Oh boy, another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov, following the tried and true formula of:
1. Pick topic close to the heart of techies
2. Deride the worst/most fanatical examples of said topic in practice
3. Make non-techies feel safe and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep
Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos.
This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking" has been appended.
I think it's wrong to bifurcate the audience into technie and non-techie, as if the only people who don't buy into personal optimizer narcissism are decidedly untechnical. You live in a little bubble if you think that's the case.
No doubt. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously excesses when it comes to life hacking, or entrepernurialism, or anything, and it's fine to pushback with reasoned arguments. However, IMO, Morozov's contrarianism leaves little room for a healthy spectrum, and devolves quickly into "look at those tech freaks!"
Its older and in some ways a simpler tried and true formula of "Hey, did you know Americans are the pinnacle of psychological reactance?"
Better known as reverse psychology. No nation of people on the planet are better at it than the Americans. Free them from the merger of .gov and religion and they'll demand a re-merger and join whacko cults. Free them economically and they'll become slaves of mortgage banks. Free them in the workforce and most of them will idolize being corporate drones. (nearly) free national parks and they'll watch sitcoms on TV instead. Pay off debts means go shopping so you're poor again. Lose some weight results in go pig out. You get the idea. You can write a billion of these stories about Americans. Self destruction is the national psyche. Its a pretty boring story once you get the pattern, although its funny to watch from the outside if you've checked out of it.
In this particular case its merely a "news" story that freeing people from some drudgework means American drones will of course true to their nature logically bury themselves in more drudgework than ever LOL. At least the dumb ones will, anyway. I could have told you the outcome, and even probably lines from the "news" story, as soon as I heard what the movement proposed to do.
I know Morozov's writing and agree with him more often than not. not sure why you call it trolling, it's for sure more substance than the usual hn blog post ping-pong. Last time I saw an essay of him around here, most comments here were about it being too long.
Well, I'll leave it to people to decide if the top commenter, potatolicious, was right in dismissing Morozov's piece as being too long. Frankly, that's the nicest thing you can say about Morozov's takedown, which confuses "length" with "substance", unfortunately.
I have read his book aside of his many essays, so I can agree his style is lengthy - that's actually the only issue I may have. That doesn't change the fact that his arguments are well-thought and usually supported by references. You don't have to agree with him or like his style, but bringing it down to a 'TLDR' is silly, his writing has more substance than the usual blogosphere content posted around and it's worth taking those few minutes of overhead (instead of scrolling some blabbering on twitter f.ex.).
I'm not a fan of Morozov either, but this piece is not worse than his usual. First, it's a review of two books by other people. Second, the examples he picks are not extreme, they're rather typical. Third, his critique in this case is, in my opinion, pretty sound.
"Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?"
Sure, yes. But there's nothing new about this and it really doesn't have anything to do with lifehacking or Silicon Valley.
Speaking from the lofty position of having letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s I can tell you that people have been enthusiastic about this kind of thing forever! And some people will be so enthusiastic that they'll totally overdo it and lose the benefit.
He does have a point, though. Lifehacking was supposed to be a means to an end: a way to get more time to oneself by finding more effective ways to deal with the daily chores and other "maintenance" tasks. But for far too many, it has become an end and itself: the time gained back from lifehacks gets reinvested into LIFEHACK MOAR, and we become slaves to routine in the very way we were trying to escape. That wasn't the point.
What lifehacks are awesome for, though, is getting your life straightened out. If you're like a lot of geeks, you can probably identify one or two things that you've let fall by the wayside in the quest for more time that you really shouldn't have. But now, you're having more trouble Just Doing Them back into your life. Lifehacks present an alternate approach to these tasks: a way to do them that breaks the psychological associations that led you to stop doing them in the first place. That can be a very powerful thing. So next time you decide to tackle that task, try a lifehacked approach. It really helps.
Yes, many things do become ends unto themselves. This is why I read only the occasional life hack, or life pro tip. It's become a fetish. It's less about optimizing your life than being able to say that you're a lifehacker. The same thing largely applies to the so-called "maker" culture.
Maybe for some it was a means to the end of getting more free time. But some of us love our work, and want to fill our time with it. Lifehacks are a way to be able to waste less time, doing what we love more effectively.
>letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s
Please post a scan of that.
