The Meaning Drift

Why productivity doesn’t answer the direction question

We are living in the age of unlimited opportunity. Our access to abundance - of knowledge, information and technology - allows us to create our lives like no other time in history. Our modern society further validates this by glorifying independence, hustle culture and the popular idea that no achievement is impossible if you only work hard enough. And yet, on the individual level, we increasingly feel more anxious, lonely and sad. A rising number of people struggle to find meaning, doubt their self-worth or their life’s trajectory. A true paradox of modern time – our increased exposure to optionality makes us feel more lost. We try to combat this feeling with the urge to control – a false remedy that blindly steers us away from the deeper problem:

Our modern ideas about time & its management misunderstand the very notion of our finite, limited lives. The promise that we can regain power over our lives by doing more, mastering productivity & optimizing every second is false. Whilst fostered by the fact that it’s measurable and thus – visible, it pushes us to get more & more done in the hopes of finally feeling accomplished & enough. And yet we just feel more miserable. A giant rat race – we spin the wheel faster & faster, powered by our anxiety & fear that we are falling behind. Our constant comparison with the world enabled by hyper-information & the promise that nothing is impossible ensure that this race cannot be won by anyone. The more we strive for control over our time, the more loneliness and sadness we experience.

A strive for utopia.

A utopia that is counter-intuitive to the very notion of human happiness and meaning. A notion, whose recipe we already know to consist of one key ingredient – the quality and depth of our social relationships. People are social creatures – our physical health & emotional wellbeing are directly tied to how well we interact with each other. Yet, when we try to reign over our schedules, we become more and more distant. Your calendar does not like the fact that it can’t control the time of others, so it pushes you away. You replace connection with productivity & tie every hour’s worth to a ‘to do’ list. The more productive you are, the more you feel successful by all modern standards of society – your salary, career & status all tend to increase. The external validation game gets you hooked and you push yourself to achieve more. However, as you chase external rewards – your intrinsic meaning starts to slowly drift. The busier you get, the less time you have to reflect on whether your direction matches your inner drives and purpose. Your ability to tick off boxes earns you more & more boxes. And your efforts to optimize the very second of your time end up creating more noise, not more clarity. A vicious cycle: the better we manage our time, the more responsibility we are given, the less time we have to think about direction. In the attempt to master our time, it ends up mastering us.

This problem is further amplified by its invisibility. The meaning drift is silent and is only seen on a time scale that doesn’t fit our modern habits of speed and short-termism. Each productive week is defensible on its own – you see the products of your work and feel the sense of accomplishment. It genuinely feels good to produce and see your inputs turn to outputs. But over time, productivity does not answer the direction question. It’s one thing to see & understand your weekly calendar, but it’s completely different to be able to map towards what your time compounds and where your current path will bring you in five years. The speed with which our calendars & planners fill does not enable clarity. Especially when we consider that we don’t even see what we aren’t choosing - every yes is a thousand nos. But these nos are invisible - they don’t generate notifications and don’t send reminders. You see what you’re doing. You don’t see what you’re excluding. And before you know it – all the social validation & promotions you earn might drive you to a place you never desired. Often, by the time misalignment becomes visible, our optionality is already reduced – commitments & responsibilities are accumulated and therefore correction costs rise.

The real problem isn’t time management or our ability to execute. It’s the fact that we rarely stop to think about our trajectory and direction. Our relationship with time is transactional and we fail to understand its long-term complications in regard to our own dreams and aspirations. The popular culture around time management preaches various productivity techniques that can get an undisciplined person to finish a task or a project but fails to teach us how to specifically choose, follow & update a life direction that matches our unique values, desires and dreams. Productivity is visible and highly efficient in completing projects and to do lists. It justifies itself via its ability to be measured, analyzed and improved. On the contrary, trajectory is hard to measure – it depends on a variety of different factors, often immeasurable by the standards productivity has. Meeting a deadline or completing your to do list has direct feedback – you are doing well and it’s visible for everyone. So, you optimize for it – it comes naturally to optimize for the things you see & get rewarded for. What remains invisible is the vicious cycle discussed earlier – the more you optimize, the busier you are, the more you start to drift.

The modern world amplifies the above observations and adds several new layers of complexity. Whilst the core topic of direction and meaning is an eternal human problem from the days of Seneca, our present time poses challenges that we have never faced before. First – the unprecedented access to information & our tendency to constantly compare ourselves with the world make us question every choice & direction we are on. The world gives us unprecedented number of opportunities, yet we increasingly find it difficult to decide what to commit to. We enter a state of decision paralysis – the more options we get from the world & its technology – the more difficult it becomes to choose a path without regrets. Second – the development of AI & robotics mean that the productivity layer of optimization & efficiency will soon become commoditized. As execution & intelligence become cheap, the opportunity costs of a wrong trajectory become increasingly expensive. Direction and meaning become the bottleneck.

What is the solution to this key modern problem of humanity? This question’s complexity does not justify any single answer as a satisfactory end or conclusion. Our relationship with time is subjective and individual perceptions on meaning and direction do not conform with singularity on the matter. Furthermore, these concepts aren’t static – every new choice, experience or action interact together to create an infinite number of probabilities. Therefore, instead of a definite answer, we will once again return to the beginning – the tension between meaning, direction and our modern (mis)understanding of time. We optimize what we can measure. We drift from what we can’t. And by the time we notice, the cost of correction has already compounded. The question isn’t how to be more productive. It’s whether we’ll notice where we are headed before it’s too late to change course.