When the steamship was invented and then improved in Britain in the early 19th century, there was great relief that it meant a far more efficient use of coal. Now far less would be necessary and resources could be conserved. Or so people believed.
As the improvements kept coming, one economist offered a contrary prediction. His name was Stanley Jevons, perhaps the most insightful economist then writing in the English-speaking world. He said that the more efficient use of coal would have the opposite effect. It would dramatically increase the demand because now more could be used at less cost.
He predicted an explosion in demand. As it turns out, he was correct. It’s counterintuitive, even paradoxical. Once a technology comes along that causes a product or service to be delivered with less resource use per marginal deployment, the overall use will increase in proportion. The ability to save a resource intensifies the demand for doing so, ending in a paradox.
That’s a revealing insight and it might be generalizable.
In our own time, this insight might have predicted our current fate.
The digital age that kicked off in 1995 meant far more efficient access to information, to communication, to calculation, to everything. We are swimming if not drowning in it all.
At the time, I truly imagined that people would thereby have more time than ever. We once had to write things by hand, put them in envelopes with stamps, and hope that they would get there. Now we can fire off thousands of communications in a day and bots can do millions and billions. Books will be available to the masses of people at low to zero cost, so surely everyone will start reading them.
When I was a kid, anything I wanted required a conventional wait of 6 to 8 weeks for delivery. Now I can order a vast number of products online and expect them tomorrow or even later today. For that matter, I can have nearly any food delivered hot to my front door in an hour or less. Nothing like that was possible when I was young.
We spend less time than ever doing physical things. Jobs that took days, weeks, and months can now be achieved in minutes or seconds, even in the background while I do other things. What is sometimes called the time price of nearly everything—how many hours it takes to earn money to purchase services—has fallen dramatically.
We have more time than ever. Right? Wrong.
Oddly, and paradoxically, we have less time than ever. And the first generation fully to come of age in a digit-soaked world is frightfully despondent about the future.
The phrase “I did not have time” or “I ran out of time” is more common than ever. People are reading books less than ever, a fact that is well-documented. We are becoming or have become postliterate. Even a two-hour movie taxes people’s patience.
Go to a restaurant and watch the way people ostensibly there together are wholly reliant on their phones, multitasking constantly. They cannot put them down long enough to have a rich conversation. Lacking in practice, the English vocabulary seems to be shrinking and erudition is collapsing.
We are too busy even to sleep. Phones are by the bed and lighting up at night as people grab them and answer emails and texts. Weekends seem to be going away completely as the workweek has extended more and more, eating away at leisure time and family attention.
Home cooking seems rare and the fineries of life, from tablecloths to well-tailored clothing, are evaporating from culture. We have less leisure and less attention than ever. The signs of the highest society are cultivated less than ever before.
What we used to think of as the American dream—homeownership, stable families, good jobs that build a legacy—is out of reach from most people under the age of 30. The middle class is facing a squeeze unlike anything we’ve seen in the postwar period.
It’s all quite remarkable and the opposite of what I had expected. Instead of freeing our lives from drudgery, we have more drudgery than ever. Just as the steamship ended up bolstering the demand for coal, digital technology has eaten up our attention entirely while making the physical world less affordable than ever.
Ask a friend about gardening or ironing or preparing a well-decorated cake, and the answer comes back the same: there is no time for such things anymore. Sewing, knitting, baking, painting, learning languages, practicing piano—it’s all fading on grounds that we are all just too busy for this stuff.
Something seems off. The most cultured and highly civilized societies we’ve ever seen from evidence in cities and homes dates from a time before email, social media, phones in every pocket, or even refrigeration and internal combustion.
How in the world did people in the past have time to make clothing, raise half a dozen kids, read the classics, write a hundred Christmas cards, entertain guests, keep their houses clean, pursue hobbies, and even travel before the age of flight?
The more efficient everything becomes, the less time we have to do anything at all. What was supposed to save us time has actually consumed it.
They write:
“In specifying only the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right of man, the writers of our Declaration of Independence may well have expressed an intuitive understanding of adaptation-level theory, as indeed have certain philosophers since the time of the Stoics and the Epicureans. While happiness, as a state of subjective pleasure, may be the highest good, it seems to be distressingly transient.
“Even as we contemplate our satisfaction with a given accomplishment, the satisfaction fades, to be replaced finally by a new indifference and a new level of striving .... As the environment becomes more pleasurable, subjective standards for gauging pleasurableness will rise, centering the neutral point of the pleasure-pain, success-failure continuum at a new level such that once again as many inputs are experienced as painful as are pleasurable.”
Or as B.B. King sang a year earlier, “The thrill is gone, The thrill is gone away.” Then we want the next time-saving device, which raises the question, what exactly are we saving time to do? Adopt new ways to save time? It’s not working and it is not thrilling.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? As a kid, I dreamed of video phones and instant communication with friends from private handheld devices. Now that they are here, I get no thrill from them at all. Indeed, I’ve worked to deaden my phone as much as possible, turning off all notifications, haptics, and even turning the colors to black and white only. More and more, I leave it at home and never pull it out in the presence of company.
At first the iPhone was amazing. Then it became normal, in about two days. Soon we were juggling notifications, learning curves, subscriptions, upgrades, panicking about a low battery, and dealing with new problems like digital overload or strange social pressure from social media.
Now life feels more hectic than ever before. We are running in place on the treadmill.
This hedonic treadmill has been enormously profitable for tech companies but what has it done to our civilization? Our attention spans are short, even reduced to minutes or seconds. We live off dopamine hits. We’ve lost the patience for reading or learning new skills. With the dramatic reduction of the need for work or human hands, we’ve lost ambition and life satisfaction. All these tools are eating us alive.
This is not a case against innovation. The steamship was great and streaming music is a joy. I’m thrilled to stay in touch with family and friends. Even AI has its uses. It can achieve analytical feats that used to take me weeks in a matter of minutes. Great, but let’s keep some perspective here.
We all need to become more conscious of the grave need for moderation. I experience my most joyful moments in life completely unplugged at museums or at the lake, and I never read with more focus than when holding a physical book or newspaper.
It is not inevitable that technological advance puts us on the hedonic treadmill. We just need to get better at remembering that these are not a source of joy in life and in fact might actually devour paths to true happiness.
Thomas Jefferson spoke about the pursuit of happiness. He did not mean to turn over our lives to techno-overlords so we can amuse ourselves to death. His was a higher and more spiritual conception we need to regain.
