Keywords:: PermanentNote
"This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution."—Yuval Noah Harari
Productivity roughly means the ratio between the outputs and inputs in time. However, time is a very recent concept.
Before the industrial revolution, people didn't measure time like we do today. Life went on according to the sun and other cycles of nature. Even in the 18th century, there was no universal time. Each city had its own, unique time and most people were oblivious to the act of measuring something with time.
This means that we've been measuring our lives with time for roughly 200 years.
In other words, the concept of productivity accompanies our species for 0.001% (200/150,000) of its existence!
This makes you think.
Is it normal that the everyday life of almost all people revolves around time, when the concept of measuring something with time is a blink of an eye (in evolutionary terms)?
We use alarm clocks to wake up at a particular hour. Classes in school have a rigid time-based schedule. We have to go to work at a particular time and stay there for a defined period. Our wages depend on our efficiency and most of them are expressed by time (like the minimum wage is $12/h).
This means that our lives are mostly about exchanging time in order to produce (or prepare us to produce). That which is left is being spent on things we really want to do—things we do for fun.
(For most of our existence it was the opposite)
But why are we living like that? Why are we trading our precious time to produce more? Why are we not prioritizing doing fun things—things we really want to do?
To make more money? To get more things? To gain status? To avoid pain?
Is this all being driven by status because status gives us access to better mating? Does this all boil down to this fundamental nature of ours?
Or maybe we're in a viscous cycle being exploited by corporations that take advantage of our pre-industrial biology making us want to consume without end?
Or maybe we're sacrificing for a collective (intersubjective) good like going to Mars or becoming immortal?
Or maybe we just want to be wealthy because wealth makes life easier R: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
In other words, is modernization the price worth paying?
Relevant notes (PN: )/questions (Q:):
P: Collective imagination made us human (intersubjectivity): we are who we are because of stories we believe in collectively.
P: How to compel people to action (the Fogg Behavioral Model): Maybe the motivations of the FBM could be of help here?