The Burned-Out Bulb of Bright Ideas

For the last week I have been enjoying catching up on sleep.  This has not been an entirely painless process; as my body has begun to mend itself after a year and a half of excessive work, I have at times physically felt the discomfort of the mending process.  (To use a metaphor, wait until the engine has cooled off before you try to pop the hood and refill the radiator.)  The recent experience of working like a dog has given me further insights and inspiration for the essays on precarity which I have yet to write.  However, I am not going to try to tackle that subject today, except for a few brief observations.  

First, there are a couple of interesting recent articles which describe how the rate of scientific discoveries in the industrial world has been slowing over the last several decades.  The title of one of these articles is "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" and the other article, "Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study", cites the first article which I have linked.  (It's interesting that both articles have been published on websites which have chosen to support themselves partially by renting space for ads for gadgets, toys, t-shirts, and gossip.  The academic profession seems to be falling on hard times these days ...)  The chief researcher cited in these articles has suggested that a key reason for the decline of truly groundbreaking research is the fact that quantity of published research has begun to be emphasized over quality of research.  This is because funding for research has become tied to the number of papers published by research institutions as well as the number of citations of published papers by other publishing peers.

Second, my past year and a half of crazy busy work has introduced me to design automation tools which I had not had a chance to use during the past several years of my career.  I found that while I had been involved in things unrelated to the production of technical work products, the tools for producing that technical work had undergone a rapid and drastic evolution.  The software products of Autodesk are a particular example of this evolution - and of the consolidation of multiple formerly separate design functions into one software package, available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.  By the way, I am not singing the praises of Autodesk!  I think they have created a near monopoly racket.  Their subscription model for providing software services is to me like having a family of leeches stuck to one's legs.  I will be using an Autodesk package to do my part of a multidisciplinary design project during the next several months.  Thankfully, the client is paying for the software during the project.  But I have noticed all the things the software can do - things which a human being used to need to know how to do.  This has led me to ponder the de-skilling which is now taking place among many knowledge workers as a result of the automation of much of their jobs by software.

Where will this de-skilling ultimately lead?  And what will be its ultimate impact?  The answer to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask.  I will consider only one prediction, from that group of prognosticators known as "techno-optimists."  That prediction is the same prediction that has been made by such folks over much of evolution of the Industrial Age, namely, that automation of knowledge work would lead to increased leisure for knowledge workers as the tasks that would normally take such workers a day to do were sped up so that they could be accomplished in only a few hours.  After the last year and a half, I must disagree with such a prediction.  Digital task automation may speed up tasks, but what actually results is not that knowledge workers get to go home early each day, but rather, that they get more work to do.  For digital automation tools are not seen by capitalists as a means to grant more leisure to their workers, but as a means of getting more work out of them.  The deployment of such tools is usually followed by the demand that workers produce more each day.  Meanwhile, the workers (at least those whose jobs are not replaced by the automated processes) become more and more stupid as time passes and an increasing portion of their skill sets and the theoretical knowledge they learned in college is taken over by the automated processes they serve.  Thus knowledge workers of the early 21st century may well be turning into the cubicle equivalent of de-skilled industrial factory workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In short, our society seems to be evolving into a configuration in which the ability to think deeply and outside the box is dwindling, and in which our work is to blame for this dwindling.  (To read further about this evolution, please see "The Woodcutter's Dull Ax.")  We see here a trap to be avoided by those people in search of true craft, people who truly want to learn to engage in beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful.  Learning to avoid that trap should be an interesting experience.

Precarity - My Own Experience

Last week's post presented a few definitions of precarity as a social and economic phenomenon.  Today I'd like to present a definition which overlaps the definitions previously given while expanding a bit on the personal side of this phenomenon.  From the standpoint of those who experience it, precarity is a state of being in which a person can't be sure that they will have enough money each month to make rent or mortgage payments, to go places by other means than walking or riding a bicycle, to keep the utilities connected, or to cover groceries for the entire month.  This can be due to not earning enough each month for the expenses listed above.  It can also be due to having a job which is in danger of disappearing even though for the present it does provide enough money to cover the bills.

