Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, let's talk about this new kind of efficiency, right?
There’s this quote – I always butcher names, but I think it's Marshall McLuhan – and he said, basically, that the big thing we're gonna figure out this century is that humans just aren't built to live at, like, the speed of light. And, honestly, it makes total sense, you know?
Think about it: there was a time when news, gossip, whatever, only moved as fast as someone could walk or, you know, maybe ride a horse. But then technology came along and totally flipped everything. It messed with time, it messed with space, and it, like, gradually synced up everyone's brains across the planet into this totally new, liquid sort of reality. It's kind of wild when you think about it.
So, for example, there was this massive volcano eruption in Indonesia. And, like, people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – halfway across the world – felt it! Well, not the actual blast, obviously, but they felt the *impact*. They were terrified, apparently. And that was because of the telegraph. This brand new thing, the telegraph. It blasted the news out to sixty newspapers all over the world. That was the moment, maybe, when we realized space and time as absolutes weren't really… absolute anymore. You could suddenly jump into something happening thousands of miles away, without waiting weeks to get there. Kind of like McLuhan said, you could have dinner in New York and indigestion in Paris super quickly.
Before trains, everyone just ran on “sun time.” Each town set its own time based on where the sun was, and every degree of longitude meant a four-minute time difference. Imagine the chaos! But then railroads showed up, and suddenly the sun wasn't cutting it anymore. I mean, it was a mess. All these different railroads had totally different schedules. So, eventually, we just had to ditch sun time and create standard time. Humans took control.
And that's kind of the thing, right? Once technology started warping time and space, it started pulling the strings of our lives. Railroads dictated where we went, and train schedules dictated *when* we went. We traded freedom of movement for, like, a more efficient way of life. And that quest for efficiency just kept getting tighter and tighter.
So, back in the 1800s, scientists were figuring out that humans waste energy, just like inefficient machines. Then this engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, noticed that workers got way more done if they followed a really strict, choreographed set of movements. He figured out it wasn’t that people weren't working hard enough, they were just wasting energy. A super precise routine could speed up the whole manufacturing process and make it easier, too. And Ford Motor Company took that to a whole new level. They started using assembly lines with conveyor belts, so instead of working on one car at a time, workers did one tiny thing on *lots* of cars in a row. Suddenly, they were churning out cars, like, every twenty-four seconds. And, boom, the assembly line became the global standard for efficiency.
And, honestly, little by little, everything became an assembly line. Farming, building houses, even healthcare… patients waiting to be "fixed" all in a production line.
Even when work shifted from physical labor to, you know, brain work in the 50s. Suddenly everyone wanted to be office workers. Everyone in the rural areas, at least. But the factory model stuck around. People sat in place, did the same monotonous thing all day long, clocked in, clocked out, fueled by coffee. Even the office layouts were like factory floors. It's kind of crazy, really.
By the 70s, the most unhappy workers weren't the factory workers anymore; it was the office workers. The factories just morphed into shiny offices, and our brains became the new assembly lines. Quantity over quality, all the time. No room for creativity, no room for brilliance. It was all about how much you could churn out, not how good it was.
But here's the thing. We're problem solvers, right? When we hit a limit, we build tools to get around it. When our hands couldn't go any faster, we built machines. And when our brains couldn't compute fast enough, we built calculators, computers, supercomputers. Now, AI can do a lot of knowledge work way more efficiently than us. Automated trading, legal chatbots, AI eye surgeons… it's all happening.
So, with AI taking over the lower-level stuff, suddenly the focus is shifting to, like, idea generation, complex learning, and problem-solving. Companies are worth more for their intangible assets – their algorithms, their brand identity – than for their physical stuff. And those intangible assets come from, like, exceptional brain work. Products are so complex now that it’s more difficult to dream them up than to actually make them.
So, the old factory-style work model just doesn't work anymore. The assembly-line brain, flattened out without the peaks of brilliance or the troughs of recovery, is totally useless in this new world where genius ideas and ingenious solutions are what matter. Efficiency isn't about quantity anymore; it's about quality.
And that's why it is important to explore how our brains work best. If you match the rhythm of your brain to your work, your mental performance can absolutely skyrocket.