What will you do with all the time you save?

It feels like we're moving around faster than ever in the name of speed and efficiency. That might be OK if it felt like we were feeling the benefits of all that hustle.

Photo by Ashley Whitlatch via Unsplash

The vehicles we drive never have been safer when we take into account the myriad features designed to prevent accidents — and to keep us safe should accidents occur.

A logical implication of these advances is obvious: Vehicle-related fatalities should be decreasing as we reap the rewards of this new technology.

Instead, the opposite is true. In 2021, more people died in the U.S. from vehicle-related accidents than in any year since 2005. While there are multiple reasons — including the increased weight and height of vehicles making them in some cases more lethal, particularly to pedestrians — much of the increase is attributed to errors of operation.

We know our cars are equipped with more safety features, so we drive them faster and with less care. We assume don’t talk/text and drive rules are for everyone else, not us. And we suffer the consequences.

This is a problem for anyone on the road.

But it’s also a metaphor for the way we are living outside of vehicles as well.

We are going faster and faster because technology allows us to, instead of going a speed that allows us to see the benefit of this progress.

We live our lives at the equivalent speed of a car going 80 mph in a 55 zone (and did I mention the driver has a large iced coffee in one hand and is simultaneously trying to help a 4-year-old in the back seat locate a stuffed animal).

Our society’s most coveted value has become efficiency, and it is pulling away from the rest of the field.

This might be OK, or at least it might be easier to see the value in it, if the sum of all this efficiency and speed in the moments where they seem warranted added up to this: More whimsy and down time when we could relax and reflect as a reward for the hustle.

But we all know that’s seldom reality, right?

Just like safer cars on theoretically safer roads are crashing more frequently and with greater danger, many of us have filled the time we’ve saved by being more efficient with … more hustle.

We have worked to eradicate what I like to call “the in-between spaces” in our lives.

(Here I should be careful: This is how I feel particularly in my life. I sometimes fall into traps and assume my experience is shared. But in this case I do have the sense that what I am experience mirrors what I am observing and hearing/seeing other people talk about).

The push for productivity and urgency, particularly in work, is not new — and in fact has roots deep in white supremacy culture.

Like so many things that have long been true, though, this notion feels particularly acute now. It also has crept into our non-work lives in ways that just weren’t nearly as present in past generations.

If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten a newsletter from the New York Times at the crack of dawn Saturday telling me how to rest. Imagine trying to explain to someone 100 years ago that your big problem is that you are unable to relax and spend all your down time.

But this is modern life.

Are there feelings of guilt that come from taking time to do things outside the realm of efficiency and productiveness, making them easier to discard as we map our our days?

Do moments of quiet reflection about how we are living in 2024 make us more uncomfortable, causing us to run away from our thoughts as quickly as possible?

Or is it just too easy to get distracted — leading us to keep moving, keep checking, never slow down?

One supposes it does not help, at least in this regard, that most of us carry around at all times a tiny powerful computer, often letting whatever is on our phones at the moment — social media, some seemingly harmless game, even an interesting podcast — fill in whatever blanks might exist in our days.

COVID-19 disrupted countless processes, particularly related to work. I tell myself that I love the ease of commuting only once or twice a week instead of five times a week, but secretly: I sometimes miss the commute, particularly the era when I was using public transit virtually every day.

It was 15-20 minutes each way when I could just let my mind wander. Sure, I sometimes crammed in some work or scrolling mindlessly on my phone, but often I just sat and looked out the window while I processed life.

Of course I can still do that. So can you. But it often takes being intentional about having no particular speed or agenda in order to get out of our default efficiency mode.

The consequences of never leaving that mode are both personal and societal.

We don’t end up using the time we “saved” by being efficient on the things we really want to do. We either cram in MORE “efficient” tasks or we’re so wiped out from doing so much so fast that all we want to do is tune out. Then we start over again the next day, quite possibly after a poor night of sleep.

We can’t differentiate between moments that demand true urgency and ones that don’t. And when efficiency breaks down, we lose our minds.

I remember a time maybe a year ago when I was in line picking up dinner at a drive-thru and it was taking what seemed like forever for the person in front of us to order. We weren’t late for anything. I just wanted the line to move at the speed I expected it to move, and so I yelled (inside the car), “Let’s (bleeping) go, guys! Let’s (bleeping) go!”

Nobody could hear me except our son, who was 3 at the time. When he repeated that phrase a week later while we were in a different line, I initially laughed. But then I winced.

The swearing? No, that was fine. But what was I teaching him about expectations and time?

(I was reminded of the episode Saturday when reading Will Leitch’s entertaining post on his frustration with those darn kids parking on the street in his neighborhood. Like Will, I’m working on it).

My greatest teacher in all this, ironically, is probably our 7-year-old. One of her go-to questions is: “Daddy, can I take my time?” She cannot be rushed in any scenario. Eating. Getting ready for bed. Going to the bathroom.

I tend to think of her as having no concept of time, but maybe I need to reframe my thinking. She has a concept of time and insists she will not be ruled by it.

She has always had this gift. I remember when she was much younger, maybe 3 or 4, and we were in the car. I looked back at her and she was just staring out the window with a contemplative look. I asked what she was doing and she explained, “I was just having a wonder” — her term for a daydream.

I love her “wonders” and am finding more space for my own. Having time to just let my mind meander and expand is essential to thought. I find connections that piece together those thoughts in quiet moments — clarifying not just what I think but what I want to write.

As I lean into her mindset, I’m also mindful of reality. So I’m teaching our 7-year-old things that most of us take for granted as facts: school starts at the same time every day, and everyone in her class has agreed to be there at the same time. Even if she doesn’t want to get ready to go, she needs to do it.

And that you don’t make 15 trips to carry 15 pairs of socks from the clean basket to the bedroom. If we didn’t have at least some efficiency built into our lives we would run out of time in a day for the things we have to do, let alone the ones we want to do.

But we have gone overboard. We’re strapped for time because we expect to move at unreasonable paces. And we often don’t know what to do with ourselves if we suddenly don’t have an urgent matter at hand.

We have become the embodiment of a description of law school that I remember hearing from friends on multiple occasions: It’s like winning a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie.

The more more we get done, the more we do.

That’s a pretty bleak reward.

A better one is this: Appreciating that we have the opportunity to slow down instead of crashing.