Sometimes I get into a discussion about how “things were better in the old days”. Most of the time, fortunately, the people around me are smart enough to see this isn’t true. You can look wherever you want and find evidence that things are much better nowadays. Fairer laws, safer homes and products, shorter travel times, higher literacy rates, etcetera.
We make advancement after advancement, and generally speaking things are better later in the timeline. Until we’re at a point when I can walk outside for three minutes and visit a grocery store that has more food than I’d need in a lifetime.
When people say “better”, however, that often isn’t really what they mean. It’s a very subjective term, yes, but they mostly mean “more efficient”. Traveling from A to B is faster now. Getting food on your plate is faster now. (Especially with home delivery, takeout, prepared meals, and the general removal of “cooking it yourself” as an activity.) You can access all the information in the world within a few seconds, and you don’t even have to visit the “computer room” anymore to do it.
The Fallacy
I’m not saying that efficiency is bad. I’m saying it’s not the same, inherently, as “better”.
There is a time and place to want efficiency. There is also a time and place where it doesn’t matter. Or where it’s even an obstacle.
And thus, I would say that many things are more efficient today, but not better than they were before.
I am reminded of a talk by Rory Sutherland. Many of his talks are on YouTube, and there is obviously a lot of duplicate material, but he usually has some fun jokes and interesting (marketing/psychology) insights.
He explained that, for the longest time, a transport company tried to optimize its network. Travelers were unhappy and they obviously wanted to fix that. The company searched for ways to move trains even faster, to increase capacity, but there was just nothing more to do.
Then they tried something new. Something unheard of! They realized they were optimizing for speed and efficiency. When in reality, the true problem, was the fact that people disliked taking their train. Which, as it turns out, had little to do with efficiency. In fact, it was sometimes detrimental.
- If a train ride was too short, then people couldn’t do any work. They couldn’t settle or take a breather.
- Longer train rides were preferable to overcrowded trains.
- (Especially because this is an all-or-nothing situation. You either get a seat and have a nice time sitting by the window, or you have to stand in the train and have an absolutely miserable time. Another solution would be to invert this: sitting passengers get a chair and nothing else, standing passengers get better positions or Wi-Fi as compensation.)
- And a long train ride wasn’t an issue as long as people were comfortable and the train passed interesting landscapes. If people were certain of a good position, they could just open their laptop and work for an hour during the train ride. This was more pleasurable than arriving faster.
The XY Problem
This is related to the XY problem. People ask for X, because that is their assumed solution, but you have to poke around to find out they actually want to solve problem Y?
For example,
- Someone visits the electronics shop and asks: “Do you have a USB drive?”
- The employee behind the counter shows them one, but it’s too small. It can’t store enough data.
- So is the next one. So is the next one. Until even the most expensive, largest USB drive isn’t good enough.
- Until the employee asks: “Pardon, but what would you use it for?”
- Customer: “I wanted to digitally store my collection of family photos from the past 20 years.”
- The employee realizes that the true problem was the need to store many terabytes of data. They explain to the customer what a hard drive (or NAS) is and they’re happy.
In this (somewhat silly and simple) example, the customer didn’t actually state their problem. They stated their own assumption about what would solve the problem. They were familiar with USB drives, they knew it could store photos, so that’s what they asked.
I often mention this problem when people say “we should give the people what they want”. When people justify everything by saying “but people asked for this” or “but people voted for this”.
No! People don’t know what they want! People of identify a problem (correctly), then assume a solution (incorrect), but only communicate their invented solution. It takes a sharp brain to ask what they really want to achieve and find the underlying problem. And then convince them there are other solutions.
Why do people believe this?
In that same vein, many people have convinced themselves that efficiency is key. Companies hear this and focus on speed and convenience over all else.
- You have to wait in line for 10 minutes?
- You complain: “Make the lines move faster! Serve me faster!”
- Company responds: “We removed employees. The machine will now automatically serve what you want. Should be 5% faster on average.”
The real problem was that you disliked that waiting time. Not necessarily the fact there was a line or that you had to stand around for a few minutes. I mean, how much time do people already throw away every day standing around and looking at a phone? How many people actually work all day without taking lots of breaks?
You could “fix” this problem simply by making that waiting time more bearable. Make the atmosphere better. Make the place nice. Have entertainment. Let people sit in comfy chairs.
But that will never happen, of course, because “sitting people will create even more waiting time! Instead of 10 minutes, it will be 15 minutes!”
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And it will be a comfortable, painless 15 minutes instead of an annoyed, frustrated 10 minutes.
Time is rarely the problem. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone with a schedule that absolutely does not allow a delay here and there. A life that crumbles down the moment something is slightly less efficient.
Discomfort, uncertainty, stress, safety, everything else is usually the problem. But people don’t say that. They invent their own solution, which usually means “it must be faster/easier!”, and that’s all companies or governments hear.
