"For we have been trained too long to strive and not enjoy" — John Maynard Keynes Was on the Side of the Orcas
Fuck them yachts.
We were just pulling into the parking lot of the H-Mart in Yonkers when my watch started blowing up with texts.
Biden’s out.
Biden’s out.
Biden’s out.
The middle of my chest began to roll and squirm. I’m of course also trying to herd a 5 year old out of the back seat and get him into the store so I have no time to open my phone and check the headlines. I’ve gotta swallow my feelings and try to pay attention to the wacky waving inflatable arm man in front of the Popeye’s that Oscar has been demanding I weigh in on.
The produce section is gently pulsing with shoppers and despite an awful lot of coaching before we went in, Oscar immediately struts right into the middle of an aisle causing a minor scramble with a forklift full of watermelons. My chest warbles and my breath is coming in short. Bapzz. Bapzz bapzz. Bapzz. The haptic vibration from my watch has me ready to whip around and tell an irritating somebody to hold their horses but of course there nothing to shout at but air.
I look around and watch the waves of information swoop into everyone’s pockets. There’s a soft swipping sound as everyone sucks in a breath … and holds it. The woman picking out strawberries in a Van Halen crop top answers her phone and leans into the shopping cart handle, barely registering her own floating footsteps while she shout-whispers into the distance. The man scanning the peaches absently digs around for his phone, glances at the screen and then widens his stance as he settles in to scroll. The young woman by the cooler case of kimchi turns to touch her husband’s shoulder and without looking away from the screen, holds it out to show him the news. A moment later we’ve shaken it off, stuffing our phones away and looking around to figure out where we left our feet.
This is our life now — trying to move through all the normal stuff we have to get done while quietly waiting for another unprecedented headline to hijack our focus. The last four weeks have echoed the Trump era when norms were changing so fast I felt like my life depended how fast I could refresh the homepage of the New York Times. I thought I’d developed better habits, stronger coping skills — but as the temperature has gone up so has my screen time. I find myself peeking at the news any time I’m a little bored or tired or have even a few minutes of (god forbid) unstructured free time. I know it won’t make me feel better but it will make me feel, which is preferable to the wooden, disconnected, lost-in-an-evil-funhouse vibe I’ve gotta contend with otherwise.
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.
The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes 1
John Maynard Keynes imagined that by 2030, technological efficiency would mean we’d only need to work about 15 hours a week to meet our basic needs. Keynes had just lived through one of the greatest improvements in economic productivity in recorded history — since the time of his birth to 1930, when he wrote Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he had witnessed a 22% decrease in the number of (paid, outside the home) hours an average person worked per year. In the decade to follow, he would experience another 24% drop.2
Keynes believed the key to stop living in scrambling survival mode and find a calm life of abundance wasn’t just about (fairly distributed) economic prosperity, but recognizing how our internal world would also need to change: we would need to re-learn how to immerse ourselves in the joys of living. We would need to learn from the mistakes of the upper class: putting the common good over pathological self-interest, investing in our communities instead of hoarding our wealth, governing ourselves and intervening in the market wisely while breaking down the gates of class hierarchy.
Y’all — Keynes was on the side of the orcas.
He died at 61 before discovering that the wild economic efficiencies that characterized his life would become stubbornly sticky. Since 1940 our average hours at work have stayed about the same despite the mind-numbing advance of technology. Modern economists are still putting together the pieces — two of the big contenders are our increased trade interdependency and… well, greed. Lopsided innovation means one part of the supply chain can move lightyears forward but be stuck in a traffic jam behind other necessary but slower to evolve technology (see: batteries) and wealth hoarding by a few large and dominant oligopolies corporations prevents an the kind of idealized allocation of resources that’s supposed to make the whole perfect free-market bit work 👀.3
These are of course not the only reasons we haven’t gained more free time than we had in 1940 and there have got to be about 5,000 books on that now so I’ll skip to the point: Keynes believed a good society wasn’t one where each person was making (and keeping) the absolute biggest amount of money and power, but where we had the most freedom — and where we used that freedom to build and create thriving, supportive and creative communities.
Keynes was (wildly!) overly optimistic about how technology would relieve our need to work for survival, but he was right on this: revolutions start at the kitchen table, in the minds of average people who scrape together the strength to pull out of the doom scroll.
Yes, this election is important — but it’s just a drop in the bucket of 40 years of bad policy where we’ve confused the pursuit of money with the pursuit of happiness. We cannot wait for our politicians to catch up and figure out that the big, slow, out-of-touch machine they’re slamming into everything ran out of gas back in 1989.
We have to start reimagining abundance and moving our lives towards it today.
ICYMI
https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/why-has-productivity-slowed-down