This past weekend, I overheard a neighbor talking about getting her groceries delivered. “I’ve already put in my Costco and Target order.” As a way of getting food to the house, this is highly efficient. It might take half an hour to put the order together, but it's much less time than driving to the stores and picking everything up.
Later that day, my wife and I walked to a local spice shop. It was anything but efficient. Just getting there probably took 30-40 minutes, with a similar amount of time on the way back. The shop was really cool, with all kinds of spices and products locally and from around the world. We lingered, and it was also anything but fast, with the shop attendants scooping various spices from large jars and placing them in jars for customers. It was also a lovely experience– the weather was nice for the walk, the shop was interesting, there were nice little conversations to be had with strangers.
In this country, we tend to be rather obsessed with efficiency, with optimization, with getting the most done in the least amount of time. Perhaps there are times where this makes sense. Often though, this increased efficiency is actually linked to a redefinition of what it is we are trying to accomplish. If we defined acquiring spices as a task to be accomplished, we would have been exceedingly inefficient in getting it done. That’s the point though, simply acquiring something was not the task at hand. We were interested in many things: spending time together, enjoying the outdoors, discovering a new shop—and yes, acquiring spices.
We often become highly focused on what we need to accomplish; in the process, we inadvertently reduce ourselves to a to-do list. When we travel to other parts of the world and contrast our lifestyles, it is hard to ignore how little space we make for enjoying the day-to-day. Perhaps less gets done—but perhaps not. In many places, walking to the grocery is far more common than having groceries delivered. That might seem inefficient, but carrying groceries home is naturally part of daily life. There’s less need, then, to schedule a separate trip to the gym. In trying to get groceries more efficiently, we cut out the walk, which creates new problems—such as being sedentary—and solving these problems becomes another item on the to-do list. Perhaps carrying groceries home is less inefficient than it first appears.
It would be one thing if our frantic pursuit of efficiency left us happy, or if the time saved translated into other, truly fulfilling activities. But when we shave thirty minutes off a grocery run only to scroll through endless feeds on a phone, it’s hard to argue that our efficiency is actually enriching our lives. We may accomplish a given task more quickly, but unless that time is redirected into areas that enhance our lives, it is difficult to feel the change has made anything better.
This focus on efficiency has far-reaching implications for how we view our lives and spend our time. Activities we enjoy but that don’t accomplish a specific task are often labeled as luxuries—or worse, as a waste of time. We tend to feel accomplished and proud at the end of the day when we have checked off a long list of tasks. Enjoying life, however, has become a luxury we can afford only in small doses.
This quest for efficiency is closely linked to the desire for more. We believe that efficiency and progress are synonyms. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not. A more neutral synonym for both increasing efficiency and progress might be change, with a more open question as to whether that change enriches our lives or not. Labeling it as change invites us to consider both what is gained, but also what is lost, perhaps offering us a better framework for understanding whether any specific increase in efficiency should be embraced.
While we may gain a lot when we embrace efficiency, we may also lose more than we realize at first glance. Efficiency has no finish line, and the more we prize speed over depth, completion over connection, the more we pursue them. Before long, we forget what the extra time was supposed to be for. The losses happen quietly, as we stop cooking meals from scratch (take-out is faster), stop walking places (takes too long), stop talking to strangers (nothing to be gained anyway). We trade color for grayscale, fullness for convenience.
The fact that this essay feels relevant is itself a stunning statement about how far we’ve drifted off course. Walking to a shop, talking with a stranger, cooking a meal—these often feel like luxuries we have to intentionally embrace, instead of the basic texture of life. It’s a reminder of how deeply efficiency has shaped us, how strange it is that we have to justify living fully, as though taking our time requires explanation. We’ve normalized hurrying so completely that we now need to defend slowing down, to make a case for walking, tasting, and presence—as if these were luxuries rather than the point. We’ve optimized our days so thoroughly that doing things the slow, human way now feels almost radical, like an act of rebellion. Efficiency was supposed to serve us, but it feels like we are somehow living in the service of efficiency instead. Being efficient is no longer something that enables a good life, it has become the point itself.
Love,
Doc
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