Stop Trying to Hack Your Life, Try Living It
The journey is really all you've got
A strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way.
A push to exchange quantity for quality
Feel Drained by Advice to Hack Your Life?
In this era of narcissism, everyone seems to want to tell everyone else what to do and how to do it. We are inundated with such advice from an ever-growing self-help industry, estimated to be worth almost $14 billion by 2025 with roughly 15,000 self-help books published in the US each year, with the aim of physical and psychological self-improvement. Despite the plethora of material available, there is an apparent disconnect between theory and practice, as rates of mental distress continue to rise amid this thriving market.
One can no doubt come up with many reasons why self-help advice does not result in improvements, not the least of which is that many don’t seek it out or those who do likely fail to implement recommendations effectively, if at all. This is compounded by the reality that many situational aspects of current everyday experience (such as fracturing social relationships, inflamed emotions and partisanism fueled by social media, and the stressors associated with modern life including noise and light pollution in conjunction with environmental toxicity) impede psychological and physical well-being. But, another important factor more directly related to self-help messaging, particularly with respect to the burgeoning push to “hack” all aspects of our lives, is that much of this advice encourages unhelpful mindsets that orient us toward unfulfilling pursuits disguised as solutions.
The Efficiency Trap
Self-help advice begins with the recognition that what one is currently doing is wrong or suboptimal, potentially impeding their achievement of desired outcomes, and consequently should be changed. On some level, this is always true. If one was thriving, they would be unlikely to seek out improvement advice. The goal of a hack is to address the suboptimality associated with time management, to highlight where one is wasting too much time on some activity and to demonstrate a more efficient process. The hack then allows one more time within which to pack additional activities, which they could (and importantly should) be doing. Efficiency is promoted as a way to get more done, because more is better.
People have developed and shared hacks in almost every domain, fueling the perspective that we should always be looking for ways to increase efficiency, no matter what we are doing. Improving efficiency can be valuable if one really is wasting time, but repeated exposure to such messaging promotes a sense of chronic time urgency that can turn quickly into valuing quantity over quality in an endless search for methods that ultimately prevent one from interacting in deep and meaningful ways with their current experience.
Hacking life promotes the idea that, whatever we do, we should be worried about efficiency and speed because there is so much that needs to be accomplished and productivity is of the highest value. Ensnared in this mindset, we become oriented to view our “real life” as some point in the future - a distant tomorrow when we will presumably have the time to delve into things more deeply or actually do what we enjoy. But when that future comes, why would we? Once we get there, someone will inevitably be encouraging us to hack our new, more efficient existence to optimize productivity for some better experiences at some time point further down the line. It is easy to get caught, once we step on this ever accelerating treadmill, until there is no experience left to appreciate because it has all rushed past us as we efficiently completed our myriad tasks.
Embrace Missing Out
To avoid this trap, or to step off the moving platform if you find yourself already running apace, we must adjust our mindset. The first step is to recognize that our life is limited, our days are limited, and our hours are limited. Let it sink in that each of us will NEVER be able to do all the things that we might like or wish to do. Acknowledging this limitation is imperative to adopting a more fulfilling relationship with time management. (For a more detailed discussion of these concepts, I recommend reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.)
Once you sit with this reality - and take the time to sit with it, there is no hack here - with the recognition that you will never have enough time, you may notice that you start to feel lighter, freer, and less stressed. This is because you are stepping off the treadmill. No matter how well you can hack your experiences, you will always fall short. Whatever time you free up or however efficient you become, you will find there is always something else to fill the space and you’ll never get to it all. Like Lucy’s experience with the infamous chocolate factory conveyer belt, some delicious truffles of potential experience will always end up wasted on the floor.
Some might find this distressing, the thought of slowing down, of stepping off, because it means they’ll miss out. And you will. But if you really let yourself process it, you’ll begin to see why this is actually a great thing. Acknowledging this limitation - there is never going to be enough time - frees you up to know that every choice means missing out on something. Even the greatest hack will still fall short. As a consequence, you can reorient and seek to get the most out of each of the experiences you have selected.
This is not to argue that seeking efficiency in some things doesn’t add value, it certainly can. The key is to avoid optimizing efficiency at the expense of deep engagement. A stroll outside might not result in the same caloric burn as a run on the treadmill but it can provide myriad other benefits the treadmill cannot. In the same way, stepping away from the accelerating efficiency cycle might mean getting less done, but this too can be valuable. When we take the time to fully acknowledge that current experience may be all we have, we can be more selective and more present, learning to effectively balance the benefits of planning for the future with seeking meaning in the here and now.
I wrote last week about appreciating the struggle and this is very much related to the ideas presented here. A focus on hacking your life orients one to avoid a struggle or to work around it rather than pushing through. There is a place for such arrangements as pointlessly struggling typically doesn’t provide value, but take care to not live your current life in an endless hurry to rush past at the expense of true engagement - with both the good and the bad. A meaningful present-focus can be balanced with an orientation to delayed gratification. Saving up for a big reward in the future hones valuable skills and is psychologically rewarding. However, this does not preclude the ability to delve deeply into the experience while you work to get there. (And, now that you are willing to acknowledge that you might never get “there”, your meaningful experience during the journey may be all you’ve got.)