09/04/2026
We need to stop filling every empty space in our lives.
We’ve become so obsessed with efficiency that whenever we find a way to save time, we immediately find another way to spend it.
A letter once required writing, posting, and waiting days for a response. Email reduced that process to minutes. In theory, we should have gained enormous amounts of time. Instead, because communication became easier and faster, the amount of communication exploded. We didn’t just send the same number of messages more quickly. We started sending more.
The same thing happened with household chores. Washing machines dramatically reduced the labor involved in doing laundry. But we didn’t necessarily turn all those saved hours into leisure. We washed clothes more frequently, owned more of them, raised our standards, and filled the remaining time with other responsibilities.
There’s an economic idea that helps explain this: Jevons paradox.
In the 1800s, economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange. As technology made coal more efficient to use, people assumed coal consumption would fall. Instead, it increased. Greater efficiency made coal cheaper and easier to use, which created even more demand for it.
I think we’ve done something similar with time.
We invented technology to make life more efficient, but instead of protecting the time it gave back to us, we increased the quantity of life’s demands.
Faster communication became more communication. Faster travel became more travel. Faster work became more work. Convenience created capacity, and we filled the capacity.
Maybe that’s why we have more time-saving technology than any generation before us and still walk around saying, “I don’t have enough time.”
The problem isn’t that we haven’t saved time.
It’s that we’ve forgotten how to leave saved time empty.
But maybe there’s another reason we keep filling the time we save: we’ve become uncomfortable with time that produces nothing.
We call an afternoon spent working “productive,” but an afternoon sitting with a book “wasted.” Why is that, when time doesn’t care whether we’re producing or simply living?
Somewhere along the way, we decided that time has to justify itself. It needs to make money, complete a chore, respond to a message, improve our body, expand our knowledge, or move us closer to a goal.
Even rest has become productive. We meditate to perform better. We walk to hit our steps. We read to improve ourselves. We take vacations to “recharge” so we can come back and work harder.
We struggle to do something simply because it feels good to be alive.
Capitalism has convinced many of us that time saved should be spent doing more, instead of living more.
And perhaps that’s the real reason all our time-saving inventions haven’t made us feel like we have more time.
Every time technology creates an empty space, we rush to give that space another job.
Maybe we don’t need another way to save time.
Maybe we need to stop believing that time is wasted just because nothing was accomplished with it.
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