The case for the long way home

Why optimizing for efficiency isn’t always the answer

If you’re like me, you’re always looking to shave a few minutes.

You know what subway door is closest to the right exit escalator. You have the 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner.

But there’s a big fat problem with our always-on lives that I don’t think enough people are talking about. We live in a world where people are physically unable to ride five floors in an elevator without swiping down to refresh. Our feeds have turned into a sort of gas that fills all the unoccupied seconds of the day. We’re constantly optimizing for efficiency, but we keep filling our blank space with more stuff.

We suck at taking time off.

Nevertheless, efficiency is still the new black. 7 minute abs, 4 hour work weeks, Soylent’s coffee+breakfast in a bottle. We have apps that count calories and wristwatches that count steps, but nobody is counting the effect that filling our days with constant stimulus has on our ability to be still.

Well maybe some people are measuring. Apparently the average human attention span is…whoa look, a bird!

In Alan Watt’s The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, he has this great passage about the space between things.

“Let’s consider music. When you hear music, most people think that what they hear is a succession of notes or tones. If all you heard when you listen to music were a succession of tones, you would hear no melody and no harmony. What you really hear when you hear melody is the interval between one tone and another…the interval between this year’s leaves, last year’s leaves, this generation of people and that generation.”

The inefficient moment—when we’re walking home from work or waiting in line for coffee—is our chance to process. It’s our chance to let all of the whirling inputs from our snow globe days settle into some form of clarity.

But that doesn’t happen if every time the bus is late our knee jerk reaction is to see what’s going on on twitter—even if you do find an article on the “7 Habits Successful People Use to Optimize Their Commutes.”

Our feeds are filled with productivity hacks, productivity apps, and productivity snacks. We all want to do more, faster and thus it’s easy to think that squeezing more time out of every moment is the paradigm. But to what end? Isn’t the whole point of “buying more time” to take a break.

Maybe, it’s a problem with how we define success. Out of the Industrial Revolution came the 9-to-5, and with it this new concept of leisure. We began to take road trips and go to amusement parks. Kids went to summer camp and drive-in movies. But now, especially among millennials, busyness is cool. It’s like a some a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

Everybody and their mom seems to have a side hustle these days. But even those of us that don’t fill all our time off with consumption—music streaming, binge watching, dating in bulk.

I’m worried we’re losing the little moments of down time. The pauses at the end of a breath or the requisite blank spaces between paintings on the wall of the gallery.

Our days aren’t meant to be a series of todo lists, quantified steps, and push notifications. Sure, I’m down with the data and all the carpe diem talk, but I also think we need some daily inefficiency, to bake a few exhales into our afternoons.

So, next time you walk to the grocery store, try taking out the headphones. Trust. It feels good to create some space between things. Tomorrow, we can all go back to ordering on Amazon or calling the Task Rabbit. But the long way home reminds us that we always have the time if we chose to make it.

We can hack away the rest.

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