Although I am an African-American and my family is African-American, I was not born into precarity, even though I was born into a time in which I and my family had to face an environment of racial hostility which was as bad as or perhaps even worse than the worst which the Trump years produced in this country.  My life from birth to adolescence was relatively secure because my dad was an officer in the military.  However, once I reached adolescence, my siblings and I found ourselves living in a broken home.  It is not my desire now to describe how this happened or who was at fault.  Indeed, at the time our home was breaking, I could not have provided such a description, as a lot of what was happening went right over my head.  All I knew at the end of it was that I was now living with one parent instead of two.  

I do not want to say anything that would be dishonoring to either of my parents.  However, for the purpose of this post, I must say that the parent with whom I ended up living chose to approach the new, constrained life we faced with a rather - shall we say, interesting - perspective.  Looking back, it seems to me that some of the elements of that perspective consisted of the notion that we should live as luxuriously as possible even if it required Divine miraculous intervention, combined with a belief system and theology heavily influenced by holy-roller Pentecostalism.  Mistakes and bad choices were therefore made, and we suffered consequences such as occasionally running out of food before the end of the month, having utilities turned off, having a car repossessed, and finding it hard to buy clothes for rapidly-growing children.  This parent was not the only source of my personal sufferings during that time.  I too was a complete and utter doofus.  To explain this further, I was an underachiever and quite lazy.  Partly this was due to the fact that I could not stand school, although I was able to do well enough when I applied myself.  But I preferred to spend my time either watching TV, listening to public radio, reading science fiction, or just prowling the neighborhood during the hours when my parent was working swing shift.  Therefore I was definitely not on the college prep track.  

During my freshman and sophomore years in high school, this sort of life was tolerable to me.  But as the Good Book says, "Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap."  After a while the reaping grew more and more painful.  I therefore started looking for work at a local swap meet, and later got a job at a local drive-in movie theater.  And I began to worry about my future beyond high school.  I knew that I had not prepared myself adequately for college, let alone for any kind of scholarship money.  So it seemed to me that my best chance for eating and having clothes to wear after high school lay in joining the military myself.  Therefore I enlisted.

Thankfully, during my tour of duty I was never in combat and never had to shoot at anyone.  But I quickly got tired of spending my time sleeping in the woods with people whom I could hardly stand, people who got drunk at every possible opportunity.  So I served only one tour and then got out.  My experiences of adolescence had combined with my military experience to produce in me something that had not previously existed, namely a strong desire to better myself and to leave completely behind a lifestyle of just barely getting by.  So I decided to put myself through college.  My heavy exposure to science fiction moved me to choose engineering as a major.  I knew I was in for a long and hard slog to reach my goal, but now I was determined to get there.

I entered my college years with a certain perspective on the world and on the place of educated people in the world.  Part of that perspective consisted of the expectation that corporations and their white-collar workers would continue the same occupational culture which my dad had experienced during his career.  He had served in the military as an officer until he had reached the point where he could retire, then had switched to white-collar managerial work as an employee of a large defense contractor.  Later he retired from that job also and entered into a well-endowed post-retirement life.  He was part of a corporate and occupational culture in which corporations lasted for decades and entered into what I call long-term care arrangements with their best and most loyal employees.  This meant that those who worked for these corporations for a long enough time could expect a guaranteed pension and the sort of stereotypical retirement send-off in which the boss would give the new retiree a gold watch.

The reality I experienced was rather different from this, to say the least.  When I first left the military and moved back to Southern California, I got a job at a defense plant in order to support myself while I was in school.  This was in the last years of the Cold War, and we thought the Cold War would last for decades more.  Therefore we thought our defense plant and others like it would continue in much the same way that public utility companies continued decade after decade.  But then the Berlin Wall fell, and for a time, geopolitical shifts destroyed the economic security of a number of defense contractors.  The plant I worked for was eventually converted to a shopping center.  Many, many people were laid off.

