About a century ago, products that were new at the time, but are now quotidian, were marketed the same way as today’s new tech: as beacons of efficiency.
In an American Environmental History class, we read the fourth chapter of Susan Strasser’s “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash,” featuring some of these products.
Exactly 100 years ago, for example, a subsidiary of General Motors marketed their refrigerator as not only a device to keep food cool, but as “freedom from the possible annoyance of outside ice supply… without any attention on your part.”
Similarly, the cereal brand Grape-Nuts, for example, picturing a stressed couple at the breakfast table in a 1927 ad, writing, “When the clock hands aren’t where they ought to be… When time and trains are up to their old tricks of waiting for no man … What then? What then? Is there no hope?”
I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about the ice supply or cooking breakfast as I rush off to class or an internship. Perhaps it’s freedom, perhaps it’s hope; in any case, it’s saved me a lot of time.
Since these century-old ads, we’ve really advanced our efficiency game. My brother, for example, has an Oura Ring, which tells him the ideal time for him to go to bed. My phone tells me when the next train will come so that I leave my apartment at exactly the right time. I attend workout classes that exhaust tiny muscles in my body in a dark room for 50 minutes, then I leave, done with my movement for the day.
As the ads claim, efficiency is beneficial, allowing us to focus on what really matters. But I worry that today’s version of efficiency has moved beyond saving us time, but into new territory, where time is a meaningless currency.
My central question is this: What do we do with all our saved time? When Uber Eats has delivered the salad, our iPhones have summarized the email, ChatGPT has written the essay — what have we done instead?
Instead of allowing us to focus on what really matters, too much efficiency pushes us to focus on nothing.
The costs of efficiency deserve to be talked about. I keep thinking about an interview with Ezra Klein, The New York Times opinion columnist, and Kyla Scanlon, a journalist who covers the economy. Scanlon theorizes about “friction;” she says that digital tools allow us to have a “frictionless existence.” Yet, she posits that “the good parts of life often come through the hardest struggles … That’s what all the greats write about: the struggle and the path.”
I agree with Scanlon’s thesis, at least in relation to the college experience. College relies on friction. The learning we do here comes from the “struggle and the path,” as Scanlon would say. I chose to write this piece in the Orientation Issue to encourage you, freshmen, to lean into friction, rather than shy away from it.
Writing a term paper, for example, is greatly rewarding not in spite of its inefficiency, but because of it. It’s a process that can’t be rushed, if you want to do it right. It requires me to go to the library, find the Dewey Decimal call numbers that correlate to my topic, lug those books home and pore over its pages to find the perfect quotation. The longer I think about a subject — though 10 weeks is hardly any time at all — the more complex and profound my conclusions are. You’re not going to write as good of an essay if you had AI summarize the sources for you — you just won’t.
It scares me that in life after graduation — save for those who become professional researchers or academics — spending more time on something, thinking deeply about it no longer earns you praise from a professor, but a performance review from your boss. That is why it is all the more important to do hard things now.
This could mean taking a class in an unfamiliar subject; after all, this would be an awfully expensive four-year talent show if you only engaged in classes and skills you’re already good at.
For me, that meant taking ECON 201 and 202, Introduction to Macro and Microeconomics, respectively. I attended office hours and peer tutoring every single week just to basically earn the median grade. I still think weekly about what I learned there, in that Tech lecture hall at 9 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — no doubt because it was such a time-consuming activity of mine for 20 weeks.
In the Winter, the 15-minute morning walk up there was long and cold. With a ski buff around my mouth and nose, only my eyes were exposed, and tiny icicles would form in my lashes. An inconvenience, sure. But the world glittered.
These private, brilliant sparkles are everywhere, if you look hard enough. Find them in the class that seems interesting, even though the CTEC says it’s eight to 11 hours of homework a week, or that talk with an acclaimed speaker, even though you won’t get any extra credit for attending. There is certainly magic in the reading, too — so do it, instead of asking ChatGPT to summarize it for you.
It’s an ephemeral luxury — a blessing — to embrace inefficiency as a way of life. I have a sense that when I look back at my college years, my favorite memories won’t be the parties that were too loud, or the football games that I was bored at.
Instead, it will be the moments when the minutes flowed and I was completely unconcerned about it: Chatting in the American Studies lounge in between classes. Sitting in a lawn chair outside of Plex and reading a book for class in a single go. The many, many walks south on the Lakefill catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in a few days, which feels like a lifetime in college.
When I am older, I will acquire more of other resources, like knowledge and money. But I will never have more time than I do now.
If you were to go through college trying to be the most efficient student you could be, you would indeed turn that time into a meaningless currency. What are all of the hours for, if not for learning?
Grape-Nuts posited a century ago that seeing the clock run out would make one hopeless. Now, I’m hopeless that the clock will run out and I’ll realize that I haven’t done anything meaningful with the time I saved by using more efficient tools.
I’m writing this for myself just as I’m writing it for you. You have four years to bask in inefficiency, I have just one left. I’m ready to embrace it in all of its tiny difficulties and possible annoyances. (I’m writing a thesis, so I’d better be.)
While you’re at it, if you’d like, come say hi; I’m the tall brunette in Herskovits Library, often wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, hogging a carrel with an unreasonable quantity of books. I’m always happy to put them down and chat for longer than I probably should. What’s a few minutes, anyway?
Talia Winiarsky is a rising Weinberg senior. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
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