A game of "Would you rather?"

The more you work, the more you destroy the planet.

Responses from last week’s newsletter about work as a pie-eating contest made me wonder, if presented the choice, how much do people want to work? Do they want to constantly work 40 hours a week to produce more and more stuff? Or produce the same amount of stuff but work fewer hours?

In the last 25 years, since 1997, our GDP per capita has doubled, meaning we have twice as many things as we did before, working the same 40 hours a week. Generally we take the 3% economic productivity gain we make every year, to annually produce 3% more things and experiences.¹ The road not taken is we could have used our annual 3% productivity gain to give ourselves more time. If we had done that in 1997, we’d be producing the same amount every year, but be working 20 hours a week. I remember 1997! I was 25 years old and this came out. If we had only listened to Biggie:

I’m curious what you would choose, so here’s a reader poll of fun parlor game “Would You Rather?” (if you have deeper thoughts, write them in the comments). I want you to VOTE!

Would you rather our society consume:

1. The goods and services of 1972, but everyone works 10 hours a week²

2. The goods and services of 1997, but everyone works 20 hours a week.³

3. What we do in 2022, with everyone working 40 hours a week.

Here’s the secret: The number of hours we work is set by us, through custom and by law. In the 1800s, it was common for people in manufacturing to work nearly 100 hours per week: between 10- and 16-hour shifts over six-day workweeks. The 40 hour work week isn’t set in stone, Congress passed it in 1938. In 2038, we’ll still work 40 hours a week, unless we do something about it.

The Paperclip Maximizer

The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. It’s worth reading a summary or watching the 3 min video explainer below, but imagine a generalized artificial intelligence computer built to optimize making paper clips. Because it’s AI, this computer learns and improves by itself. At some point, it begins learning and improving faster than humans can teach it. At that point (the Singularity), the computer is beyond the reach of human control, optimizing the production of paper clips to infinity, while disregarding any other human value and destroying the planet.

People have used the Paperclip Maximizer to explain the modern economy: coal burning plants are optimization machines aimed at maximizing energy output without taking responsibility for the pollution, Facebook and social media companies are optimization machines aimed at capturing human attention without caring about the human cost, the news media are optimization machines aimed at maximizing clicks and outrage without regard to truth. But if you widen your gaze you realize: capitalism itself is the optimization machine. By producing and consuming 3% more and more “paper clips” every year, we are destroying ourselves and the planet we live on.

Productivity, consumption, and climate change

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: the more you work, the more you destroy the planet. The reason is twofold.

1. The more you work, the more you produce. Production is the reason for the environmental crises we face.⁴

2. The more you work, the more you consume. The dictionary definition for “consume” is to burn up, destroy.

The second isn’t necessarily true, there’s no logical connection between your income and your spending. In fact, decoupling them is the basic idea of the FIRE moment. But it’s an exceedingly rare person who doesn’t spend more money when they earn more money.

There's also a third reason: when you work 40 hours a week, even in social justice or nonprofit work, you’re participating in setting the norm that everyone else should work and consume at 40 hours a week.⁵

Here's a sneaky, but incredible thing to realize: every lifetime dollar you make you will eventually spend.⁶ So there are strong arguments to limit your lifetime working and earning: lagom, opportunity hoarding, more time and liberation. Not least of all: the more money you earn over your lifetime, the greater your carbon footprint and environmental impact. There's no ethical argument that allows you to destroy the earth more because you make more money. But yet somehow, people who believe in climate change have high carbon footprints than climate change deniers. The entire article is here, but this is the relevant quote:

… a series of research papers reveal that there is no significant difference between the ecological footprints of people who care about their impacts and people who don’t. One recent article, published in the journal Environment and Behaviour, finds that those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not.

Why? Because, environmental awareness tends to be higher among wealthy people. It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions. Those who see themselves as green consumers, the paper found, “mainly focus on behaviours that have relatively small benefits.”

I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays in the Caribbean, cancelling their environmental savings 100-fold. I’ve come to believe that the recycling licences their long-haul flights. It persuades people they’ve gone green, enabling them to overlook their greater impacts. . . .

[Research by Oxfam suggests that the world’s richest 1% (if your household has an income of £70,000 or more, this means you) produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%.

