Autopilot (13 page)

In seizure activity, part of the brain becomes what is called hypersynchronous. Hypersynchrony refers to the fact that there is too much synchronization among a group of neurons, or between brain regions. This appears in the EEG record as
ictal
spikes, which look like huge bursts of brain waves all rising and falling together. These can appear at first as low amplitude high frequency waves, which give way to very high amplitude low frequency waves.

What this means is that there is a brain area where all the neurons begin to fire together and do not stop. This hypersynchrony can spread to other brain regions and cause a person to lose consciousness or go into convulsions. In severe and intractable cases, such as when medication does not stop the seizures, neurosurgeons may remove the part of the brain because it will not stop going into hypersynchrony.

Epileptics often feel an “aura” preceding a seizure. This can take many forms from visual hallucinations to brief moments of pure lucidity. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy and described the moments just prior to a seizure as being full of joy and harmony: “For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life—such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

This type of experience is not uncommon among epileptics, and has in recent decades led scientists to try to predict seizures based on the EEG records from these patients. So far, these efforts have fallen short. This is likely due to the highly variable and nonlinear way in which ictal or seizure activity interacts with normal electrical brain activity, which is also noisy, variable, and nonlinear.

A rigid management strategy is a seizure. One of the chief goals of productivity strategies is to reduce the amount of variation in any company process. When variations in neurons are suppressed too much, and this reduction in variation becomes widespread through hypersynchrony, the result is a seizure that can quickly spread to the rest of the company, causing a global convulsion. The brain can no longer do anything. An organization that is having a seizure stops being creative, adaptive, or any kind of humane place to work.

For example, hiring new people is an important process in any company. A person using the Six Sigma approach would scrutinize this process—creating what's called a process map. Then she would identify wasteful parts of the process. This would involve using things called “Value Stream Mapping” and “Process Flow Tools” to try to identify “value-added” and “non-value-added” parts of the hiring process.

Our Sig Sigma utilizer would likely find that each hiring manager has his or her own way of hiring people—this is called variation, and according to Six Sigma, it's very bad. It leads to a lot of non-value added activities, like having long in-depth conversations with potential new employees. Then, she would develop a process that is as “lean” as possible—i.e., generating no waste.

For example, she might develop a set of standard interview questions that every hiring manager has to learn and use. Thus, the manager could not inject personal noise into the process. Any process that cannot be defined, analyzed, controlled, or improved would be tossed out. Next, she would develop a process for hiring people that is done exactly the same by everyone in the entire organization. In other words, she would make the hiring process something an automated system could do.

She will be able to measure this process and tell if it's working using the same Six Sigma tools used to design it: as though she were measuring a ruler with another ruler. There is no independently verifiable way to know what Six Sigma is doing. So why do companies insist on using it?

Reducing variation is harmful to many natural systems. The ecological consequences of the current vast reduction in global bio-diversity are devastating and we are likely in the midst of a mass extinction. On an individual level, variation in our heart rate is critical to our health. This is tightly connected to our brain's natural variation. Heart rate variability (HRV) is the variation over time in the period between consecutive heartbeats. The HRV reflects your heart's ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances by detecting unpredictable stimuli. Low HRV means that your risk for stroke or sudden death from cardiac arrest is elevated. Thus, the natural fluctuations in your heart rate are very much connected to your cardiac health. The general rule is that the more nonlinear your heart is, the better your autonomic nervous system is operating.

The purpose of science is to understand reality by trying to disprove theories using experiments. These management fads use concepts and methods that were developed originally within scientific fields, but because they are not used for a scientific end, these torturous methods are misunderstood and misapplied. Science has no goals. Science is a creative act with the same purpose as art: to liberate the human spirit.

9

“The ultimate measure of humanity's success as a species is its ability to increase the overall global output of goods and services by at least five percent per year. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue along these lines much longer, we're likely to destroy everything.”

—David Graeber

“The survival of humans and other species on planet Earth in my view can only be guaranteed via a timely transition towards a stationary state, a world economy without growth.”

—Peter Custers

This is a well-known phenomenon in psychology called “semantic satiation.” For example, say the word “buffalo” to yourself over and over again until you become uncertain about what it means. As you transiently forget what the word “buffalo” means, you might become a little bit scared and think “am I having a stroke?”

The same semantic satiation occurs with the phrase “economic growth.” Pick a random newspaper on any day and find the phrase “economic growth” recurring throughout. Economic growth is supposed to mean that we increase the amount of goods and services in the world every year.

