We built machines to save time. Work took every minute back.
Somewhere along the way, we confused making a living with making a life.
Nobody remembers voting for that.
Yet here we are.
Every productivity guru now wants you awake at 4:37 in the morning.
Apparently, if you are not journaling, meditating, lifting weights, taking an ice bath, answering emails, investing, learning Mandarin, meal prepping and launching a side hustle before sunrise, you are falling behind.
It is exhausting.
We turned life into a competition to see who can become the most efficient at never actually living it.
We work forty hours.
Then fifty.
Then sixty.
When that still is not enough to cover the cost of existing, we are told to start a side hustle.
Apparently, the cure for having too much work is a second job with better branding.
Soon our hobby is listening to podcasts about how to find time for hobbies.
Humanity built machines to wash our clothes and dishes.
We built computers that answer questions in seconds. We can summon dinner with a phone. We can cross a state in an afternoon. Artificial intelligence can finish in minutes work that would have taken days only a few years ago.
Every minute those inventions saved was apparently reassigned to Outlook.
Somehow, after two centuries of labor saving technology, ordinary people are still told there are not enough hours in the day.
Either we built civilization backward, or someone got a much better deal than the rest of us.
The better deal is not difficult to locate.
We can produce more with an hour of work than the people who came before us. Technology grows more capable. Corporate profits grow. Wealth piles higher.
It simply does not pile everywhere.
The numbers keep telling us how rich the country is.
Millions of checking accounts have filed a dissent.
People reach Thursday studying their bank balance like it contains evidence from an unsolved crime.
We created abundance.
Then we put most of it behind a velvet rope.
A few people now live like minor gods, surrounded by drivers, assistants, private aircraft and enough money to purchase the one thing everyone else keeps losing.
Time.
The rest of us get an app that reminds us to breathe.
We are producing more than ever.
Someone is enjoying it.
Most of us are just producing it.
Imagine explaining our lives to someone from two hundred years ago.
“We built machines that answer almost any question in seconds.”
“Wonderful. You must spend your days with your family.”
“No. Mostly meetings.”
“We built cars that cross states in hours.”
“You must travel everywhere.”
“No. Mostly commuting.”
“You carry nearly all human knowledge in your pocket.”
“You must be very wise.”
“No. Mostly notifications.”
They would think we were describing the losing side.
People have always worked hard.
Inequality did not begin with LinkedIn.
The obscene part is that after all this invention, abundance and automation, exhaustion is still sold as proof of character.
Rest is laziness.
Time with family is a scheduling failure.
A hobby is wasted potential until it has a storefront, three sponsorships and a weekly newsletter.
You cannot simply bake bread anymore. Someone will ask whether you have monetized it before the loaf cools.
Even joy has performance metrics.
Meanwhile, we are too tired to watch our kids’ games.
Too distracted to call our mother.
Too burned out to learn guitar.
Too guilty to use the vacation days we already earned.
Too busy chasing tomorrow to notice today quietly ended.
We keep sacrificing today’s memories to buy tomorrow’s security.
Tomorrow arrives.
We mortgage that one too.
The electric company remains stubbornly unimpressed by sunsets. Money matters enormously when you do not have enough.
The first raise can change your life. The second might too.
There comes a point, though, when more money stops buying freedom and starts charging you for your absence.
We have been taught to recognize wealth only when it has commas in it.
But time that still belongs to you is wealth. So is an unhurried breakfast with friends. So is hearing every ridiculous detail of your daughter’s day. So is laughing across the dinner table while both phones sit facedown.
None of that appears on a balance sheet.
It is still the part people miss when it is gone.
Most of a life is not made from weddings, vacations, graduations or the photographs we remember to post.
It is made from ordinary Tuesdays.
The coffee you reheated twice.
The ride home.
The ridiculous joke your spouse tells badly.
Your child calling from the other room.
The dog asleep across your feet.
Everyone still here, all at once.
Nobody realizes yet that this is the room they will someday give anything to enter again.
Those moments are not the space between the important parts.
They are the life.
Somewhere along the way, we confused making a living with making a life.
Making a living keeps the lights on.
Making a life is what the light is for.
If we have built a world where millions of people are too exhausted to enjoy the lives they work so hard to afford, the problem is not that they are lazy.
The problem is that we kept demanding more work and calling it a life.
We forgot what the point was.
EDW•
