The Four Seasons - Giuseppe Arcimboldo
This order is now bound to technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force…the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
- Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
I often don’t immediately know why I enjoy a particular piece of writing. As I wrote last week, sometimes reading an essay or book, I just feel like the author gets it, that they’ve found a particularly rich, deep deposit of insight to mine; they are digesting the incomprehensible and presenting it, often beautifully, for our collective edification. Recently I’ve been reading – devouring – the work of some Substack writers that just makes sense; Burgis, Kingsnorth, Sacasas. This work is at once powerful and dense with ideas and fun to read. It has been like stumbling into a conversation, then immediately beginning to nod along, all without necessarily knowing the premise or starting point.
All of these writers have extrapolated from a key insight that simply meshes with my experience: that when we exist as cogs within a machine (or The Machine, per Kingsnorth) we fundamentally lose out on some of our humanity. When presented so directly, along with the benefit of hindsight, it might seem banal or obvious, but I consider it to be among the primary challenges of being human. That we’re daily ensconced in a web of mechanistic tentacles, subject to the demands of enormous institutional and ideological power, is a deeply significant premise, and one that before was terrifyingly easy to ignore. Thriving in our modern society involves reckoning with this fact, this social fact, and it is a challenge which I’m trying to pick up.
I’ve long thought of this process as that of dehumanization, one wherein bureaucracy and the sheer scale of an interconnected society flattens our persons for the sake of efficiency. When faced with astronomical numbers of people, reducing them in a solipsistic frenzy of paper shuffling and number crunching to mere abstractions is logical and expedient, if perilous.
Dehumanization is a prerequisite for a host of modern social ills. Once we’ve reduced our fellow citizens to numbers on a spreadsheet, or voters in an election, or enemy combatants, we are free to manipulate them as objects of our own lives, subject to our goals, merely another variable in our equation. Widespread dehumanization, while likely an unhappy emergent quality of society at a certain scale, is a key step along to way to creating the vast systems that alienate us - from the quotidian, violent inefficiency of the DMV to the pernicious criminal justice apparatus, to say nothing of the horrors of mass war or the legacy of slavery. When we see other people as parts of a machine, rather than meeting them with charity, we might release ourselves from our duty to them as divine and kindred souls.
And all of this is a reasonable starting point. But there is a further key insight beyond this extrinsic, other-directed dehumanization that these writers have led me to, or rather made it impossible for me to avoid. While it is easy to recognize when others are treating us as cogs in a machine, we are equally susceptible to seeing ourselves that way.
I’m naturally defensive when I know my time is being wasted, naturally frustrated when my career prospects are reduced to a 1-page resume that I have to retype into an online job portal, and naturally impatient when I have to wait 6 months for a dermatologist appointment. I’m quite alert to any external force that might dehumanize me for its own benefit. Noticing that I’m treating myself like this, however, is quite another challenge, one I can’t now avoid after reading the work of Burgis, or Sacasas.
This is the process of giving up (some or all) of ourselves, our humanity, our agency, in service of forces which are, by definition, not aligned with our own ends. When we see ourselves as cogs, we can never be at rest, let alone at leisure – a cog exists only as a tool, not as an end in itself. A piece of equipment does not have desires, it has a productivity function. Idle equipment is inefficient. Downtime must be avoided.
Burgis writes that leisure is not idle amusement, but is the only space in which we are free to decide what we stand for. A cog is never afforded this space, and every force, every institution we ensconce ourselves in, encourages us to see ourselves as one. School and work, as places familiar to us all, want to encourage us to fall in and serve the ends of the institution rather than have the liberty to explore ways of being, to express our individuality, and to pursue our own ends. Identifying other people as cogs naturally comes along with this, a monumentally powerful shift, one which allows us, yes, to organize, but also to treat each other with terrible contempt or stolid indifference.
The fact is, of course, that we are decidedly not merely cogs. In fact, I would argue that our most beautiful, meaningful, and colorful experiences come from those characteristics which are entirely distinct from our machine-like capacities. Our ability to love, to make art, to connect, to know one another, to pursue the ostensibly meaningless, to venerate and pray, all come from our leisure, our liberty, and our space to think. Everything we give up when we identify with the Machine is everything that makes us human. Denying or subjugating these qualities wilts away those psychic muscles which make us lovely and loved, and hypertrophies our materialistic selves.