Actually maybe don't, there's no way the reality of Time Management Magazine circa 1990 is going to live up to what my imagination is currently constructing.
> letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s
Did you know you can set a "wake up time" for your computer? This is set in your computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System). Access it by pressing F2 or Del while the RAM counts down (hurry and press it, unless you have 8Mb of RAM!) This is how I get my computer to start the lengthy boot process before I've woken up, saving me hours of waiting every month.
Hmmm... I just push the button, then go get some coffee. Thereby saving myself the time it took you to do the F2 thingy. Which I then lost writing this post to tell you about it :-(
I copied this sentence as well - it doesn't seem self defeating at all to maintenance one's infrastructure, just part of life.
it's interesting that we both copied that sentence because I just looked at your SN and I'm amused by the fact that I was about to paste the same quote from here at the Causata office :]
One thing I remember from watching the Inbox Zero presentation [1] by Merlin Mann a couple of years ago was the analogy he used involving a burger joint.
Paraphrasing, he said that lifehacking is similar to optimizing the process of taking orders and organizing them, but at some point those orders actually need to be fulfilled. Otherwise you'll end up with a lot of angry customers, who don't care about what awesome optimizations you're doing behind the scenes!
This is not to say that lifehacking is useless. Rather, the emphasis is that ultimately, you have to get things done.
I think some of us like to experience the joy of inefficiency to some degree provided it doesn't hinder too much of productivity.
"within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient).
Edit: Er... brain fart grammar. I need more Lifehacking!
"within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient).
I thought the conventional wisdom on Hacker News is that you should sleep well, exercise, eat right, and have a good balance of activities, even if you are a startup founder.
This isn't limited to HN, but I feel like the startup scene is somewhat of a "do as I say, not as I do" phenomenon. People will nod in enthusiastic agreement about the need to work sustainably, be balanced, eat well, sleep enough, etc.
And then pull an all nighter filled with Monster and Red Bull.
There's a bit of a dissonance in the community. On the one hand we agree with all of this talk about balance, on the other hand the culture is still very much an overgrown frathouse. We're touting the merits of working smarter while at the same time playing up the "code through the night!" hackathons.
That should be the conventional wisdom everywhere.
I would say, on average, programmers are worse at these things. Free food & booze and a job that makes it easy to work wherever, whenever certainly doesn't help.
For someone who has spent a great deal of time decrying how facile and shallow TED has become, Evgeny Morozov has really doubled down contrarianism for contrarianism's sake without contending with irony therein.
He styles himself as a truth teller to some sort of "techno-elite", but he's really just a troll with nothing interesting to say.
Oh, I don't know. It's kind of entertaining to take one crazy person ("Consumed within three hours of getting under the sheets, meals of at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol ... and 40 grams of protein produced dramatically faster time-to-sleep scores....") and rub them up against another, contrasting, crazy person ("within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers").
To me this article 1)says very little 2) conflates 'lifehacking' and 'lifestyle design'
Lifehacking to me has always been about little things you do to reduce friction and mundanity in your day to day. Tim Ferris promotes something else entirely which advocates an entirely different lifestyle, fueled by passive income, allowing you to focus on What You Want™.
[Sorry for the buzzword bingo above, I felt I needed to embrace it to adequately articulate the thoughts.]
How one-sided. Anything worthy can be done to excess, but that line is drawn by the individual.
Take running as an example - the couch potato thinks the weekend 5K duffers are "running to excess"; the 5K duffers think the person training for a marathon is "running to excess"; the marathon trainers think the ultra-runners are "running to excess"; the ultra-runners think the 72-hour endurance runners are "running to excess".
As long as a person's lifehacking "system" is contributing to their well being, and serving them, who's to say it's wrong? If someone steps back and says, "ok, I'm working this system too much and I want to change it", then that's fine too.
Really, people - live and let live - it's not that hard.
I agree, but I also think this argument goes both ways.
The 5K runners think the couch potatoes should run more, the marathon trainers think the 5K runners should run more, etc. In a similar fashion, the "inefficient" are bombarded with lifehacking advice from the likes of Tim Ferriss and David Allen.
I think if there's one good takeaway from this article, it's that the lifehackers should "live and let live" as well. Not everyone needs or wants to optimize their life.