Like solyent green, the Capitalism Optimizing Machine is us. It’s easy to blame corporations for guzzling fossil fuels. But why do big corporations guzzle fossil fuels? To sell you products. Literally no other reason. If you would stop consuming, they⁷ would stop producing. The destruction of the natural world is an unintended consequence of our unexamined belief in our not-enoughness, our pathological need for more.⁸ And we are all implicated.

Optimizing for time

There’s a simple solution: we have to change the settings on the capitalism machine to optimize for time. Instead of creating more paper clips, we need to turn the dial so capitalism creates more time, more liberation.

“Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.” - Juliet Schor

This weekend, I read a Dallas News column: In the U.S., we work so much. Do we need to? In it, the writer asks whether Americans will ever confront the unexamined assumption that having more money will bring free time, life satisfaction, and happiness.⁹ Until we do, we're simply accelerating towards the cliff.

And who’s telling us that having money will bring more free time, life satisfaction, and happiness? Remember, as we explored last week, if we stop excessively spending and working more than necessary, we take away power from the rich. It’s only the rich that tell us that working longer hours will make us happy. Stop producing paper clips. We have enough paper clips for everyone. What we’re really missing is time and attention, the necessary ingredients to, as Jungian psychologist James Hollis writes, “stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life.”

Freedom is about choices: Freedom to choose less rather than more. It’s about choosing time for people and ideas and self-growth rather than for maintenance and guarding and possessing and cleaning. Simple living is about moving through life rather lightly, delighting in the plain and the subtle. It is about poetry and dance, song and art, music and grace. It is about optimism and humor, gratitude and appreciation. It is about embracing life with wide-open arms. It’s about living and giving with no strings attached. . . .

Simple living is as close as the land on which we stand. It is as far-reaching as the universe that makes us gasp. Simple living is a relaxed grasp on money, things, and even friends. Simplicity cherishes ideas and relationships. They are treasured more because simplicity doesn’t cling nor try to possess things or people or relationships. Simplicity frees us within, but it frees others, too. . . . Simple living is a statement of presence. The real me. This simplicity makes us welcome among the wealthy and the poor alike. . . . 

We will not be happy living selfishly in a small world. - Richard Rohr

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes anticipated that so we'd produce enough that everyone would work two-day weeks (yes, five-day weekends). Yes that’s still completely available to us now. And here’s the simple math: over the next 25 years, we can take our productivity gains and choose to move down to 20 hours a week, giving us more time to spend enjoying our families, friends, and leisure activities.¹⁰ We could sleep more (epidemic), have less stress, experience less illness. We’d be more fully present to our lives and our relationships. We’d slow down climate change.¹¹

In the end, this is not a game of “Would You Rather” but a game of “Would We Rather?” We, together, collectively have to choose. And not making a choice is a choice.

Postscript

I’ve got 7 students for my October-November Financial Freedom 1 cohort. I’d like to get to at least 10. Most of my readers of alumni so share with anyone you know who wants to change their relationship to money? Thank you!

1. 3% interest doubles every 25 years

2. Extending the logic and math of the question back another 25 years.

3. That might mean no Internet and no mobiles phones. No car-hailing or grocery buying services. No Amazon.com to have anything in the world shipped to your door in 2 days, no Google to answer any question you want. You might have to rely on paper maps and written instructions.

4. I’m not going to get into “decarbonizing the economy” but suffice to say, I don’t believe we’re going to decouple production from extraction at a rate fast enough to stop going over the cliff.

5. People who work less than 40 hours a week then becomes at a competitive disadvantage in the housing market. Same for families with one wage-earner competing against two-income households. We are setting the norms for others.

6. And your inheritors, but most likely you.

7. Corporations are simply groups of people producing stuff for other people too. In other words, you.

8. George Monbiot coined the term: “pathological consumption.” Pathological means diseased (dis-eased), excessive, markedly abnormal, or leading to death. How much is our consumption pathological?

9. Thanks to reader Trey Howse!

10. Interestingly, there is evidence that companies with 32 hour work weeks are as productive as ones with 40 hour work weeks. But what I’m saying is more radical than that: I’m not saying we should be more efficient, I’m saying we need to produce less.

11. And a litany of other environmental problems