What is Enough?
The "Father of Macroeconomics" said we'd only be working fifteen hours a week by now.
Back in 2015, when I started Wander & Perch, I spent a lot of time sewing. In the beginning, I made all of the Wander Wet Bags™ myself. This meant that I would sometimes spend an entire day in front of my sewing machine, and I had a lot of time to think. I find that making things with my hands is very meditative. When I am doing a repetitive task, whether sewing or painting or cooking, I easily enter a state of flow, where my analytical “to-do list brain” turns off, and I am able to hear my own thoughts.
One day, as I sat feeding seam after seam to the presser foot, I started thinking about how people used to have to sew each stitch by hand. I thought about how it must have taken an entire day (or longer!) to make a single shirt or blanket. In a time before sewing machines were invented, families had to sew all of their own clothes or barter with a neighbor and trade services for clothes. I pictured myself hundreds of years ago, sitting in a log cabin with a long piece of cloth, weaving a sewing needle and thread in and out, all day long. How much time I would have had to just “be”. I probably would have been overwhelmed by the same tasks that “get in my way” today: “I still need to wash the laundry in the creek, hang it to dry on the line, get the fire started, chop the vegetables, cook dinner… Is that the baby crying!? Time to nurse him…”. I might have dreamed of a world where I didn’t have to spend my entire day sewing so that I could spend more time reading, playing cards with my family, or taking a walk through the wheat fields.
But here we are, in the 21st century, with machines to do our sewing, washing, cooking, and beyond, and I’m still flooded with work. As these hours-long tasks became automated, we didn’t choose to use the found time to play or relax, but instead the opposite: we use the hours to work more! To produce, consume, and wear more clothes, just faster and more extravagantly than before. We strive to be more productive to earn the ability to consume more. Which begs the question: What is “Enough”?
When will we be satisfied and decide to work less? When will we have the adequate attire, sufficient shelter, and necessary nutrition to simply rest? When we can wear a different outfit every day for a week, or for a month? When we have a home with a bedroom for each family member, or a house in each of our favorite vacation spots? When we have fresh fruits and vegetables for every meal, or when we can sample exotic cuisine from every corner of the globe? It seems we are caught in an endless cycle of relentless production to fulfill our incessant desires. What if we decided to want less? And once we had “enough”, we made sure our neighbors had “Enough”?
Since that day, I’ve slowly shifted my life to prioritize free time over more money. Making more intentional decisions about where I work and live, and what I covet and consume, so my family and I can have more time to enjoy today. I recently learned that, nearly one hundred years ago, at the start of the great depression, John Maynard Keynes (the “Father of Macroeconomics,” of which Keynesian economics is named) predicted that by now,we would be working just fifteen hours a week. His essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, written in 1930, is strikingly relevant today as we sit on the precipice of what Silicon Valley tech leaders proclaim will be the achievement of his “Keynesian utopia”: ending our human struggle for subsistence. So I ask, in an era where most of us still work 40-80 hours a week to survive, what will happen in the next five years as AI successfully automates the majority of our lives?