Economists use several different metrics to measure this increase of goods and services—the most common of course being the gross domestic product (GDP) which somehow measures how many “goods and services” are created in a particular society or in all the societies on earth combined (called world GDP).
⁶

Without economic growth, we are told, billions of people living in extreme poverty would never be able to climb out of poverty, or they would become even poorer. This is despite the fact that by most measures, the number of poor in the world is increasing. To lift them out of poverty, and to avert a global climate catastrophe, we actually need to shrink our economies. But how do we achieve this?

Most of the jobs politicians are perpetually promising to create are downright awful. For people without formal education, the countless jobs that each party claims to be able to produce are demeaning and tedious service-sector jobs at places like Amazon fulfillment centers that don't pay enough for rent, healthcare, food, daycare, phone bills, or a car. For people with more formal education there are mindless corporate jobs where the only skill required is to master the asinine business jargon in a way that makes it seem like you are doing something meaningful.

To the ancient Greeks, anyone who had to work to make a living was considered a slave. In modern society almost everyone has to work to make a living because we all owe someone money, or expect a bill to come due in the near future.

Economic growth disproportionately benefits the people who do not need to work—i.e., the people from whom we are ostensibly borrowing our student loans, our mortgages, our car loans, and our credit cards. This group of people includes corporations, politicians who serve the interests of the corporations, and, of course, people who work in international finance.

Consider the financial crisis of 2008. Why were the banks able to cause such widespread misery? They created money out of thin air, loaned it to hapless borrowers, then, when people stopped paying back the fake money, the banks forced the government to pay them the money that they had made up in the first place. They chopped up the debt into microscopic pieces, randomly put some of the pieces back together, and traded all this debt among themselves, creating a gigantic impenetrable web of derivatives and credit default swaps. Why didn't anyone see the crisis coming? Because people stopped believing in failure. The more we believe in the impossibility of failure, the more likely failure becomes. This is in fact Arthur C. Clarke's first law of prediction: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

I wish to make a radical suggestion: because our social system is predicated on the majority of people believing in the fundamental necessity of work, a sharp increase in idleness, absenteeism, laziness, and non-industriousness might be the most effective way to bring about positive social and political change.

Conjuring Bartleby, a collective “we'd prefer not to” would send much more fear into the hearts of the bankers and CEOs than any organized political movement. Naturally, people need to be able to afford decent housing, food, and health care for themselves and their families. However, the vast majority of jobs in the world simply exist to make a certain group of people more money, thus increasing their relative privilege.

Not only are most people unable to meaningfully choose the nature and intensity of their employment, but once they are employed, they are told by the time management industry that there are correct and incorrect ways to deploy their skills. Then they are told they should be happy about the fact that they have a job at all.

“Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.”

—Benoît Mandelbrot

Recently,
New York Times
columnist Ross Douthat wrote an essay entitled “A World Without Work.” “Imagine,” he wrote, “as 19th-century utopians often did, a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work—a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether. If such a utopia were possible, one might expect that it would be achieved first among the upper class, and then gradually spread down the social ladder.”

First of all, Douthat assumes such a utopia is not possible. This is a prime example of what Graeme Webb, a scholar at Simon Fraser University, called the collapse of the social imagination. In a recent paper on how the Occupy movement has reintroduced radicalism to the mainstream, Webb describes the fact that the discourse of individualism, market fundamentalism, and consumerism has come to so dominate our culture that we simply cannot conceive that society can be organized any differently. In our atomized and desperate struggle for individual material well-being, we perceive “that the society we have today is the only possible society; we have lost our imaginations.” Webb points out that we have willingly abandoned the idea of utopia, and utopian thinking is denigrated and dismissed.

Secondly, Douthat suggests idle bliss would come to the wealthy ahead of everyone else. Presumably this is because the wealthy are the only ones who have any meaningful choice in the matter. In their magnanimity, according to Douthat, the wealthy would work less and then spread the gift of idleness “down the social ladder.” Douthat's trickle-down theory of idleness is presented without irony. His assumption is that the rich have to give the rest of us permission to work less. Revealingly, Douthat seems to be implying that if only wealthy people had the means not to work (as the wealthy do) they wouldn't choose to work. Except, he points out, the wealthy work more than poor people. Nina Easton, a strident apologist for the wealthy at
Fortune
, asked in 2012, “what if I told you that there was a group of hard-driving workaholics who … bring a level of talent and skill to their jobs that attracts premium pay in the global economy?” According to Douthat, if utopia were possible
,
these “hard-driving workaholics” would work fewer and fewer hours, and eventually allow their minions—us—to work fewer hours too. Because, you know, rich people are so generous.

