Answering My Child: If Productivity Keeps Rising, Why Do We Feel Busier?

1. First Ask Whether It’s True, Then Ask Why: The Eight-Hour Workday

Broadly and on average, human working hours should have gotten shorter. Not going back too far — since the Industrial Revolution, workers’ hours went roughly from a sixteen-hour system to an eight-hour one.

But when people today, mental workers especially, voice this complaint, they aren’t wrong either. Quite a few studies and monitoring efforts show that working hours over the past two decades have not clearly declined, and may even have risen.

2. Endless Desire: Total Demand Inflates

To compute the average working hours of people in an economy, you can roughly take total work, divide by average productivity, then divide by total population. The rise in average productivity is fairly obvious, but total work inflates not only with population growth but with human desire. Before smartphones existed, few people wanted one; now everyone wants a top-spec iPhone or some Android flagship — the only question is how much money I have. In ancient times most people never left their village in their entire lives; now a family that doesn’t organize a single trip in a year can practically be classified as poor. Walk into the great cathedral of consumerist society — the shopping mall — every few months, and you’ll find an endless stream of new products and services. If desire inflates faster than productivity rises, working hours must necessarily lengthen.

3. Today’s Work Is Never Done Today: People Who Never Clock Out

If your work is physical labor — planting trees, say — then when you finish today’s assigned task and clock out, you can rest. But if your work is mental, like when I worked on recommendation algorithms at a game company, then in essence there is no concept of clocking out. The recommender’s data system is constantly recording performance; the revenue curve pulls at your heart; in the work group chat, clients and bosses can reach you at any time to solve problems. The output of mental labor is hard to measure by the day, and so it’s hard to have a “today’s work finished today” kind of clocking out. And the arrival of instant messaging software like WeChat has intensified this inner feeling of busyness. Everyone who has seen a work group chat flashing at midnight, everyone who has gone back to the hotel room on vacation to revise a proposal, everyone who has opened a laptop to work on the subway or the high-speed train — they all know that heart-stopping feeling I’m describing.

4. To Each According to Ability: Productivity Gains Are Uneven

What “productivity improvement” refers to is actually the overall efficiency of the economy, not that of any single person. Take a production line that originally needed 10 people, each producing 10 products a day, 100 a day in total. Through technological innovation the line needs only 2 people, each producing 100 a day, 200 a day in total. For those two, efficiency went up tenfold; for the remaining eight, what’s facing them is unemployment — that is, their productivity drops to zero. So will the two who remain become more idle? Economic law — or human nature — dictates that the boss would rather hire fewer people and pay each more, but will not let his employees be more idle. In software development, for instance, there’s a saying about hiring ten-times programmers at two or three times the salary. In the AI era, that efficiency gap will be amplified further by AI. The economic laws of capitalism will not distribute work evenly among ten people so that everyone is less busy; they will pay one person three times the salary to do ten times the work and let the other nine go unemployed. The result: either you’re unemployed, or you’re busier than before.

5. All Craving Is Suffering: The Free Choice the Individual Does Have

The eight-hour workday and social welfare systems were both produced after productivity rose, as corrections to capitalism grounded in humanist thought. About changes at the level of relations of production, we ordinary people can speak up, but what we can do is limited. Speaking of which, I think of Shakyamuni several thousand years ago, before he left home: he was a nobleman’s son, and his father, to keep him from his fate of renunciation, let him see nothing distressing. But Shakyamuni went out for a walk and inevitably saw birth, aging, sickness, and death. From his time to ours, productivity has risen immeasurably, but the human predicament hasn’t changed. As long as desire keeps inflating, people will be trapped inside their own desire, unable to free themselves from meaningless work. We often see middle-class people online, half showing off and half complaining: a year costs however many tens of thousands, this money has to be spent, that money has to be spent — and the classic line: “So that my child can suffer in first class instead of economy, I must work hard.” If there is no consumption you’re willing to give up, then busyness is just a self-fulfilling expectation.

Spend more time thinking about how much money in this world you truly must spend, and more time thinking about what, in this one life of yours, you really want to do. J.K. Rowling said: it is our choices, not our abilities, that show who we truly are. Bruce Lee said: the reason people differ so much is not what happens in our lives, but how we choose to respond when we face the important situations in life that test its courage. Shakyamuni said: the suffering of birth, of aging, of sickness, of death, of being joined with the hated, of parting from the loved, of not getting what one seeks — in brief, the suffering of the five aggregates of clinging.