Greetings from Canggu, where I turned 34 this week. What are you reading this week?
#1 Predictions: I've been revisiting original texts that people seem to quote over and over and that has led to a lot of thought that emerged in the 1930s and 1950s. This essay from Keynes I found to be incredibly readable and still highly relevant. I'm going to experiment with a more detailed breakdown...let's dig in.
In 1930, amid a global depression, John Maynard Keynes pondered the question, "What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence?"
In the essay, he predicts that "the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day" which has mostly been realized (about six in the US). His point is that this standard of living might open up new possibilities or what he states, "greater progress still."
What he is getting to is that at some point in the future (for him, 2030), we may have moved beyond our "traditional purpose" or "the struggle for subsistence" towards a world where we may have to contemplate other ways of being.
He goes on,
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
However, he does not think that people will readily accept this transition. He predicts a collective "nervous breakdown" and cites as evidence the wealthy in that age that have struggled to "occupy the leisure" which they have achieved by solving their own basic economic problem.
I often here the modern refrain "you can't just not work" and I would completely agree. Except we may need to broaden our definition of work beyond what can be paid for and to things that include childcare, taking care of the sick, volunteer work and creative work. As I site here typing, this feels like some form of work while at the same time feeling utterly distant from the PowerPoint decks of my past.
Keynes addresses our belief in work for works sake and suggests that "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"
I imagine Keynes would delight in being alive today as he practically acknolwedges that we are not there yet (in 1930, that is)
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
In order to get to this post-work state Keynes outlines, he acknowledges that our underlying beliefs will need to shift:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable.
This inversion of values seems unfathomable today where in the US making money is seen as almost universally good and our expectation of the kind of life one should enjoy has steadily risen. Keynes acknowledges that "the needs of human beings may seem to insatiable" but seems to think this can be overcome.
Let's take a quick look at demand for housing, where you notice that as people have gotten wealthier, they have demanded bigger houses and not decided to spend less. The average home size has increased about 1,000 square feet over the last 40 years (while the # of people in that house has shrunk).
Keynes may think that humans can overcome their "insatiable desire" but I'm not so sure.
#2 4-Day Week: I published a longer essay on my thoughts around the four day work-week, which as I hypothesized, seems to be catching more steam in Europe than in the US. I think that the constraint of a maximum number of hours or days can help us start to ask the deeper questions of what all this work is for anyway and figure out which things might not be worth researching until 1am.
#3 Time For Happiness: This HBR piece on our "time scarcity" offered some interesting reflection on time and money but seemed to fail to ever identify that working less might be an option.
On why we say we care about time, but make decisions that prioritize money:
But it makes more sense if you understand commodity theory, which holds that when any resource is perceived as valuable, it is also perceived as scarce. So, the more we get paid for our time, the more we value it, and the more intensely we feel the loss of any moment.
And how feelings of financial insecurity drive our behavior:
Feelings of financial insecurity (regardless of actual wealth) may also prompt people to experience more intense time poverty. That’s because individuals who feel unsure that they’ll have the same job or earn the same level of pay in the future are more likely to prioritize having more money at the expense of having more time.
+ For more on time scarcity check out Andrew Taggart's Quartz piece "Why you never have enough time, a history"
#4 Noise, Truth & Thinking: Daniel Kahneman and Krista Tippett have an amazing conversation on the limits of "truth," sharpening our thinking and how much we mistake noise for expertise. Here is Kahneman:
"Why don’t they change their mind?” And the reason they don’t change their mind is that facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think. And people on both sides believe that there are facts that support them. But those beliefs should not be taken too seriously.
#5 Tribal Psychology: A great podcast on how easy it is to get people to behave tribally.
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