A Right to Not Care About Efficiency (Sketch)

02 Aug, 2025

The dog whose needs inspired this post. My muse.

How much time of the life of a dog owner is wasted struggling with the sides of a plastic poop bag that stubbornly refuse to separate when you need them? You have to fumble with them in all sorts of ways until you finally find a breach in their stickiness where you can place your invading finger and pry open the bag. By this time, your dog, whom you've told to sit and wait lest he'll wander off too far throughout the whole process, is lying down and looking at you with pitiful eyes ("Could you please take care of this and let me go?," he seems to say).

As I pondered on these existential matters this very morning, I realized how I might be thinking about time and efficiency in a problematic way. Dealing with the cursed plastic contraption is still annoying, but is wanting efficiency in everything around us a good thing to desire?

After all, efficiency refers to solving a task with the lowest investment of resources (time, energy...) possible. It is hard to think of this being a wrong thing to desire. Yet, I would argue, it can be indeed a problematic thing to desire if we prioritize this over other important goods. Surely no one in their right mind would agree to someone else being hurt for us to be able to, say, get our groceries faster or a bit cheaper, questions of global and local inequality aside.

Cognitive Self-Determination

I believe there is a quality of the human mind that we often forget to consider and often sacrifice in the name of efficiency. Such sacrifice means damage to our very own personhood and yet we barely realize it until it's too late. For lack of a better term at the moment¹ I would call this cognitive self-determination².

This concept would refer to our very own ability to decide what we want to do in any given moment without hard or overwhelming external influences³

I have noticed through observation and introspection that when an individual is very interested in efficiency, they tend to create a certain mental state where an inner voice is constantly directing their attention to the principle of efficiency, silencing in the process (since our inner dialogue takes place through just one conscious channel) any other possible motivation. It can become a hard influence reshaping our lives and overriding any other potentially important motivations (such as, e.g., kindness, compassion, affection, leisure, or rest) that we happen to need for our wellbeing and that of those around us. Thus the motivation for efficiency, whose origins we should also examine, becomes dominant and likely leads to an individual behaving in harmful ways for others and themselves.

A further question we should consider is where is this drive to efficiency, and against our cognitive self-determination, coming from and for whom are we actually trying to be efficient? Sometimes, in small or long-term slow-burning bouts, it may arise from our own desire to lead a tidy life and improve it. It is also an important principle in industrial or managerial matters. I sense it is often internalized from this environment and imported into our inner life. After all, spending as much of our waking time at work as we do, it is to be expected that we import part of the ideas that configure our work life into our private and personal lives.

A Right to Be Imperfect?

But let's finish by pointing out how dangerous the obsession with efficiency can become. Not only as it alters our priorities making us arguably worse to others and ourselves, but also because there is something about personal freedom lost when we subordinate important aspects of our lives to an idea, a sort of mental slavery of which no yoga, mindfulness or wellness––the usual cures suggested to all sort of modern ailments––can save us.

After all, we could consider the intuition that our minds are not made for perfection, for constant efficiency. We weren't born for it. We, as much as the worlds we inhabit (mental, cultural, biological, social...) are imperfect, flawed. And that's perhaps simply because of the fact that we get tired, we are finite, our lives can only conceive and occasionally experience bouts of small-scale perfection. Striving for perfect efficiency runs counter to the idea that we get tired, that we experience desires that we don't fully understand, and thus are often unsure as to what or why we are doing things, especially in our personal or private lives. Imposing the obsession with efficiency in all domains, as it might seem we tend to do as a byproduct of our labor lives, could be considered simply to be against our human nature.

Our human nature is something we need to protect, since harming it harms us individually. Could we perhaps develop a collective duty to protect this aspect of humanity amongst ourselves with a right to inefficiency in our daily lives? Even more, a right to outright reject efficiency at all costs, and thus leave consumerism with one less selling point: we don't need better and bigger things; we just need to exist and get our things done at our own pace. Perhaps progress might also be achieved looking inwards, and not just outwards. To be discussed further on, as future readings will surely shed light on this.

Footnotes