Efficiency

Lose weight in only 30 days!

Learn Japanese in only a week!

No longer do we have to carry heavy books when we can download them by the thousands! No more wasting an hour mashing potatoes for super, buy instant mashed potatoes! Just add water!


We don't have any time to spare and shouldn't have to make time. We should enjoy ourselves immediately, because we could die tomorrow. Make more money! Watch more movies!

Increasingly alone among billions of our fellow human beings, we strive for the gain resulting from efficiency rather what we're awarded for effort, striving  for entertainment rather than companionship. Are we less patient, now that everything should be a click away and isn't my whole night ruined if the internet is slow today? Are we becoming lazier and lonlier, the more the world has to offer to us, the more we have to offer the world?

What is the price of efficiency?

We're problem-solvers. If it can be thought up, it will be attempted, then upgraded. And again, version5.33435435.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that we're never really focusing on the right problems.