Dualities of Efficiency

I outline a thought that struck me recently; in the duality of production and consumption, efficient production does not necessarily cause efficient consumption. What do I mean by this? As humans, we are to work efficiently to produce objects efficiently, and then others consume them. We must come to realize this; what we consume turns us either more efficient, or less efficient, with respect to our ability to expend our energies towards the direction of our goals. Hence, our consumption governs what we have the energy to ourselves produce. In other words… we wish to create efficient producers, who at a later moment act as consumers, and they may consume things which lower their efficiency because of what was produced efficiently. If the consumers are also expected productive members of the social world, why feed them efficiency-reducing objects? It is counter to the idea of productivity itself. Thus, efficiently creating consumables which decrease the productivity of consumers who are also expected producers is a system whose self-victory relies on self-defeat; nonsensical way of doing things.

An iPhone must be produced to such scale that the entire process of its creation must become efficient, otherwise how could it sell millions of devices in a short span-of-time? Over time, the product becomes more consumable because it is advanced technology, an object-of-desire, and because of its improved production efficiency. Although the production of an iPhone is an efficient process, our consumption of the iPhone, generally speaking, causes us to become LESS efficient. Generally speaking, the most efficiently produced objects reduce our efficiency. In-fact, we must spend time UNDOING the habits, tendencies, and lack of efficiency they instill.

If we believe we’re going come out of this phase net-positive over our lifetime, we need rethinking. What software is available on these devices is efficiently created to work at scale, clearly scaling a less-efficient nature across our communities, dragging us through our path as opposed to helping us glide through it. This all ties into the idea that, at the end of our life, which can strike at any moment, if we know we haven’t accomplished our goals because of stupid wastes of time, because of things that were efficiently created to block us from fully exerting our energies, then we’re going to regret this existence.

I am signaling a warning that this is something we need to be aware of, daily. Look around you; everything is meant to be sold to you for consumption. How much of it is worth your energy?

Go to a grocery store, see what is available. Numerous aisles contain objects no human should ever eat. Let us always put an asterisk here; I am not commenting on what you should be eating… This is a simple reality. We know that sugar itself, the way it is refined into concentrated, crystal form, would never appear naturally. I’m not taking the “natural is best” argument, but when we produce something in concentration, like refined sugar, by extracting it from a source, condensing it, and giving it to humans as nutrition to their body, knowing its harms, we need to ask the big question — What the fuck are we aiming at for ourselves? The efficient process of creating refined sugar is useful because it helps with ease of importing and exporting, and can be used in recipes. BUT… it makes humans more inefficient, and is one of many other disappointing and incurably created consumption habits and itches that leads to living a life we will ultimately regret. The more of the bullshit goodies we pack into our life, the more it’s going to drag us down and away from what we seek, which is peace of mind.

So this is the duality of efficiency; things that are created and produced efficiently, if consumed, may not also provide efficiency of human possibility and potential. It may actually thwart it. One must wonder, when one thinks of the ideal of efficiency from the standpoint of production — if the products produced do not lead to efficiency of social life, and of human life, then we’re merely putting up barriers in the line of human sight, and preventing them from achieving their highest capabilities. Most corporations don’t believe in human productivity, they believe in material productivity, but the latter itself is only a product of the powers illumined by the former; their belief is misplaced. We are wasting human potential by the millions.

We wonder why we need diets… They’re a complete waste of time. We first produce horrendous goods to feed ourselves, and we call it “freedom”; “We should be freely capable to produce what we like!”. We freely and efficiently produce candy, alcohol, chips, and so on. We then say, “If a human wants to be fit, they should ignore those temptations, because they have freedom of self-control.” While that is true, only to a degree. There is the fact that companies hire behavioral psychologists who study optimal methods of convincing humans to consume products, conversely, we end up needing psychologists to work through some of our built-up consumption habits. Why not convince us to purchase only those things that improve us… Like anything else, this system can be used towards our evolution, or against it. When it comes to making money, most of us don’t distinguish between the two. We look at the job of money-making as viable a candidate as any for sacrificing our energies, while our concern for social impact is non-existent. It’s up to you the consumer to decide and make efforts to resist the lures of temptation.

Recognize, walking around in this world, in the streets and malls, there is always a logo, brightly illuminated, to say “this is what we’re selling you”. We’re a beef restaurant, we’re a Korean restaurant. You want, we got, and we make you want again. Walk into a mall; everything is a store. Even the mall is a store; it’s selling you to the stores within it. It’s all meant to lure you in. How many times have you walked by a store, not needing anything, looking in, went in, and bought something? Or seeing an object-of-desire, going home and thinking about it, and a week later, going out to buy it? Or just having your mind disturbed by thoughts of purchasing things you don’t need? Even time spent considering… “should I, should I not?”, is itself a complete waste. “I just had a cup of coffee but should I go into this café and get a thing?” It’s pure nonsense. As humans, we would be more effectively utilized if we didn’t go down these roads. I urge you to keep this idea in mind as you live your life, that in this world, you are constantly being sold something.

This is not an anti-capitalist message, because I believe that capitalism can also create things that are absolutely productive to culture, and efficiently-so. It’s not the actual system that’s the issue, it’s the tendency WE have to create things efficiently that are not efficient for us to consume. We’ve also destroyed the concept and techniques of self-control because it’s just some “old religious maxim” that isn’t feasible today, and we mistakenly liken it to suppression which is a frail argument revealing of a frail mind. The only tool that remains to defend ourselves is our own will. But we don’t know we have a will, nor were we ever trained to use one.

Human action and emotion have the capability of causing growth or destruction of humanity, yet this fact cannot allow us to be anti-human, because we know the ultimate power of human goodness. Similarly, a corporation has the capability of causing immense growth or destruction of humanity, and this fact cannot allow us to be anti-corporations either. They are key to fruitful culture if they can only direct their attention to human evolution as opposed to de-evolution.

For all the efficiency that a corporation admits, what it produces to the world outside of that corporation is the opposite; it induces uncontrol. The production is very controlled, but it creates humans who have less control, less efficiency, their movements become unnatural and minds scatter-brained. We’ve created this reality for ourselves but we don’t really know it. This is a reality, and you have to recognize it isn’t helpful. If you’re ever in a position to do something within a corporation, I would urge you to create something that is efficient at the production AND consumption ends.