There’s a lot of focus on making ourselves as efficient as possible: cramming our days with conspicuous activities, multitasking, and listening to podcasts at double speed. This might make sense during the good times, but we come unstuck when everything gets a bit squirrely – during a pandemic or a recession, for instance – then we suddenly realise our regime isn’t really serving us.
As Andrew J. Scott and Lynda Gratton explain in The New Long Life, if we’re too focused and efficient – what they refer to as tunnelling – we can end up in a place of scarcity. With few options to choose from, we make bad decisions. Furthermore, those decisions made with a scarcity mindset are both limiting and often short-term. For the basis of this idea, see Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. What we need instead is slack, a pool of personal resources that gives us more options. This could be savings, protected blocks of time for experimentation, or regularly learning new skills. The point is not to plan for exactly when we’ll need to deploy these resources, but to have them in reserve if they’re needed. And they will be at some point.
In Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb rails against (amongst many other things) our obsession with optimisation. Yes, being super-efficient is effective under very specific circumstances, but it doesn’t help us survive in tougher times. As we’ve seen over the last few years, companies are imploding partly because they don’t have the capacity to try anything new. Already stretched to the limit, they can’t adapt without taking expensive risks. They’ve been tunnelling for years and lack other options. This applies to individuals, too.
As Taleb illustrates, Mother Nature likes redundancies (or slack) and the human body keeps going thanks to spare parts. We are generally blessed with two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, and can still function when one of them refuses to cooperate. Talebs memorable example is sharing kidneys and renting out our eyes at night when we don’t need to look at anything: Airbnb for our organs. Efficient and lucrative, yes; sensible, no. After all, the “sharing” economy is motivated by a relentless pursuit of wealth extraction, rather than a genuine desire to pool our resources.
I’ve often coached people who’ve been encouraged to pursue the highest-paying job and use it to get the biggest possible mortgage. In other words, to optimise their lives. But well-paid jobs are often all-consuming, leaving little room to keep other options open. You’re urged to optimise yourself for that specific role. While that’s great for your employer, you’re stuck in a tunnel. When the company goes bust, you’re faced with overwhelming pressure to replace that big salary ASAP so you can maintain those beefy mortgage repayments. In that place of scarcity, it’s hard to make good decisions.
When I worked in the tech world, I met colleagues who earned impressive six-figure salaries, but were made redundant every couple of years. Trapped in the scarcity mindset, they lacked the headspace to explore other options in the meantime. The game becamer tougher, too. Every round of redundancies meant more folks chasing fewer jobs. Employers, of course, are keenly aware of the economics: an oversupply of workers pushes down wages. Why hire someone on a big salary when you can get two eager juniors for the same money? Sometimes, doing less is better both for our sanity and our bank balance in the longer term.
We don’t know exactly what the future holds (thank goodness), but by being a bit more slack and keeping hold of our kidneys, we can prepare ourselves for it.