I'm not sure. I'll agree that it can be irritating, but I think sometimes people actually do need to evangelize their latest $WHATEVER in order to help motivate themselves and stay focused. Whether or not this is a sign of un/healthy activity could also be an interesting debate.
Take running as an example - the couch potato thinks the weekend 5K duffers are "running to excess"
A classic straw man example. I hadn't herd of this 'running to excess' term, but I defy you to find someone who thinks running 5k once a week is excessive. I'm not into running myself, but I walk a round trip of that length a couple of times a week (to a specific destination, I don't mean that's my only exercise) and the idea of jogging it instead doesn't seem particularly radical.
“Business destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social,” - does not seem to reconcile the partition of mental activity presented in "The Role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" (summary: http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...) - notably, "The importance of rest" has its own section.
Productivity tools are not destructive, they are just useful in context and inefficient when mis-applied - just like any other tool.
What I say in the book is "chronic busyness destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social" and that I would argue is true. Deliberate practice to me means intense focus on one specific activity for a long period, not trying to juggle long to do lists or multitasking. Crucially, deliberate practice also I would argue an internally imposed task - in that the practitioner chooses to focus on it - rather than switching among hundreds of tasks a day on an externally imposed schedule. What I argue against in the book is trying to master "busyness" - because quite simply our brains are not designed to be busy and when they are busy the amazing things our brains can do are suppressed. That's my hypothesis - I think it's testable.
"You should spend time doing nothing" is a life hack. Life hacks aren't all about doing more more efficiently, what do you think the title "The 4 Hour Work Week" denotes? MORE work?
Lifehacking is when someone thinks of the idea to use a paper binder to keep your cords tidy.
I hereby propose a vote on calling what TFA is talking about as either:
A) Todo Voodoo
B) Efficiency Masturbation
Feel free to use either free of charge. I just open sourced them and now intend to have Tim Ferriss write a book about how you can do all this in only four hours a week!
No, it's so you can take the Google ad profits from your blog with that article to work less hours at work which you devote to creating an AI robot to write more lifehacking articles until the circle of life is complete and you have time to catch up on all that missed sleep.
We already do it. We get hungry, so we eat. When we are very hungry, we eat more. When we are not very hungry we eat less. That is a quantification of our life to an extent.
To me, life hacking is expanding that understanding. I get distracted, why? Do I need to be distracted because the distraction is doing me good? I don't want to be distracted because I have things to do. If I can do something that gets me what I need from that distraction more efficiently I should do it. If I can't, and I still have too many things to do, I should get fewer things to do. Is the distraction a result of something external (poor diet, poor sleep, poor exercise)? Could I correct that external problem and then be less distracted?
For me, it's not a matter of turning into an automaton. It's a matter of agency. I want to be in control of my actions, which means I need to understand what is going on in my life. If I get distracted, I want that to be because I allowed myself to become distracted because it was in my interest.
A healthy balance is optimal, but if I want to pull an red bull fueled all-nighter, that's fine too. It just means that I will throw off my routine and ruin my sleep for a period. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it, but you can only make that judgment if you're aware of the consequences and alternatives.
You can put nitrous on your car, and while it might damage your engine when used for prolonged periods, in short bursts it will increase performance. Understanding the risks and damage it can do can lead to making more educated decisions on when to use it. Otherwise all we're left with is feeling and panic.
To some extent, yes. You need to know where you spend your time (not down to the minute) in order to free up time. Knowing calorie consumption helps if you want to lose weight.
I agree with this, but data for data's sake is worthless, which is where many life hackers get lost in the weeds.
Knowing your calorie count helps you understand where you may be overestimating your exercise and underestimating your intake, which is a common problem when people try to lose weight. As you gain more experience, the data itself becomes less and less useful.
I'm not convinced that ever-more-granular access to data (such as precise micronutrients) makes people any healthier than those who don't pay attention to them.
Just because I eat does not mean I am bulimic, in the same way, having an ECG doe snot mean I "quantify my life". I meant quantifying a lot of things which are not usually done (tracking your time, measuring and weighing yourself everyday, calory counts, keeping track of productive output, etc).
1. Pick topic close to the heart of techies 2. Deride the worst/most fanatical examples of said topic in practice 3. Make non-techies feel safe and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep
Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos.
This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking" has been appended.