After I obtained my bachelors degree, I went to work for an engineering firm which had once done cutting-edge work for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA during the space race and the arms race.  However, both national and global political shifts had caused most of that work to dry up by the time I came on board.  The military work never completely dried up.  However, during my first few years at that firm, we worked on prisons (a fact of which I am now ashamed), as well as MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) design for a number of fast food joints (we're talking about places as small as a typical Taco Bell or McDonald's), gas stations, and amusement parks.  When I first joined that firm a new employee could enroll in the company pension program.  But within a few years, the pension program was replaced entirely by a 401k/ESOP program.  Only the old-timers got anything like a gold watch.  And not a few of those old-timers got the ax during one of several down-sizing periods.  There were times when the cubicle farm in which I worked looked to me like a town in Europe of the Middle Ages must have looked after the bubonic plague had swept through it.  Picture a town with lots of suddenly empty houses.

A major factor which began to affect my engineering discipline (and hence the stability of my career) was the beginning and later acceleration of the automation of many elements of the design process.  This took place as design software companies added functions in their software for the rapid performance of both drafting, layout, and computational tasks which had formerly required humans to do things by hand.  Some of those people I knew who got the ax had been among those who refused to learn the new technology.

My first experience of precarity had been due to personal foolishness on the part of myself and my relatives.  This led me to take the path of education as a means of escape.  I do not in the least regret taking that path.  However, in leaving one realm and entering another, I unwittingly entered a realm of accelerating precarity caused by accelerating large-scale economic and technological shifts outside of my control.  Those shifts were driven by the following factors:

• The destruction of restrictions on capital flows as a result of the deregulation that began under former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's.  This led to the following:
• An increasing attempt by corporations to try to grow profits by financial trickery, by mergers and acquisitions, and by cutting costs related to long-standing covenants with workers.
• An increasing volatility in the corporate landscape, with long-standing publicly-traded firms suddenly being threatened by either the consequences of ill-advised decisions, or the threat of hostile takeovers, or by the blowing and bursting of economic bubbles, or by the saturation of existing markets.
• The shrinkage of available resources for large-scale transformative megaprojects.  This shrinkage was driven by:
• The political and economic conservatism of Republican administrations in the United States from 1980 onward.  This conservatism tended to lead to cuts in any kind of programs (such as the space program) which had aspirational goals related to the betterment of humankind, although the Republicans always seemed to be able to find money for national defense and law enforcement.  (Unfortunately, however, due to recent Russian thuggishness, it appears that the generous U.S. outlays for defense have been necessary!)
• The beginning of the actual shrinkage of the resource base available for the global and national industrial economies.
• The beginning and later acceleration of changes wrought in work (both manufacturing and knowledge work) wrought by the introduction of automation, advances in telecommunication technology and artificial intelligence.

These factors include things that society can and should collectively decide to reverse, such as the choices and policies of rabid free-market late capitalism.  However, some of these factors should be regarded as inevitable factors that are leading to inexorable changes in the way we procure a living for ourselves and the landscape in which we earn that living.  Seeing such factors in this way should motivate each of us to make whatever personal and communal changes we need to make in order to survive the coming changes.  The technological changes are especially significant, since those who refuse to adjust themselves to prepare for these will wind up being steamrolled by the technological juggernaut.  Each of us may find that he or she needs to engage in a process of constant personal re-education and reinvention.

As for me, I have worked for a few engineering firms since that first firm I encountered after graduating from college.  Some of their offices have gone out of business due to the flat-footedness of managers who were not able to make the mental adjustment to rapidly changing markets and circumstances.  Some of these firms continue to do well to the present day, although their employees must pay certain costs in terms of extensive travel and sometimes long hours.  The challenge for employees is to find an occupational path which provides economic security without working a person to death or imposing unacceptable costs in other parts of the person's life such as his or her family life.  In a future post I will argue that the Great Resignation has provided a temporary boost to workers seeking to navigate such a path.

