How We Lost Care In the Name of Efficiency, and Why It is Exhausting Us
Care vs Efficiency – The Monk And The Engineer
In the frantic, distracted states we usually find humanity marinating in today, a childhood tale that stays with me is that of an old Buddhist monk and an engineer. The engineer on his way to work everyday sees the old, frail monk struggling to get water out of a deep well with a rickety rope. One day, the engineer installs an automated pulley mechanism to help the monk retrieve water with ease.
However, the next day, on his way to work he sees the monk at it again, with the same old rickety rope. The engineer felt frustrated that the monk refused to evolve and use a clearly more efficient system. He chose to confront the monk. While the monk thanked the engineer for his kindness, he explained that he’d still like to continue using the rope. Perplexed and miffed, the engineer demanded to understand why.
The monk explained that using the rope that he has used for years helps him perform the activity with the utmost care. That helped him connect more deeply with the act, and feel more rewarded by the act itself, and the water at the end of it. This enabled a natural sense of connection and mindfulness with the mundane morning task. He also said he had nothing else going on. So he didn’t feel this need for efficiency over his need for care and connection.
What are we really doing with our time?
Why are all of us living like it is imperative we get back to our phones? And why are we acting like every little thing we do needs to be optimized, from our morning coffee to the time we go to bed? Why are we sucking the joy out of everything in the name of yet another tech solution driving efficiency in our lives? Our superpower has always been to find care towards tasks, which helps create a sense of connection with it.
As that sense of care has evaporated from our lives, we have lost connection with our work. With AI being used for so much, and marketed as productivity gains, all we are basically enabling is more junk in the digital space, whether in public, or behind corporate firewalls. Just look at the state of LinkedIn!
We generally live distracted, careless lives looking into our phones, stressing out about it, while becoming obsessed with finding more time to do just that! We walk into a store and sign up for emails and texts for life. The number of promotional emails we get daily that we don’t look at is the epitome of the carelessness with which we approach everything as collective humanity. We sign a lease to an apartment and sign up for various apps, from buzzing people into the building to raising tickets rather than calling your handyman. All this usually disguised as efficient outcomes while the handyman calls you multiple times anyway! We’ve just created technological gatekeepers for every little task of our lives, actually creating inefficient layers within simple tasks. It is exhausting!
This plays out in the corporate world at a much larger scale, with people going hard on the efficiency train, while being in large corporate structures that are inefficient by design. In the corporate world, I couldn’t generally get over how much efficiency and business needs was used as a crutch, while usually delivering inefficient, careless outcomes.
The loss of care in the name of efficiency is exhausting us as humanity, and AI is making it so much worse. We are so obsessed with tech-ifying our lives that we have lost perspective on our superpower – finding a careful focus toward executing specific tasks. The tech that is helping us be ‘efficient’, to then find you the time to infinitely scroll. This marketing gimmick is making us all sickly and burnt out. I go into this into more detail in my book Burnout Highway, helping you create a more conscious relationship with technology, and work.
What’s the point?
Today, we are confronted with technology promising efficiency for every little task in our lives. There isn’t much in our lives today that we can’t establish via an app or a website or an AI chatbot. We have automated light fittings, cars with remote controls, coffee makers that know when to make coffee as you open your eyes, all saving us bucketloads of time. As humanity what are we doing with all the time we are saving? Probably watching reels and creating digital noise!
While technology has enabled so many positive outcomes, it has sadly, also collectively led us to doom scrolling and looking to our phones as soon as we have a moment. It is a careless, frantic state of affairs that has made LinkedIn look more and more like Facebook – ‘5 leadership lessons from my dog walk’. The monetization of our free time through such intrusive and addictive technology is probably the biggest shift in our economy and human existence since we became settlers.
With spatial computing and VR, we are now entering a phase of technology where tech is moving from monetizing time to monetizing our physical space, and eventually us. This is already happening in some form through companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon knowing everything about us – from our heart rates to where we shop for groceries, to how much we spend every month. All that time you spent doom scrolling, or generally online is just helping tech companies know you better, and monetize you further, even as you continue to lose yourself.
The efficiency bias
I grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas in Northeast India, a place that is similar to the Navajo Nation in the US. It is one of the poorer parts of India with tribal culture being dominant and the work culture there lacks any sort of efficiency. The corporate sector is missing in those parts of the world, and most employment is driven by government investment.
The timezone itself drives inefficient outcomes as a country as large as India needs 3 time zones, while having one. Thus, Eastern India generally has lesser daylight hours during the workday with the West having more daylight work hours. It is no surprise that Mumbai, on India’s west coast is the most efficient, financially powerful city in India. Where I grew up, people used time zone, weather and everything under the sun, as an excuse to not work.
While not wanting to work is not a good thing, on the other end of the spectrum, treating work as the most important thing in your life is toxic, a sea change I witnessed in my own personal journey from Shillong to New York. I remember a time when a colleague of mine was flying around the world for sales meetings while being 8 months pregnant, something that made everyone attending the meetings uncomfortable. It was quite the experience and was literally the opposite of the ‘inefficiency’ I grew up around. In my opinion, nothing is worth doing that, especially within large corporations, where we are all micro-cogs.
In a world where increasingly we don’t have an option but to accomplish every little task on a screen, this mindless propagation of technology is creating a culture of carelessness, where we don’t engage with tasks mindfully, seeking efficiency over care. This has affected all work, especially corporate work. We are using efficient outcomes as a crutch to justify a collective addiction, and franticness. Having a perspective on reclaiming your time, and care, not just from work, but from technology itself, and this efficiency bias we have created in society involves moving back towards care.
The efficiency bias isn’t new in society, it stretches back to forever. This is because it took ages to accomplish anything and thus, it made sense to strive solely for efficiency. Think about investing as an example – apps like Robinhood have truly democratized investing towards making buying and selling a stock with a tap. Even a couple of decades ago or so, brokerages were expensive and inefficient, often involving complex procedures. While this democratization has helped increase access, it also has enabled extreme speculation in financial markets, and reckless trading.
These examples, and the state of the world in general, are crying out for us to move back to care, a slowing down back to that metaphorical rope, for some things in our life. While we can’t do much to change the world and the proliferation of technology within it, we can make conscious choices, to not be so mindlessly obsessed with efficiency where care is needed, in as little or as large a task in your life, to hopefully find connection with it, and feel a little less exhausted.
Come work with me and let me help you find care again.