Disentangling Can from Should
Sometimes the list of tasks that we can automate or outsource does not overlap with the list of things that we’d be better off not doing ourselves. As computing advances allow us to automate more and more tasks and communications advances allow us to pay someone else to do more and more tasks, it is becoming increasingly important to determine which subset of necessary tasks we will save for ourselves.
When a company outsources its core competency or automates a mission critical business component that deserves the extra attention that having a human in the loop can add, the error is often not caught until it is to late to be undone. Skills have been lost and people have been let go or retrained. A much more subtle threat is posed to our personal lives by the same forces.
The societal consequences of personal outsourcing and automation can be grave, and in the same manner as business, the benefits are often visible at the outset, but the costs are hidden for years or decades. The rise of obesity in America has been linked to the rise of easy to prepare processed foods and swift, cheap meals in restaurants. The increase in productivity that has come from not having to cook for ourselves is significant, and may well be worth the price paid by our health, but I don’t think the exchange was ever intentional.
These exchanges of convenience and productivity for unknown costs need to be periodically reevaluated on a personal and societal level in order to optimize the balance between “can stop doing for myself” and “should stop doing for myself.” Serendipity plays a large role in this process. Usually the trade off is not noticed through intentional focus, but rather through something revealed by an unexpected event.
Last year, almost forty years after the introduction of Lawn Genie’s sprinkler timers, I switched back to watering my lawn by hand. My city was having a bit of a water shortage, and my clay soil causes most of the water from a quick run of the sprinklers to run off into the gutter. So I decided to spend thirty to forty minutes a few times a week spraying down my grass with a hose nozzle until the summer was over.
It turns out that I really enjoy watering my lawn. It is an extremely relaxing task for me to perform. I don’t know if that is normal or just my mild OCD, but I never would have known it if I had not set aside time and done it on a regular basis for other reasons. A year on and I have yet to plug the green box in the garage back in.
I haven’t gone completely anachronistic or anything. I still use the water that is delivered to my house by the city’s water pipes and a nifty spray nozzle that cost a few bucks at the hardware store. What I did do was seize the serendipitous opportunity to reevaluate my technological relationship with my lawn and recalibrate the trade between convenience and the benefits of doing the task myself in order to improve my overall well being.
So I would like to advocate a self awareness on our parts. As we give up tasks in order to take on new tasks, we should remain open to putting in the effort to partially or completely undo those changes somewhere down the road if we notice that they are costing us something that we would rather not pay. The little things add up in ways that we don’t expect and can change us beyond recognition.