The Woodcutter's Dull Ax

If the ax is blunt and one doesn't sharpen the edge,

then he must use more strength;

but skill brings success.

- Ecclesiastes 10:10, World English Bible

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a paid audiobook subscription during the waning months of the COVID lockdowns.  For the price of my subscription I get one credit per month which I can apply toward a free download of an audiobook, and I also get audiobooks at reduced prices if I decide I want more than one new audiobook per month.  At first I used my audiobook credits to obtain downloads of fiction (particularly Chinese science fiction), but lately I have been sampling some nonfiction.  So it was that this past month I stumbled across a book called Rest by an author named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  

As advertised on the audiobook website, Pang's book invites us to "Sit back and relax and learn about why overworking and under resting can be harmful to yourself and your career."  And the website also informs us that "If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."  Such statements intrigued me precisely because for the last seven months, I have been working like a dog.  While there are elements of entrepreneurship which I have enjoyed, overwork has not been one of them.  So I gave Mr. Pang's book a listen or two to see what I could learn.  Below are some of my observations gleaned from my listening.

First, a few observations about Mr. Pang.  It seems that he is a member of that sector of the economies of the First World known as the "advice industry."  This "industry" includes many "content" producers whose advice is aimed at aspirational members of the middle and upper middle class.  Some of their offerings are well-researched and contain original and valuable insights, but other offerings have a familiar snake-oil smell to them.  (Think of Norman Vincent Peale for an early 20th-century example, or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for a couple of modern-day examples.  Note also the dissatisfaction which some people are now expressing toward the advice industry as they see its use as a tool of capitalism.)  

But let's get to Pang's book, shall we?  Rest is laid out thus: Pang's thesis statement is set forth in the introduction and the first two chapters.  Then the next six chapters describe the day-to-day setup of the  habits of rest in the lives of elite creatives, drawing on a number of historical examples.  The last four chapters describe the ancillary activities of recreation of these creatives, some of which can be fit into a day-to-day schedule, and some of which are larger activities which take creative people out of their daily routines for a while.

Pang's thesis statement is something that I think most reasonable people would agree with, namely, that appropriate rest is the necessary precondition for excellent work.  When we don't rest appropriately, our work suffers.  As he says, "I argue that we misunderstand the relationship between work and rest.  Work and rest are not polar opposites...Further, you cannot work well without resting well."  Pang rightly points out the contrast between the harried lives of most employees (especially "knowledge workers") and their employers versus the unhurried pace of the lives of the people who were responsible for some of the greatest discoveries and innovations of the modern industrial era.  

Focusing more closely on the harried lives of workers, Pang says, "As a result, we see work and rest as binaries.  Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities....When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it.  Americans work more and vacation less than almost any other nationality in the world..."  Finally, Pang's thesis statement contains the following words: "Rest is not something that the world gives us.  It's never been a gift...If you want rest, you have to take it."

A problem arises when we move from Pang's thesis statement to the chapters describing the day-to-day routines of history's greatest creatives.  The problem does not lie in the efficacy of the routines themselves.  In particular, the observation that the best creatives spend no more than four or five hours a day working deeply on their craft has been validated by the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others who studied the role of deliberate practice in producing expert performance.  Similarly, there is abundant evidence for the benefits of establishing morning routines, taking daily walks in order to clear one's head, taking naps during the workday in order to recharge, and getting enough sleep each night.  The research cited by Pang also validates the larger ancillary activities of recreation which he describes in the latter part of his book.  (I really, really like the idea of sabbaticals!  I've got to get me one of those things...)

