You have probably heard of “life hacking”: in recent years, the term has become a shorthand for any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency. Life hackers might track and analyse the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, or how they’re feeling on any given day. Online, they share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher. Underpinning this is a view of the world as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimised, and subverted. In his book “Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents” (MIT Press), Joseph Reagle examines this phenomenon.
For the uninitiated, could you explain what “life hacking” is?
Life hacking is a type of self-help for the new millennium. Trivially, it includes clever tricks for doing something quickly or cheaply. Substantively, it approaches life as a system to be mastered, optimised, or exploited—often by bending or breaking widely recognised rules.
Sixty years ago, model railroad enthusiasts at MIT coined the word “hack” to describe a quick fix to “The System,” the web of wires and relays under the train platform. They defined a hacker as someone “who avoids the standard solution.” Life hackers do the same today, across all the domains of life.
What is your sense of how widely this advice is actually practised?
We can only estimate, but consider the most popular book, podcast, and website. Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich has been translated into 40 languages and has sold more than 2.1 million copies. In November 2016, Ferriss reported his podcast had crossed the hundred-million download threshold—with as many as seven-million downloads a month. It can only be larger now. Presently, Lifehacker.com gets forty-million plus visits a month.
Your book traces the history of this movement. When, where and how did it originate?
The movement emerged among a handful of technically inclined writers in 2004. In February of that year, Danny O’Brien proposed a “life hacking” session at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego, California. O’Brien, a writer and digital activist, noted that “alpha geeks” are extraordinarily productive, and he wanted to speak “to the most prolific technologists about the secrets of their desktops, their inboxes, and their schedules.” Within the year Merlin Mann launched 43Folders.com, named for a way of organising future tasks via folders, and Gina Trapani started Lifehacker.com, a site that remains popular today. Tim Ferriss took the practice mainstream with his 2007 best-seller The 4-Hour Workweek. Although Ferriss does not make much use of the life hacker term—he sees himself as a self-experimenter in “lifestyle design”—his books and podcast make him its most famous practitioner.
How does life hacking differ from previous self-improvement methods?
It’s not a coincidence that the term “life hacking” emerged a few years after Richard Florida’s 2002 identification of The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida argued that metropolises with the “3T’s” (technology, talent, and tolerance) correlate with growth. This growth is driven by the creative class, those who create “new ideas, new technology, and creative content,” including artists, engineers, writers, designers, educators, and entertainers.
Members of the creative class have significant autonomy, engage with complex problems, and accept flexible work even if it exceeds the bounds of the 9–5 workweek. They feel that working too much is better than counting the minutes before the end of the day. Consequently, they tend to complain of too little time rather than too much work.
Life hackers are the geeky constituency of the creative class, attempting to make the best use of their time, bodies, and minds. They are rationally-inclined individuals seeking self-help via systems and experimentation.
Is it damaging to view life as a series of components that can be optimised?
It can be, but my intention is not to demonise life hacking. Life hacking can be a double edged sword, and optimising has merits and downsides.
Downsides include optimising the wrong thing or doing it to the exclusion of everything else. For example, one hacker optimised his dating routine such that he went on 150 dates in four months. This led to some hurt feelings, such as when he asked a woman how her parents were when she had already told him of her childhood as an orphan. Also, his optimisations were not helping him because he kept thinking something better was around the corner. He had optimised going on dates, but not beginning a relationship.
When is life hacking useful? When is it dangerous?
The usefulness of life hacking is readily apparent; it’s hard to find something that is more pragmatic than tips on folding shirts and staying organised. However, this utility obscures the dangers. As I noted, there are the excesses of naive optimisation, which tends to blinker people to anything outside their focus. And treating features of life as something to be quantified risks objectification, especially when it comes to others.
Life hacker’s strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin, the edge of which can understood by way of a Buddhist concept. Virtues, like compassion, often have an obvious opposite, like animosity; this is known as the “far enemy”. There are also sentiments that masquerade as virtues: pity as compassion, dependence as love, indifference as equanimity; these are “near enemies”. In the book, I identify the near enemies of hacking work, wealth, health, relationships, and meaning. For example, no one wants to be incapable or incompetent, but being efficient is not the same as being effective. And no one likes being sick, but compulsively checking health stats is its own sort of dysfunction.
What does the popularity of life hacking tell us about our current political, economic and cultural moment?
Self-help reflects the needs, wishes, and fears of a people in their moment in time, as Steven Starker suggested in his history of the genre.
Life hacking, then, reflects a world of far-flung interactions, pervasive systems, ubiquitous devices, and unsettled science; a moment in which we can work remotely, outsource chores, and track and experiment with every indicator of life, from heart rate to emails sent. It’s a fast-moving world where the individual must be an entrepreneur of the self, promoting their latest writing, podcast, app, or influencer tie-in.
There has been a lot of discussion online recently about burnout – partly related to our digital culture. Do you see any connection between this and life hacking?
Certainly. Life hacking began as a technique for coping with information overload. David Allen’s 2001 book Getting Things Done (GTD), was a source of inspiration to early life hackers.
However, being more productive is the first link in a chain of near enemies. Overwhelmed, we are tempted to become more efficient without considering the larger picture of what we truly value. When some life hackers gained this insight, they concluded they needed to get off the productivity treadmill, quit their high-paying jobs, and become “digital minimalists.” They then traveled the world exhorting others to follow their newfound lifestyle of owning only what they can fit in their backpack. And when they found this lacking, they turned to hacking meaning, dabbling with Stoic philosophy and meditation.
Life hacking can impart useful techniques and insights in all these domains of life, but it has its limitations. Life hacking can be like donning a set of horse blinkers so as to block out distractions and focus attention on personal goals. Though this can be useful, life hacking, especially the optimising type, creates a type of tunnel vision. And with their vision fixed on the horizon, life hackers can be naive to the people and circumstances on their periphery. The more optimal the hacking, the more narrow and distant the vision tends to be.