We Streamlined Life So Hard We Forgot To Live It — 'What Saves Us Time Also Costs Us'
On the benefits of inefficiency.
Manu Reyes | Shutterstock The restaurant was little more than a collection of picnic tables, their legs submerged in sand. Behind them, the ocean sprawled — that vibrant, pulsing Caribbean blue. Bright and achingly beautiful.
My parents had read about the restaurant in a guidebook, and we had come prepared. We’d brought playing cards, journals, art supplies, and books. The restaurant’s claim to fame was that it took over two hours to get your food. If you ordered chicken, which, as I recall, may have been the only thing on the menu (if there was a menu at all), the chicken would be selected from a nearby yard, its neck wrung, its feathers stripped.
I was 11 years old at the time, already saddled with homework, already learning how to straddle the demands of basketball practice and math worksheets and weekend volunteer work. Gone were childhood afternoons of leisurely play.
No more exploration for exploration’s sake, no more elaborate games conjured from my imagination, no more aimless wandering. Time had become a precious resource, and the more efficiently I spent it, the more I learned, the more "successful" I would be.
But summer offered a respite from life’s increasing demands. It was summer for my parents, too, who were teachers at the same school that my sister and I attended. We had all ripped ourselves from our harried American schedules to explore the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. For a few precious weeks, we had all the time in the world.
When the meal finally arrived — after two pleasant hours of journaling, sketching, reading, and playing Rummy 500 — my stomach was audibly growling. We ate every morsel, picked at the chicken bones until they gleamed, and left feeling sated, making sure to pay our sincere compliments to the chef.
I’m 33 years older now, and in that time, the world has only gotten faster.
We not only eat with astonishing efficiency, but we can also get our food delivered — whatever it is we’re craving, not just pizza or Chinese.
And not just food. Pretty much anything can be commanded at the click of a button to show up on our doorstep.
Drazen Zigic / Shutterstock
There is so much we can do at the click of a button.
Find rides, purchase air travel, and hire someone to assemble our furniture. Armed with our apps and our smartwatches, we are walking models of efficiency. Maybe the buses don’t always arrive on schedule, but we can track them so we don’t have to waste our time waiting at the bus stop.
And you’d think, living in a world where we no longer have to wring a chicken’s neck to prepare dinner for our family, a world with McDonald’s and Starbucks drive-throughs, a world with microwaves and dishwashers and smartphone-enabled Roombas, a world with an entire army of apps dedicated to helping us Get Stuff Done, a world with an army of other apps helping us to revitalize, restore, and refocus so we can Get More Stuff Done… you’d think that all our efficiency would amount to something, wouldn’t you?
But with each new innovation that claims to save us time, we only seem to end up with less of it.
And besides, measures of efficiency depend on your metrics. If McDonald’s, for instance, aims to serve the cheapest food to the most people in the shortest amount of time, goals that are evident in its proud claims of “billions served,” then yes, I suppose it achieves these goals with remarkable efficiency.
But think of all the discarded foil packets, boxes, bags, cups, straws, and napkins. Think of all the supersized fries that land in the trash. All the food that never gets sold. All the land that is cleared for grazing cows, the resources that go into processing and transporting the food, and the resources that go into disposing of the food that never gets eaten.
I am quite sure that the restaurant in Costa Rica wasted no food — any leftovers went to the animals, and the bones went to broth. Nearly everything that went into the meal was harvested nearby. There was little need for gas-guzzling trucks or plastic packaging.
By all measures, except for the number of minutes that elapsed between sitting down and actually eating, the operation was vastly more efficient than any fast-food establishment, and likely any restaurant in the United States, period. It was even more efficient than the “home-cooked” meals I rush to prepare in the 30-minute window I have between finishing work and sitting down to dinner with my kids.
And it was a meal I remember even 30 years later, when most other meals are a blur.
At the end of the day, if saving time isn’t creating more joy in our lives, why are we all buying into the false narrative that efficiency, as we define it, is making our lives better?
Are we happier? Are we spending more time with the people we love? Are we making more time for our community?
The answers to all these questions for me are a resounding NO. Like a newborn baby, joy is inherently inefficient. I run for exercise, but I walk for joy. I sit on a beach doing nothing because I can lose myself in the expanse of the ocean, whether it’s a blinding Caribbean blue or a churning Pacific Northwest gray.
Magic cinema / Shutterstock
I wander the neighborhood with my children and no particular destination because it creates space for real conversations that go beyond barking orders and protests. Sometimes we walk to our farmer’s market, even though I’ve already done my weekly grocery shopping, to buy strawberries that cost more and rot faster.
We buy them because they taste like summer. It’s hard to believe they even share the same name as those bland, pithy monstrosities sealed in plastic at the grocery store. Usually, the entire pint of strawberries is gone before we get home, our mouths are smeared with juice, and the smiles on my children’s faces remind me, yet again, how much we have over-complicated pretty much everything. All in the name of efficiency.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.
