In 1769, James Watts improved the steam engine and coal became a more cost-effective resource. This innovation enabled a wealth of industries in England to produce the same economic output using less resources. Fuel experts at the time claimed that coal usage would be reduced as a result.
But they were wrong.
William Stanley Jevons observed that the English economy started to use more coal during this period. Contrary to popular belief, improving coal efficiency led to consuming more coal. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, and it doesn’t apply to coal alone, but to any resource. If something gets cheaper or more abundant, people use more of it.
For example, the fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars enacted in 1975 in response to the Arab oil embargo didn’t reduce fossil fuel consumption — they increased it. Not only that, but it also led to more horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles travelled, and higher car ownership rates.
The debasement of time
In an essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren", economist John Maynard Keynes made an optimistic prediction. By the time his grandchildren had grown, they would work 15h per week. It was 1930 back then, so he referred to the 21st century.
Productivity has increased quite a bit since 1929, as shown in this graph:
Now we can do things that people in 1930 could only dream of. We can hop on a plane and land on the other side of the planet in 24h. We can travel thousands of miles with efficient and safe automobiles. We can communicate in real time with people on other countries. We have nuclear plants to produce cheap energy. Healthcare innovations have increased life expectancy from ~ 60 years in 1930 to ~ 73 in 2024. All in all, working 15h per week would be 100% feasible nowadays.
Except that it isn’t.
We could enjoy most of our time in doing things that bring us joy. But we waste it in producing things that people don’t really need. We find it annoying to wait for some hours for someone to text back, but our grandfathers were fine waiting for days or weeks to receive their post mail.
Time is more abundant now, so we take it for granted. The law of supply and demand whispers here. As the supply of free time has increased, now it’s cheaper. People don’t value it so much. Life, in fact, has accelerated. We feel the need to fill every moment of our free time with some kind of productive activity.
In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line. The time it took to assemble one car shrank from 12h to 93 min. The whole automobile industry could have agreed on halving working hours and still make more money than before. Employees could have enjoyed more time with their families or on their personal projects.
What do you do for a living?
There’s an expression I hate in Spanish — ganarse la vida. It literally means “earning one’s life”. We refer to work when we use it. Language itself subtly tells us that we need to work to be the owners of our own lives. As if life was something to be earned. English has a similar expression — to do something for a living. Life is given to us the moment we're born. There’s no need to earn it. But most people lose a little bit of their mental peace every day at the workplace. According to the survey Work in America from 2023:
Workplace stress also remains at a concerning level, with 77% of workers having reported experiencing work-related stress in the last month. Further, 57% indicated experiencing negative impacts because of work-related stress that are sometimes associated with workplace burnout.
Our understanding of time is wrong. When we say “I’d like to have more time”, we refer to “free time”. There’s no distinction between “free time” and “busy time”. There’s only “free time”, and “work”. We think of work as something separate from time, but work is time that we exchange for money and health. Time permeates every other aspect of our life. It’s not a calendar, a time table, or an agenda. It’s our life.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. Perhaps this seems simple and so obvious as to be unworthy of mention; but if we consider that the majority of men are, for the greatest part, employed in doing what they would rather not be doing, it is a valuable lesson.
— Henry David Thoreau
Life is, at the end of the day, our currency.
Practical advice
In a nutshell, make decisions that give you more free time, and don’t trade your mental health for money.
Brilliant piece to put everything in perspective. Thanks for sharing. 🫶🏻 If only we could have those 15 hour weeks! 🤞🏻 I work in the UK where my company requires 35 hour weeks and provided 2 hours of well-being time per week (so I work 33ish hours per week) and I appreciate that definitely! I try and only work my hours as well and take back time over (and since I manage a European team I let my team take back any overtime hours too). Life and the things outside of work are so important!