Outsourced Connectivity

You know that feeling of juggling too much to the point that everything begins to unravel? I had one of those days this past weekend. I left a bag of books on the train in Boston, my luggage didn't arrive when I got to the airport, I almost lost my plane ticket, and I left a scarf on the plane. This sort of thing has happened before--just like an overloaded circuit, I had a meltdown.

Others have car wrecks, get sick or worse, but when I suffer from the deadly combination of too much information streaming in, too many demands, and too little sleep I forget things. It's a rather scary place to be and clearly part of the modern condition.

So, while in the midst of this predicament last week, I read an article about Tim Ferris’s new book The 4 Hour Week that made me think maybe I had found a way to address my situation. Ferris argues we can get our work life under control by drastically cutting down our availability to others. Ferris has been making waves in the business world by proposing the radical idea that we need to be "less connected." He doesn't read the newspaper, he has cancelled all his RSS feeds, and he even has outsourced his dating service.

He manages all this and keeps a lucrative business in operation by relying on others to deal with his e-mail traffic-- mostly by hiring highly-skilled, low-wage workers that you can find in places like India and Bangladesh. He isn’t actually interested in transforming how we think about technology; rather his is a model of globalizing the responses to technology so that people like him (lucrative executives) can enjoy more time for themselves. This model has picked up a following by the same class of people who dream of making massive amounts of money while young and then retiring early to a life of leisure. Ferris simply makes the fantasy better by showing how you can have it all right now.

For the progressive minded among us, Ferris’s model, with its blatant exploitation of others, is pretty hard to swallow. However, I would suggest that there is an uncomfortable resonance between Ferris’s model and that of the “simplicity movement” often touted by the spiritual left. Similar too Ferris, the simplicity movement speaks to a need to radically rethink our addiction to 24 hour accessibility which keeps us overly stimulated while depriving us of a rich spiritual life essential to developing our humanity. Yet, while this model is based on checking out of the high stress work world rather than hiring others to take care of our needs, the problem still remains that we can’t really think about “downsizing” our lives if we aren’t in a position of economic privilege in the first place. You can’t simplify if you are trying to make enough money to put your kids through school or if you have a chronic health care condition, or if you have to rely on food banks to get through the week.

This said, economic disparities don’t diminish the problem of our being overextended and overly available, they just require us to look at the issue differently. Without a real model of community, “being connected” becomes just another commodity in a capitalist system. The problem isn’t being connected; it’s the nature of the connection. We might ask instead: What is the quality of our connectedness and how wide is its range? Is our ability to be in touch in a moments notice actually shielding us from the deep connections that come from being in community with those different than ourselves?