One great example of this process is time.
Alex Tabarrok recently wrote about “the harried leisure class.” I think his argument is basically correct: as society has gotten richer, we have more resources (money) to spend, but there are still only 24 hours in a day. As such, we prioritize temporally efficient activities and tasks, and fight to fit more into our limited hours.
By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring.
He then goes on to say that managing our time is a strenuous mental task, and that we can easily become overwhelmed. Again, I think he is basically right on the social science, but he is only scratching the surface of the motivations and consequences of being harried.
When we see ourselves as cogs, we want to maximize our productive efficiency. I trust every reader can identify with this notion of the frantic rush. I’m always trying to leave work on time to get to the gym and then get home and walk the dog and make dinner, and have some time left over to pursue my hobbies and interests. We have to schedule it all, or we won’t fit it in. We have to make reservations to simply grab a drink at a bar, and we’re incentivized to optimize our lunch order by using an app. Sometimes setting up a time to see friends takes longer than the event itself.
Yes, this leaves us feeling harried, but it allows us to accept – or embrace as an unequivocal advantage, even a positive good – that we may never have long periods of unstructured time for deep thought and work, or so few commitments that we feel total freedom with how to act next. I think giving that up entails the loss of something real and important.
Equally significantly, being harried entails the loss of the space in between. My own view is that our most powerful experiences are enhanced, defined even, by comparative absence: the moments of waiting, the awkward pause. The expectant, anxious hours I spent by myself before my wedding ceremony. The numinous air of a full, yet silent church. The minutes spent chatting at a restaurant while waiting to order your food, or the collective period of digestion after the meal is finished. These moments are not to be spent compendiously, rushing to reach the next destination.
In principle, we all understand on some level that stacking experiences atop one another can be decremental rather than additive or synergistic. We don’t dream of eating a steak dinner while getting a foot massage and listening to a symphony on noise-cancelling headphones. We know we should put our phones away when we have a few moments with our loved ones. We’re always in danger of falling into the trap of inauthentic temporality: frittering away our precious, limited time in a race to “maximize” how it is spent. It can be harder to distinguish, or appreciate, what is important, and what time is ours, when life is rushing by.
Maybe this is because imagination breaks the path which reason follows. Maybe it’s because we only play when we have “free” time, and we are only completely human when we play. I don’t know. I do know that moments of peace are not brought on by screaming through the day with great pace and consternation at any obstacle. I know that tranquility is so rarely grasped that simply “scheduling time” to relax is insufficient. I know that I feel harried and I wish I didn’t.
So while Tabarrok is right on the economic motivations for this phenomenon, the consequences go far beyond mental strain and overwhelm. Living as if pieces of a giant machine of human parts leads us to this sense of rush and frenetic harry. Vigilance is due with respect to the mechanized threat to those tiny moments which might otherwise slip by.
If you liked this essay, or hated it, please comment and tell me what you thought. Thank you!
Thank you so much for your comment. I agree, quirky hobbies make for the best days.
I used to learn German but now tell myself I don’t have the time (lol). It’s like all of these other activities: without an endgame in mind, when I’ll be “good enough” at it, i can lose some motivation. The problem is, with that end game, i can lose the joy. It’s also so hard without other people to talk with. Rather like writing is so hard without feedback, so thanks for taking the time, truly.
Found you on Notes and I really enjoyed this piece, Chip. So well written.
One important way to combat this harried rush to fill our day with more is to find intrinsically enjoyable flow state activities. The quirkier the better. My personal example is that I learn Chinese, often 2-3+ hours per day, despite a busy work and social life. Someone who doesn’t know me might assume I’m just trying to cram more resume stuffers into my free moments. But in fact, speaking and listening to Chinese is pure bliss for me. A perfect IV drip of flow state available at any time. It brings me great joy, resumes be damned.
I’m grateful to have found my soul-mate activity. I hope everyone can find something they find so intrinsically enjoyable, whatever it is. That just happens to be mine.