The problem with incorporating these things into the daily lives of a significant number of workers is that they fly in the face of the culture of late capitalism which has been created and is being maintained by the world's richest people at the present time.  Therefore, these habits and practices are countercultural - and those who seek to practice these habits expose themselves to the possibility that they will suffer for trying to do such things.  Take doing only four or five hours of deep, focused work per day for instance.  I can truthfully tell you that I have never worked for an employer who would have agreed to such an arrangement.  From the time I obtained my bachelors degree until the time I quit my job to start a business, every employer I have ever worked for insisted on at least 40 hours a week, broken down into at least eight hours every day.  In those workplaces where the technical staff were unionized, we were allowed only two ten-minute breaks per day and one 30-minute break for lunch.  In the non-union places, 40 hours a week was not enough.  I remember one coworker of mine who worked 50 to 55 hours a week on a regular basis and who was kept alive by regular doctor's prescriptions.  I worked for another office whose local client base was shrinking due to mismanagement, and whose bosses offered me the chance to keep my job only if I was willing to travel extensively.

Take naps also.  For a long time employers frowned upon employees sleeping anywhere within sight of their managers.  This meant that if you needed a nap, you sometimes had to get into your car and drive a couple of blocks away from the office to sleep.  Admittedly there has been something of a shift in corporate culture over the last decade, in that a number of corporate offices now have designated "wellness rooms" where workers can retreat in order to decompress.  However, the first time I worked in a place that had a wellness room, I was told that the big boss in my office would allow employees to use the room as long as they didn't sleep in there.  This restriction applied even at lunch.  What a doofus!

In other words, I don't think Pang's book adequately accounts for the functional, structural factors which have driven rest from the lives of many American workers.  To be fair, the introduction of his book does mention the structural factors of "automation, globalization, the decline of unions, and a winner-take-all economy."  He also mentions the continuous increase in living expenses (especially housing expenses) which makes people hostages to longer hours and longer commutes.  But the tone of his book - especially of the introduction - implies that our failure to engage in the kind of deep rest he advocates is a result of our own ignorance or wrong attitudes, as exemplified in the following quote: "When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile, then it's easy to see rest as the negation of all those things...When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it."

Because the radical adoption of the habits of the creatives cited by Pang is such a threat to the present order (especially in the U.S.), I think Mr. Pang fudges a bit in his advice to people who want to apply these habits to their own lives.  When I say that he "fudges", I mean that he sometimes takes the radical embodiment of a radical idea and whittles it down to a size and shape that does not threaten the established order.  For instance, in his chapter on sabbaticals, the radical idea of taking extended time off is weakened by citing modern executives who take two weeks off per year and label these breaks as sabbaticals.  I had to laugh at this, as the first job I had after I served in the military as a young adult was an assembler at a defense plant.  The plant was a union shop and new employees got only two weeks off, plus one week of sick leave.  Big whoop-de-doo.  There are other examples of what I would consider fudging in Pang's book, but if you want to spot them, you'll have to read the book.  

A couple of last observations.  In his choice to cite those creatives who were gentlemen of means in Victorian England, Pang elides the fact that these people had time to set up their lives for maximal recreation and deep work precisely because they were the beneficiaries of a social and economic system which offloaded their dirty work onto the less fortunate members of the British caste system.  This point is made abundantly clear by the description of the lives of coal miners in George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier.  I am particularly struck by one of the Victorian sons of privilege whose life was mentioned in Pang's book: Sir John Lubbock.  It is amazing to me that Pang cites him as a beloved reformer who saw the benefit of rest for all of British society when one considers that his "Early Closing Bill" restricted the working hours of British youth under 18 to no more than 74 hours per week.  Consider that this still adds up to over ten hours a day, 7 days a week.  What a joke of a reform.

However, having made my objections, I still think that the central idea of Pang's book has a certain merit.  (I'd also like to mention that Pang seems to be trying to organize a movement for good in this country.)  In particular, I agree with the idea that there is a certain cluster of optimum life arrangements which must be sought by those who desire to do groundbreaking intellectual work.  And I'd like to suggest something which was not found in Rest: namely, the idea that America is suffering an innovation crisis (see this also) precisely because the overlords of modern American society have driven rest out of the lives of most workers by making those optimum arrangements for rest impossible.  I think that will have consequences rather soon.