Always Be Optimizing

Mechanical nursemaids, self-imposed insomnia, maintenance as art, and the quest for a life that's full but not overflowing—not in that order.

Photo by Jason Mitrione on Unsplash

Work, in fact, is interfering with my work,
and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.
I need another word.
— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

Human Limits in a Post-Human World

My eyes open and slowly regain focus in our not-as-dark-as-I’d-like bedroom. Feels like a decent night’s sleep. Surely, I think, it must be time to get up. I roll over to tap my watch charging on the nightstand, expecting to see a time mere minutes before my alarm is set to go off. Instead, the green numbers read something like 2:32 am or 3:41 am.

First, I’m a bit horrified. My body is sure that it’s time to get up and start the day. But the clock says I have two or three hours yet to go.

I contemplate what to do. One might expect that to be an easy decision: go back to sleep. But my brain quickly registers everything I could get done in these witching hours. Without much fuss, I come around to the idea that it’s best for me to just get up.

This process repeats itself at least a few times per month. It seems to be a pretty common experience for women over 40. I can even remember my own mother putting in hours of work as a seamstress before my brother and I woke up for school in the morning. While it might be less fashionable to broadcast one's lack of sleep today, we still rationalize voluntarily limiting sleep, "given the economic stakes," argues theorist Jonathan Crary in his book, 24/7.

The need for sleep is a reminder of human limits in an increasingly post-human world. Crary writes, “Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability.” Even if we’re not engaged with paid work during those early mornings or late nights, we’re producing data, engaging with media, or seeing to the work of life and home—often all three.

Always Be Optimizing

Today, sleep is often sold as yet another thing in our lives to optimize. We can track hours, quality, and restlessness. We can use proper ‘sleep hygiene’ to fine-tune our patterns of sleep at night to maximize our productivity during the day. But as bleak as making sleep yet another instrument of productivity is, many of us still believe that no amount of quality sleep beats just being awake longer.

The economic system we live and work in conditions us to see the world as an 'optimization problem or maximization problem,' the writer Ted Chiang told Ezra Klein in an interview. We certainly act like that’s the case—both individually and societally. We’ve learned that no challenge is insurmountable if we can understand and optimize the variables at play. Chiang further suggests that this optimization-oriented worldview is the root of our concerns about artificial intelligence and its doomsday potential.

Chiang argues that most of our fears of technology, especially artificial intelligence, are "best understood as fears of capitalism." New technologies superficially promise easier living, more convenient consumption, and more time for leisure. However, we know those “benefits” actually lead to increasing demands, precariousness, and surveillance. Work becomes more intense, and safety nets are further eroded. Chiang suggests that our fear is not of new technology itself but of how capital will exploit and control that technology to its advantage.

To keep up with our increasingly posthuman economy, we optimize our time and energy. We learn new productivity systems. We hack our psychology and physiology. Artificial intelligence seems to promise both another way to eke out a few more productive moments and, to Chiang's point, a fast track to further degradation of our personal economic safety and security.

Sustaining Meaningful Labor

Recently,

L. M. Sacasas

wrote a short reflection based on a viral quote in which a writer expressed their desire for AI to help with their chores so they could write rather than helping with writing so they could do more chores.¹ This sentiment and the viral response to it are eminently understandable. My own initial reaction to the quote was simply, "damn straight."

Sacasas's reflection, however, cautiously complicates that unsurprising response. "I wonder," he writes, "whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes ... might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner." He adds that our attention to the work of life might cultivate qualities that "sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example."

I agree with Sacasas here. However, we could easily distort his gentle suggestion into an 'optimization problem.' We might begin to ask how mundane chores could be leveraged to maximize attentiveness or optimize for patience in the same way we try to maximize our productivity through meditation or sleep.

We could further complicate the viral sentiment by revealing the hierarchy of types of work embedded in it. Dominant culture views creative, innovative, and disruptive labor as more valuable than care or maintenance labor. At a macroeconomic level, the evidence of this bias is clear. Who we revere, what jobs pay well, and what types of production we include in GDP all point to the superiority of what we call productive labor.

However, we can also see this same hierarchy in our personal economy. When we automate or outsource maintenance work so that we can get back to our "real work," we reinforce the idea that some work is more valuable than other work. Whether we leave maintenance work to a virtual assistant, a nanny, or a DoorDash driver, the result is the same. We put our work on a pedestal and pay someone else pennies to take out the trash. The system works as designed, and we have few other options.

Gender, of course, plays a key role here. Maintenance and care work is coded as feminine, while "real work" is coded as male. Sacasas's reflection reminded me of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose work centered maintenance—of the home, of the sewers, of the museum, etc.—as a form of art making itself. She created artworks that dared to place care and upkeep on the same level as creation and innovation.

Ukeles produced her most well-known projects at the height of what we might call white feminism's first "lean in" phase. While many other women found a sort of liberation in claiming their place in the productive labor force, Ukeles's liberatory expression took the form of denaturalizing the separation between productive labor and reproductive labor. Acknowledging her identities as an artist, woman, wife, and mother ("random order") and the tasks that tend to come along with the latter three, she writes, "Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art."

Maintenance is Social

Ukeles's work not only questioned the hierarchy between creative work and maintenance work, but it also reminded us of the give-and-take central to living together. Jonathan Crary observes that this give-and-take is antithetical to what he calls 24/7 capitalism. In 24/7 capitalism, "any social behaviors that have a rhythmic pattern of action and pause" are at odds with the prevailing forces of constant production and consumption. Making space for maintenance work—done by us or others—must be built on a "model of 'taking turns,' requiring alternating states of assertiveness and acquiescence."

