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Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend on It

Jan 10, 2024, 9 min read

Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend on It

rw-book-cover

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Highlights

  • The thing to note here is how the accomplishment of legitimate tasks morphs into a tyranny of tiny tasks when the performance of tasks is submitted to the logic of the time-saving technique. Here’s the second, “fidelity to daily tasks,” from Albert Borgmann discussing the social dimensions of tending a hearth:

    “It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house its center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and the solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to daily tasks.” (View Highlight)

  • What precisely are we saving time to do? I think the implicit answer is always something like “to enjoy the goods and services of consumer capitalism” as if this was our highest calling as human beings, that which would bring us true happiness and satisfaction. But it is never quite put this way, nor do we put it this way to ourselves. Instead, the terms of the offer are far more vague and generic. Most of the persuasion, if we may call it that, is done by how our tasks are framed whenever a machine or system is created to do them for us. Suddenly, previously dignified work becomes “drudgery,” labor that some might have found satisfying becomes insufficiently “creative.” The sense is that we might unlock some higher plane of existence if only we adopt a more efficient technique or outsource our involvement in a task to a new technology. Then and only then will we be able to do “what really matters,” and “what really matters” is always sufficiently vague to allow us to imagine that we are choosing these ends for ourselves and simply being empowered by new tools to achieve them. (View Highlight)
  • In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified. (View Highlight)
  • In this mode, we will always seize upon the time-saving promise, however hollow, and our life will be ruled by the tyranny of tiny tasks because we will never be doing something for its own sake. And it will be so because the order to which we are conforming our own inner life is an order ruled by idols, to borrow a religious concept, which have no interest in our well-being, idols invoked by the names Productivity, Optimization, Efficiency, and Profit. (View Highlight)
  • While the techno-economic order knows only quantifiable outcomes and measurable outputs, much of what ultimately matters, what is of greatest human concern, transpires in the particular and idiosyncratic ways we pursue our goals—in the ways we are involved, invested, and engaged in the tasks that make up our days. (View Highlight)
  • Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. (View Highlight)
  • In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production. Within this system and by its terms, we do best to waste as much time as possible, to slow down when we are encouraged to speed up, to disregard the demand to measure and assess, to relish inefficiency, to remember, as my friend Evan Selinger once put it, that “effort is the currency of care.” And such effort is best not “saved,” because our living is bound up with our caring. (View Highlight)
  • If the point is to care and to love and to keep faith, then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so? (View Highlight)

title: “Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend on It” author: “L. M. Sacasas” url: ”https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/waste-your-time-your-life-may-depend” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend on It

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • The thing to note here is how the accomplishment of legitimate tasks morphs into a tyranny of tiny tasks when the performance of tasks is submitted to the logic of the time-saving technique. Here’s the second, “fidelity to daily tasks,” from Albert Borgmann discussing the social dimensions of tending a hearth:

    “It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house its center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and the solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to daily tasks.” (View Highlight)

  • What precisely are we saving time to do? I think the implicit answer is always something like “to enjoy the goods and services of consumer capitalism” as if this was our highest calling as human beings, that which would bring us true happiness and satisfaction. But it is never quite put this way, nor do we put it this way to ourselves. Instead, the terms of the offer are far more vague and generic. Most of the persuasion, if we may call it that, is done by how our tasks are framed whenever a machine or system is created to do them for us. Suddenly, previously dignified work becomes “drudgery,” labor that some might have found satisfying becomes insufficiently “creative.” The sense is that we might unlock some higher plane of existence if only we adopt a more efficient technique or outsource our involvement in a task to a new technology. Then and only then will we be able to do “what really matters,” and “what really matters” is always sufficiently vague to allow us to imagine that we are choosing these ends for ourselves and simply being empowered by new tools to achieve them. (View Highlight)
  • In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified. (View Highlight)
  • In this mode, we will always seize upon the time-saving promise, however hollow, and our life will be ruled by the tyranny of tiny tasks because we will never be doing something for its own sake. And it will be so because the order to which we are conforming our own inner life is an order ruled by idols, to borrow a religious concept, which have no interest in our well-being, idols invoked by the names Productivity, Optimization, Efficiency, and Profit. (View Highlight)
  • While the techno-economic order knows only quantifiable outcomes and measurable outputs, much of what ultimately matters, what is of greatest human concern, transpires in the particular and idiosyncratic ways we pursue our goals—in the ways we are involved, invested, and engaged in the tasks that make up our days. (View Highlight)
  • Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. (View Highlight)
  • In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production. Within this system and by its terms, we do best to waste as much time as possible, to slow down when we are encouraged to speed up, to disregard the demand to measure and assess, to relish inefficiency, to remember, as my friend Evan Selinger once put it, that “effort is the currency of care.” And such effort is best not “saved,” because our living is bound up with our caring. (View Highlight)
  • If the point is to care and to love and to keep faith, then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so? (View Highlight)

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