Think back to the train example I gave before. The biggest issue isn’t that trains are sometimes delayed, it’s that people don’t know. The easiest way to take away most anger and doubt, is to constantly update arrival times to be as accurate as possible. If people know it will be 20 more minutes before the train arrives, they accept it and go drink something somewhere. If they don’t know, they’re forced to stand around for an indefinite amount of time feelig anxious.
It saddens me how much money and energy is wasted on making things slightly more efficient instead of actually asking what the problem is and solving that. Because most of the time, it is not efficiency, speed or convenience.
Embrace the inconvenience
And all of this brings me to my actual point.
In our relentless search for efficiency and optimization, we made many things worse. The obvious examples are unhealthy convenience. We made it so convenient to eat too much food, that we have a pandemic of obesitas. We made it so convenient to get everywhere by car, that people stopped getting enough exercise. We made firing people or raising prices so efficient, that it’s done all the time, and the victims treated like they’re nothing.
But it goes further than that. The efficiency of streaming services has demonstrably ruined our enjoyment of the content. It’s no wonder most services have switched back to the “one episode a week model”, instead of dumping a whole season all at once. Too much, too quickly, isn’t good for us. Putting a thousand shows at our fingertips, one press away at any time, devalues those shows and makes us less invested.
Even the content of the content is efficient now. Stories are so fast-paced that you’re already out of a scene before you’re in one. Storytelling has been reduced to a summary of greatest hits, which means nobody is invested and none of the blows actually land.
And we know this. The research is clear.
- People who are regularly distracted while studying, even if just for 10 seconds, will be better at understanding and recalling the information. (Try it. Read some material, then “disengage” for 10 seconds, read the next bit, repeat.)
- That’s because our brain really has two modes: effort and rest, active learning and passive learning. We need the breaks, the inconvenience, the waiting around, for our brain to actually learn and put things to memory.
- The part of our brain related to physical movement is at its core and connected to everything. Attaching habits and knowledge to physical movements is far more natural for us. Simply doing something with your hands makes you more likely to feel satisfied and have good ideas. Simply going for a walk after being presented a tough problem will solve it better than trying to be “efficient” by staying in your chair until you solved it.
- On a related topic, humans value rituals and habits a lot. These are almost always physical. The ritual of movements you need to do to prepare a vinyl (or CD) is part of what makes listening to that music pleasruable. Pressing a button to get whatever song Spotify recommended loses so much of what our bodies actually like.
- Especially when it comes to art and entertainment, the social aspect is half of it. Remember the time when there were TV shows everyone talked about? You could return to school/work on monday and have a nice discussion about it with your coworkers? Wasn’t that nice? Now, everyone watches half an episode of random things recommended to them, because it’s so easy to mindlessly watch or switch the second you’re bored.
Efficient is not always better. We evolved to live in an inconvenient, chaotic, physical world. It is no surprise that we actually feel and fare better with a certain degree of inconvenience and (physical) actions we need to take.
As they say, “stop and smell the roses”. Life is not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Driving faster just means you die faster, and you didn’t enjoy the scenery along the way.
Personal examples
People call me “old school”. Heck, I explain myself that way. But I simply allow inconvenience to exist, and I believe it’s part of my productivity and creativity.
I still do most things by hand, and write down notes and tasks by hand. I enjoy the inconvenience of having to go outside and pull our (movable) table tennis table into position before we can play. Makes me stronger—it’s a heavy thing—and makes it feel more rewarding to start playing.
I prefer board games over video games. In fact, I design so many board games that I spend hours printing and cutting them for playtesting. And it feels so much more rewarding to then play the game with others. To be able to deal out those lovingly crafted and cut cards, and see a game I invented come to life. In real life, on a table, with real people. It’s one of the reasons I don’t create many video games anymore, because it’s too efficient.
I don’t keep my phone in the charger permanently; an empty battery is fine sometimes. I always turn off my devices and unplug the electrical cord whenever I go away. People call me mad. So much effort! Wow! Like … 5 seconds every day? And in return, my brain has a clear separation between “work time” and “not work time”. I also don’t waste any electricity and I’ve been using the same broken laptop daily for 10 years now. (Everything you see by me has been made on that crappy thing.)
For years, I purposely allowed my life to be a little inconvenient. To require a few more (physical) steps to start something. I purposely took longer cycling routes when I had the time, to get in more exercise or see a part of town I didn’t see before. I kept taking handwritten notes while everyone else stared at their screen. I kept planning game nights, and I kept saying they had to be in person and we’d play board games. Even if that meant I cycled my ass off for many years, through the dark, to get to some friend’s remote home.
And at first, I didn’t even know why I did it. People laughed at me.
I simply noticed I was more productive, more creative, more healthy. I felt more satisfied. I couldn’t sleep if I hadn’t put in the work that day. I felt weird eating something I hadn’t prepared myself. It wasn’t “earned”. It’s not how our brains think about food or sustenance.
