My Two-Cents: Efficiency + Meandering
The other day my mom and I shared a drink at the bar and reminised about our NYC family trip last summer. I said my favorite memory was biking around Central Park. She agreed, saying she really enjoyed the lake in the middle. To that, I replied, “What lake?” Turns out my siblings and I fell victim to our competitive nature and were so busy racing each other to see who could finish the route first that we missed much of the scenery. Also, I had just got a new Garmin watch so I was trying to amp up my Strava stats (this is a dog-eat-dog world). Amid the Thors Sibling Central Park Tour De France, we missed the best part of Central Park. This got me thinking — has the pursuit of efficiency made me miss other views in life?
The (beer-induced) epiphany my mom and I had could be extrapolated to other areas. I’ll be the first one to admit I often favor efficiency over spontaneity and experience. I find myself cursing the Technology Luddites: those who refuse to embrace the future of AI, GPT, and yada yada yada. “Wake up and smell the Internet, Grandma,” I mutter under my breath like the screenager I am. These damn millennials! But maybe these millennials are holding onto a variable that us efficiency moguls often forget: the human experience. Had it not been for the binge-watching of my current favorite show, How I Met Your Mother, I would have missed this millennial-patented idea. This show is Legen–wait for it–dary for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most prominent one is its capture of the pre-digital, organic way of living and meeting people – running into a friend of a friend at a bar, striking up a conversation on public transport, or just being open to random, spontaneous encounters. We’ve optimized so many things for maximum efficiency to a point where we’ve almost erased the natural friction where life happens.
But all of this is good — right? Right! In many ways, the world is a lot better than it was before the tech boom... I’d rather take a razor scooter to the ankle on repeat while listening to the Harlem Shake for eternity than live in a time where Apple Maps doesn’t exist. And now that I have that extra hour at the end of my day — thanks to skipping class and watching my lecture at 2x speed — I can use that time for scrolling TikTok, binge-watching (How I Met Your Mother, of course), or lying in bed, stomach side down, gently swinging my feet in the air while typing this blog. (Photos available upon request.) This is fuel to the fire of the argument that "extra time" looks good on paper… But in practice, it often just becomes passive consumption.
So what am I really missing in all this time scrolling? (Who sounds like a millennial now!) Meandering. Frolicking. Dallying. There’s a certain richness in dallying. A certain grandeur in dicking around. Because when you d*ck around, you usually end up overdoing it—and this is where the real magic happens. That magic? The human experience! But somewhere along the way, that magic was forgotten when the hot-shot economists optimized everything for efficiency (E) and output (O). In a world so caught up in "faster and better," they forgot a couple of other important variables: Serendipity (S), the probability of meaningful, unplanned interactions, and Fulfillment (F), the long-term subjective well-being that comes from truly engaging with life.
To conclude, modern technology has brought and continues to bring us a lot of things. There is no point in standing in front of this train. But it is up to us to decide what future track it will take. Much of this was broached on by the guy who recently won the Nobel Prize for Economics, Daron Acemoglu. There are tradeoffs we as a society will have to make, and we need to think about the downstream outcomes of these tradeoffs. About what variables we want to optimize. About what makes humans, human. About if we desire to live in a world without dallying and dicking-around. About if we care more about the speed of the bike ride or the view/lake we miss along the way. And the answer lies in realizing it’s not a question of whether it’s efficacy or meandering. It’s an agreement that we need to find a happy medium between both. Efficiency doesn’t have to suffocate serendipity.
Written by Kate E. Thorstenson and Chat GPT
