Registration for my new course, Everyday Energy [1] opens next week. In anticipation, I’ve written an essay series covering the central philosophy of the course. If you’re just joining us, check out the first essay on why we’re living through a human energy crisis [2], and an essay on the biological roots of our exhaustion [3], which we cover in more depth in the first month of the course.
Nature works in rhythms. Machines work non-stop. Many of our psychological difficulties with work—procrastination, burnout, strain and exhaustion—reflect a misguided attempt to use the logic of machines instead of the logic of nature in guiding human effort.
It wasn’t always this way. Early human existence was rarely easy, but it did follow the logic of nature’s rhythms.
Anthropological research into hunter-gatherer communities, often used as a stand-in for our Paleolithic ancestors, shows that they work much harder than we do, physically. The Hadza in southern Africa, for instance, engage in a little more than two hours [4] of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day. That’s roughly 4x the standard recommendation for health, and as much as 14x the amount we typically get in Western countries.
But while this lifestyle is laborious, it isn’t unceasing. Other researchers [5], looking at a !Kung tribe found that they only “worked” an average of two and a half days per week. Even the most industrious member studied, who went hunting over half of the days researchers recorded, put in a little less than 32 hours per week.
The invention of farming, and our exit from the proverbial Eden of our Paleolithic ancestors, left us relatively poorer, with worse diets, shortened stature and new diseases.
But despite the poorer material conditions, we still worked within natural rhythms. Days began at dawn and ended at sundown, often with a rest during midday. Effort was seasonal, with intense periods during harvest and lighter efforts in winter. In as much as a third of the year [6], work was restricted due to feast days, festivals and religious observations.
The Invention of Clock Time
This changed with the invention of clock time [7]. Before clocks, our understanding of time was intrinsically tied to nature’s rhythms. Even the length of an hour could vary, depending on the amount of daylight in each season.
With clocks came a new understanding of duration. Instead of flexible rhythms, time now had a fixed, unvarying duration, untethered from the natural world. With clock time came new possibilities to regulate labor and demand more machine-like adherence to a schedule.
Clock time’s dominance became complete during the Industrial Revolution. Workers put in 12–16 hour days, with few breaks and no vacations. In the course of a year, a medieval peasant might have worked 1200 to 1800 hours. In contrast, an early factory worker might have put in over 3000 hours.
Today, few of us have the same grueling schedule as an early Industrial-era factory worker. But while we may have gained perks in the form of better pay, free coffee and comfortable chairs, we have only become increasingly alienated from natural rhythms of work and rest.
Smartphones and email mean that work doesn’t end when we leave the office. Work projects and meetings spill into evenings and weekends. Deadlines and performance reviews leave us wary of taking too many days of vacation.
A Return to Rhythm
The way we work is unhealthy and unnatural. By replacing our prior rhythms with clock time, we’ve severed the traditional cycles of work and recovery. As a result, we feel squeezed between procrastination and frenzy, exhaustion and apathy.
The solution is a return to rhythms. Not simply working less (although, for many of us, it would be an improvement) but switching from an unceasing pace to a work routine characterized by periods of effort followed by recovery.
Unfortunately, any would-be reformer of our current system runs into two problems.
The first is that, despite its unsuitability as a model for human work, the machine-logic of unceasing effort is embedded in our economy. While I think we would be healthier and happier if we had working rhythms tied to nature, as our ancestors did, I don’t long for a return to the days before antibiotics, indoor plumbing and refrigerators.
Is our machine-like approach to work simply a necessity to maintain our modern standard of living?
I believe not. There is considerable cultural variation in our approach to work, from the extreme workaholism [8] of white-color Japan, to the leisurely lunch hours taken in France. Despite this, it’s the French, not the Japanese, who have higher labor productivity [9].
This suggests to me that the way we work is a product of culture, rather than a natural result of some path to ever-increasing optimization. Office workers in Japan put in heroic hours because it is expected of them, not because it maximizes useful work. We do what is “normal”, even if what is “normal” is deeply unnatural.
This leads us to our second problem: if the ways we work are part of our culture, how can an individual buck the trend? How can we have healthy cycles of work and rest when surrounded by a culture that operates on the machine metaphor?
This is a tricky problem, but not an insurmountable one. It goes without saying that some compromise is necessary. We always flow, in part, to the rhythms dictated by the broader society. Depending on our position, that may be a gently nudging tide or a rushing rapid.
Yet we’re not entirely at the mercy of our environment. Compared to our factory-working forebears, most knowledge workers have considerable autonomy in many dimensions of our work. We can create healthier rhythms, even as the broader work culture persists in its ceaseless flow.
In my upcoming course, Everyday Energy [1], we will spend a month working on exactly this problem: how do you carve out natural cycles of rest and recovery within the constraints imposed by your job? We may not be able to return to the past, but we can return to a rhythm of life that is humane and sustainable.
In the next essay, I’ll talk about how the meaning of work has flattened, and the problem of burnout and disillusion that this entails. After that, I’ll open registration for the full three-month course, Everyday Energy [1]. I hope you’ll join me!