Most advancements remove all the things that made me active, inspired and willing to do stuff. Perhaps counterintuitively, making my life easier made it harder. Whenever I said “maybe they’re right” and tried to optimize all of that, it became a disaster.
I am a walking paradox to others, if I’m honest ;)
I am an advanced computer scientist (mathematics degree, been programming for 15+ years, called into action on every computer problem) … but I get away from computers whenever I can. I have the cheapest phone possible and barely check it. I can make video games but don’t really play them. Whenever someone suggested using some new digital tool for a university project, I always voted against it. I can fix a computer or phone, but please don’t make me use one for everything. Keep things physical, keep the inconvenience of the real world.
Similarly, I am an advanced musician. I dare call myself that, yes, because others have said so my whole life. I have played many instruments my entire life and am commonly known as “the composer” or “that musician guy” in social groups. And yet, when people ask me what’s on my Spotify playlists, or my favorite band, or if I already heard that new song that released today … I shrug and say: “I don’t really listen to music that much.”
I have a few CD’s with music that matters to me. I have a Spotify account, but don’t know the username or password. If I want to listen to music, I usually just search the specific song on YouTube. And I usually search for some live version, maybe an acoustic version, to get some sense of “real, live music” back into what I hear. In a way, I care so much about music that I don’t want to optimize it away to a constant stream in my distracted ears.
Conclusion
Which brings me to a wisdom I hope you’ll remember forever.
Humans have evolved to automatically, forcefully balance effort and joy: our “hedonistic balance”. There is no way around this.
What does this mean?
- We feel more satisfied if we put in more work to get something. I am more grateful that I can do an activity, like play the guitar or a board game, if it took some steps to get there. I am more satisfied with a story that was a challenge to write than one that I breezed through with one eye closed.
- Our brains will simply adapt to our “status quo”. If we try to only be “happy”, if we inundate ourselves with a stream of cheap and efficient dopamine, our brains just … adapt. Until it’s not enough anymore. Until something that made us happy last month is boring to us now.
Most people who exercise regularly will admit they don’t like the exercise. They like what comes after. They know (subconsciously or not) that exercise is just hard work and not fun, but that it’s necessary to keep their “hedonistic balance”. If they don’t work hard, they also don’t get to enjoy the good parts of life. If they don’t exercise, they can’t really enjoy eating their favorite food afterwards.
And efficiency ruins this. By making everything more efficient, the “status quo” of our brains changed. It updated to expect this kind of speed as the new normal. To the point where people can become truly angry and upset when it takes 1 minute longer for food to arrive at their doorstep. Despite the fact that, for most of human history, the entire idea of ordering whatever food and getting it within 15 minutes wasn’t even imaginable.
Efficiency and convenience don’t create permanent convenience. It creates a temporary burst of joy—“hey, I can do this thing much faster now!”—until it quickly wears off and becomes the new normal. As you might expect, this is a race to the bottom. Things can’t get infinitely more convenient or efficient. There are limits to the known universe.
So you can either join the death ride, or embrace inconveniences and keep your hedonistic balance.
So what? We just never progress? That’s not what I’m saying. You can take the car if you need to drive far. Just don’t take it for every trip, and be mindful of how tempting/easy it is to fool yourself into taking it for every trip.
It’s a BALANCE! Part work, part joy. Part inconvenience, part convenience. Many of my examples have been optional rituals that you can employ yourself. You can enjoy speed and efficiency in the parts of your life that need it, but slow down personally and buy your music in vinyl. You can travel fast when you have an urgent appointment, but randomly walk wander around the block when you don’t.
I don’t expect the world to change or for technology to stop progressing. And it shouldn’t, for the most part. So the advice really is: purposely make parts of your life inconvenient. Start working with your hands again. Do things physically, not digitally. Put in the effort now, knowing it will give you more satisfaction later. For example, many people read physical books simply because it fills their bookshelf as a sort of “evidence of effort”—look, I’ve read all those books! Don’t I feel good about that?
When you have to wait in line, when it takes a few steps to do it, when there are unforeseen setbacks, embrace it. It resets your balance. So that you can truly enjoy it again when something is more efficient next time.
As I said, there is no way around this. It’s how our brains work. We adapt to anything and make it our new normal. If efficiency is all we aim for, then we will make things incredibly efficient—and be frustrated by how it isn’t more efficient all the time.
I guess I’ll just end the article on a nice quote I found somewhere.
“Do we really need to smell the roses more quickly, more efficiently?”
Those were my thoughts for today, although I’ve honestly been thinking about this and applying this for years now. And I still feel I don’t do it enough. I want to visit physical shops more, I want to change up my running routes more, I want to put in more effort to get my food. I am looking for a way to make it more inconvenient to stay in bed for far too long each morning or “maintain” a relationship with someone purely by texting.
But, well, baby steps. I’m fighting upbringing, ingrained habits, weird looks, and the opinions of almost everyone around me with habits like these!
Tiamo