power. ‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form:

“In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is:”

…

Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny…As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.

Every once in a while, I think that rules are for conformists and that one is probably better off as a rebel, an iconoclast. The lines above serve to temper such thoughts.