This "social exchange involving sharing, reciprocity, or cooperation" can't be optimized or maximized. There's no wealth to be extracted from our collective give-and-take. No edge to exploit. No separation between "real work" and the work of life and community.

Lest we succumb to false nostalgia, we can further complicate the separation between productive and unproductive labor. Crary observes that 24/7 capitalism arrives in the guise of sociality. We use the same software; we buy the same products; we shop at the same stores; we work in the same non-rhythms. We shouldn’t confuse these similarities with sociality, though. 24/7 capitalism thrives on mechanical standardization, not on the heterogeneity of the social.

The counter-revolution of the 1980s and '90s privatized or financialized the "social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity," Crary writes. Things that were once held in common or supported as public goods are now available on the open market, resulting in "individuals being dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support or sharing."

In other words, while we can challenge the presumed hierarchy between creative work and maintenance work, between paid work and life work, we should also recognize the (a)historic expansion of our individual responsibilities over the last forty years. This includes, I should note, the expansion of our responsibilities when it comes to keeping up with the news, managing our retirement funds, tracking the prices and desirability of consumer goods, and even staying up to date on popular media. From within the milieu of life work, paid work often feels equally like a reward and a respite.

Choices of political economy certainly opened the door to the expansion of life work—as is often the case, blame Reagan. But technology plays a key role, too.

More labor-saving devices were invented, marketed, and adopted by households at the same time that the supply of domestic workers nose-dived. World War II, the shift to a consumer economy, the expansion of education, and—eventually—new civil liberties for historically marginalized workers all led to dramatically fewer taking jobs doing laundry, making meals, and raising children, so new appliances filled the gap, turning each home that possessed one into a housework factory. Looking to artificial intelligence for relief in these areas is, as I said, eminently understandable.

Mechanical Nursemaids

In his short story "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny," Ted Chiang, the speculative fiction writer I mentioned earlier, imagines a museum exhibit of a mechanical nursemaid. The story takes the form of a brief history. Reginald Dacey, the Automatic Nanny's fictional inventor, resolves to design the robot after deciding that human nannies were too temperamental and irrational to properly raise his son.

Dacey, the exhibit claims, dreamed of devising a rational childrearing system to rear a rational child for a world that was becoming evermore rational. He first tried to teach the system to a series of nannies, but “eventually he decided that the only nanny that could adhere to the procedures he outlined would be one he built himself.”

The steampunk Automatic Nanny was outfitted with “a spring-driven clockwork mechanism” that allowed it to hold, feed, and rock infants. To advertise his new product, Dacey touted the benefits of his invention over the risks of hiring a human woman. Initially, the Automatic Nanny was a success “with more than one hundred and fifty being sold within six months.” But when one of the Nannies, after having been tampered with, threw a child out of a window, sales dried up.

Dacey died having never resurrected the Automatic Nanny. But his son Lionel took up the project, vowing to raise his adopted son using the device. For two years, the Automatic Nanny raised the boy, Edmund. When it was time for a human caregiver, Dacey declared his son "feeble-minded" and sent him to an institution. There, it was discovered that Edmund could only thrive when being cared for by mechanical means.

Dacey, head in hands, took the boy back into his care and resolved to provide for Edmund's unique needs.

We might not be as arrogant or foolish as Dacey, but Chiang's story is an important reminder that technology doesn't make everything better. By highlighting the tragic consequences of choosing invention over maintenance and rationality over humanity, he reminds us that optimization is a tragically limited worldview. The draw of the always-be-optimizing way of life is the promise that we might escape the fate of our less exacting peers. But in so doing, we miss out on the rich texture of life and living together.

Chores aren't the problem. Pausing creative work to vacuum, care for a child, or sleep can be its own reward. But as long as we are swept up in 24/7 capitalism without a life vest or safety net, we'll continue to squeeze in a few more waking hours and put whatever the latest labor-saving device to work for us. We'll continue to find respite in our paid work rather than in activities that connect us to our homes, our families, and our communities.

The ‘always be optimizing’ view of life works counter to those goals. Self-imposed insomnia, artificial intelligence, and mechanical nursemaids won't allow us to catch up with the 24/7 crush. The solution is social, cultural, and political. It's revolutionary.

At the end of the day, I think we're all looking for a life that feels full without overflowing. We want to feel like there's enough time for what's important. Letting go of the drive to optimize might be the first step toward that life.

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Introducing Summer Seminar.

Summer Seminar x What Works is an 8-week guided learning and reflection experience that provides a structure for examining your relationship with rest.

From June 24 to August 23, we’ll read the two Monk & Robot novellas (about 45 minutes per week) and four short essays to help us reflect on the story. I’ll guide you with prompts for reflection and discussion—and I’ll offer my own reflections along the way. And yes, if you want more reading, I’ve got that too!

We’ll meet for four live group discussions on Zoom, and we’ll discuss the readings and your reflections asynchronously through written comments on each week’s assignments.

At summer’s end, you’ll have engaged with new perspectives on rest and comfort, explored your own assumptions, and experimented with a new story of your own creation.

1. I’m not linking to the post or citing its creator because a quick review of their X account makes it pretty clear that they’re uninterested in being forever associated with this statement. Nobody likes being reduced to a pithy statement lacking context that happens to go viral!