The 19th century utopian theorists to whom Douthat refers—Marx, Rousseau, and Fourier—actually thought that the newly-awakened revolutionary working class would usher in utopia and organize society in such a way that work would be beneficial, a source of joy as well as sustenance for all.

Douthat describes the fact that poor people are leaving the job market and surviving without a steady job as “post-employment.” The problem, as anthropologist Sarah Kendzior has pointed out, is that “The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal. Ridden with debt from the minute they graduate college, they compete for the privilege of working without pay.”

If there is one thing worse than working for pay, it's working without pay. The trick is to create a true post-work society, one that truly liberates human energies. Though the way forward is not immediately apparent, I have faith that the answers are waiting in billions of idle minds, and that the brightest among us have yet to realize that what they really need is a break, a chance to rest, a golden opportunity to do nothing at all.

“Scholars are ashamed of
otium
. But there is something noble about leisure and idleness. If idleness really is the beginning of all vice, then it is at any rate in the closest proximity to all virtue; the idle man is always a better man than the active. But when I speak of leisure and idleness, you do not think I am alluding to you, do you, you sluggards?”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

This book would not have been possible without my amazing wife Sonja Schmer-Galunder. She is my intellectual sparring partner and a great source of ideas. Many of the more ridiculous ideas I had for this book were thankfully shot down by her uncanny logic and insight. She also generously allowed me to work on this book at night and on the weekends while we had two small boys in diapers. She is as much a part of this book as I am.

I also have to thank my own mother Caryl Briscoe. There is not a more selfless person in the universe. My mother always gave me a strong (perhaps delusional) belief in myself, and for this I am very grateful. If this book is audacious, it is in no small part because she helped me believe that I can be daring. This book is also dedicated to her. I watched her dutifully work at a company that used many of the management techniques I attack in this book. My mother coped with the inane and arbitrary continuous performance improvement decrees from the MBA mafia at her job and it made me angry. I like to think of this book partly as my mom's revenge for her years of putting up with the mindless corporate drones at her job.

Thanks to my three beautiful children Marie, Niklas, and Jonas. You are the biggest sources of inspiration and motivation.

Thanks to my sister Sarah Smart for always being there.

I'd like to thank my step-dad and lawyer Frank Briscoe for making me a cyclist, encouraging me to take risks, and for being an immovable concrete base of support during my life. And for letting me try to read Kierkegaard in 8th grade.

I want to thank my workaholic father John Smart and step-mother Holly Smart for your unconditional love and support, for instilling in me an insatiable wanderlust, and for giving me a fascination with gigantic machinery.

I need to thank my screenwriting partner and BFF Arya Senboutaraj for being a great inspiration, for my portrait, and for always encouraging me to go for it. We'll get there.

I owe an enormous philosophical, political, emotional, and practical debt to Anthony Troy Fiscella, without whom this book would have been little more than a few loosely connected thoughts. Well, it still might be just a few loosely connected thoughts, but because of Troy's honesty and critical mind there are hundreds of research papers behind these thoughts. I have to thank my lab mates Trent Reusser and Stephen Whitlow for making our work environment tolerable and even a lot of fun, and for teaching me how to program.

I'd like to thank Leyla Kader Dahm for providing guidance for a naïve writer. I owe Sarah Douglas, cultural editor at the New York
Observer
, for introducing me to Rilke in high school and for being a friend since we were twelve.

My path to the science of idleness has been a long and circuitous one and I want to thank the scientists who have personally influenced me over the years: Jonathan Friedman, David Graeber, Steven Sampson, Sverker Sikstr
ö
m, Petter Kallioinen, Kristoffer Åberg, Jonas Olofsson, Scott Makeig, Rey Ramirez, Liina Pylkkänen, Hakwan Lau, Stanislas Dehaene, and Santosh Mathan.

Finally, the most important thanks for making this book a reality goes to John Oakes at OR Books. John responded to my initial query email summarizing the idea for this book with: “wow.” He has been immensely encouraging throughout the process of writing and a huge source of inspiration. I am so honored and proud to be associated with such a great publisher.