Voluntarily Choosing To Do Things Inefficiently
In his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen (who I recently learned about through his appearance on the Dialectic podcast, one of my favorites in recent memory) defines “playing” as voluntarily doing something inefficiently. Nguyen notes that his definition is a spin on the philosopher Bernard Suits’s. In The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, Suits writes that to play is to engage in “activities in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen.” An example both Nguyen and Suits use is golf: the most efficient way to get a ball into a hole is to walk over and drop it in. Golfers voluntarily choose the much more inefficient method of getting it there with a club. (Incidentally, I keep a “Questions” note on my phone, and these definitions prompted an addition: What’s something you continue doing a certain way even though you know there are more efficient alternatives? I’d love to hear yours!). But what struck me about this idea of choosing to do things inefficiently is how far it extends beyond what I had previously thought of as “games” or “play.”
And so that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
One Thing You Must Not — And Cannot — Be Efficient With
Christoph Niemann is a German artist known for his New Yorker covers and his “Sunday Sketches” series, where he transforms everyday objects—a banana, a bagel, a thumb tack, measuring tape, a sink drain—into clever, unexpected illustrations. In every profile I’ve read, interview I’ve listened to, and video I’ve watched about Niemann and his work, it inevitably comes out that he is very prolific. But does it ever not come easily? one interviewer asked. Do you ever get stuck? Do you ever sleep on a piece of work and realize the next day that it’s no good? “All the time,” Niemann replied. “Sometimes I do something three times over and think, this is terrible…On the one hand, I wish I didn’t waste so much time, but on the other, I really try and savor the inefficiency. I can be efficient with my work day and technology and everything, but one thing you must not – and cannot – be efficient with is creating. Once you start thinking about what works faster or better, you start ruling out mistakes, and that’s really awful. So I really try to be as inefficient as possible.”
And Then?
The humanities professor and author Alan Jacobs has a great question. For this writer excited about how much of their writing they’ve been able to outsource to AI. For that one eager to outsource his research. For this woman who likes to watch movies at 2X speed. And for that one who loves how fast ChatGPT can summarize an entire book. “My question,” Jacobs writes, “about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing. But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you? The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either … I say: If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work. And if you’re trying to get through your leisure-time reading and watching and listening as quickly as you can, then you definitely do not understand the meaning of leisure and should do a thorough rethink.”
Wasting Time
In the title essay of her collection Madness, Rack, and Honey, the poet Mary Ruefle offers a stream of quotes in defense of inefficiency—a useful corrective to the guilt I know I experience when I’m seemingly wasting time. “John Ashbery,” Ruefle writes, “in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: ‘I waste a lot of time. That’s part of [the creative process]…The problem is you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted.” In other words, wasted time cannot be filled, or changed into another habit; it is a necessary void of fomentation…Many, many others have spoken about this. Tess Gallagher: ‘I sit in the motel room, a place of much passage and no record, and feel I have made an important assault on the Great Nothing.’ Gertrude Stein: ‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.’ Mary Oppen: ‘When Heidegger speaks of boredom he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.’” (File next to: During REST, The Brain Defaults To Creativity)
The Efficient Way Is The Wrong Way
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote Seinfeld for most of the show’s run on their own, without the typical room full of writers pitching ideas. Asked if their show might have lasted even more seasons if they’d hired “McKinsey or someone” to help them figure out a more efficient process, Seinfeld replied, “Who’s McKinsey?” “It’s a consulting firm,” the interviewer said. “Are they funny?” “No.” “Then I don’t need them,” Seinfeld said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.”
The Issue With Speed
Writing in the early 2000s about the technologies newly available to make his job faster and more efficient, the great film editor and sound designer Walter Murch talked about why he still prefers the tools he’s been using since the 70s. “The real issue with speed,” Murch writes in his book In The Blink Of An Eye, “is not just how fast you can go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.” And: “Ultimately…technology is hardly ever the final determining factor in questions of speed vs. creativity. One hundred eighty years ago, Balzac wrote eighty classic novels in twenty years, using just a quill pen. Who among our word-processing [AI-outsourcing, 2X-reading, no-time-wasting] artists today can even approach such a record?”