When Less Is More

I'm back!

Not only did I enjoy a device-free day, but I learned some things. Lots of little things just from being more present and observing.

First, I have no way of keeping time without my devices. I hadn't thought much about it – but I don't typically wear a watch. and didn't bring one with me to Patmos. So I allowed myself the dispensation of checking the time just a few times by touching the screen on my iPhone and not unlocking it. 

Of course the appliance and air-conditioning guy – Dimitris of Grikos as the kids and I call him, as that's how he was described to us because he is one of two appliance repairmen on Patmos and he lives in the Grikos area – picked yesterday to come install the new living room air unit. There was no way I was putting him off.  The problem – I had no way to pay him without a device. I use an app called Wise to pay. So, another special one-time dispensation to pay the man. Prompt payment is important with a man who is like a mafia-boss in his level of importance on this island.

With the time gained not writing the blog – or doing anything else on a device – I decided yesterday was a great day to get to the beach early and really enjoy the day reading and swimming. As I left the house, I panicked for a moment when I did my routine pocket-check and found no phone. Then reminded myself, that was fine. Three steps later, I panicked that I had no way to pay for anything – because I usually use Apple Pay anywhere with a POS. Then I realized I had both cash on me and all my cards. Apple Pay is just a shortcut for the plastic cards and I was fully armed. Not that I would need it at the beach…. but still….

At decided to be cheap, buy a couple of bougatsas and a big bottle of water as Ta Kardasia for all of 4.80 euros and go chill at Petra for the day. It was an inspired choice and with a book, some sunscreen and food for the day, how much would I really need a device? I realized that if there's anyplace where I feel the yoke of my phone, it's at the beach. There are so many times when I think of something and pull out the phone to check the news, look something up, make sure no one has texted me…. I saw trails of smoke from the fire in Turkey (which they apparently finally put out last night) and I wanted to see how the situation was going. But I let it go. The firefighters were doing their thing – they definitely didn't need me.

I read a lot. More than I can remember. I swam. I took a little nap. It was GREAT. I chose to leave when I felt like it – because I had no way to tell time. I turned out I left at 6pm – about the same as I usually would on a weekend. I took my time heading back and explored a couple of side roads roads to the end because I had neither work nor was I trying to sync-up to FaceTime the kids. 

As long as I wasn't calling or chatting with anyone and had no work, I did some housework, moved the desk in the guest room that had somehow made it into a weird spot, ran a couple of errands and decided to enjoy leftovers and a movie for dinner. 

Watching a movie (I didn't count the TV as a device) was one of the most surprising things. I wanted to reach for the phone all the time – to check for texts, to look up something the movie made me wonder about, to see if the fire was out, to order something on Amazon that popped into my head. And every time I heard any kind of noise in the house – like the refrigerator clicking on or off – I grabbed for the phone that wasn't on the coffee table. The simple act of watching a movie was a real mirror for helping me see just how addicted to my devices I am.

On the other hand, being without the devices didn't cause anxiety, it relieved it. Walking away from them created space and relaxed me. If anything, unlocking my phone this morning was the real anxiety trigger. I speedily deleted all the unnecessary emails (which is shockingly most of them) and got through the surprisingly few texts. But of course I went through my news feed to get caught up on the world and just that was anxiety-inducing.

I also realized how much of the time I walk around with my phone in my hand. I'm going to try to stop that. If I'm away from the phone and I don't respond to everything in real-time, life will still be ok. 

The real disadvantage to not having my phone was not being able to share things. It's funny how the cameras in our phones have changed life. We use photos to show where something is, what it looks like. This is where I hid the key. This is what the table looks like. This is the lightbulb I need to replace. This is the new cat in the yard. Look at this dinner I made! Is that your brother with some woman who's not his wife? Are these mushrooms poisonous? Is this a coral snake or a king snake threatening me? I took a picture today of all the kinds of French packaged snacks Manolis carries at his organic shop. Camembert potato chips are a thing – that needed to be memorialized and shared. There was a moment yesterday I that reminded how once-upon-a-time, we had to take "mental pictures" of moments more than we do today. There also was not conspicuously displaying your curated life on social media – for better and worse. 

If I were somewhere other than Patmos, I could also imagine losing my navigation. Sure – my car has navigation built in, but devices are great at helping us plan how much time to leave to get from A to B or if I'm in a walking city like New York or Paris – how to walk and/or use public transportation to get around. Absolutely one of the best efficiencies our phones offer.

Another advantage of being device-free is the ability to really ponder things. I could drop into my thoughts or just find things pop up on their own – not in reaction to stimuli or input. One thing on my mind has been the declining birth rate in developed and developing countries. It's a favorite topic in both legacy and social media. I've had friends talk about it lately. My research on Singapore touches on it a lot because Singapore doesn't have enough Singaporeans to run the place – it brings in foreign labor. The declining birth rate was something Lee Kuan Yew was concerned about in the decade before he died in 2015. 

I've heard people worried about how declining populations will constrict economic growth, leave minority populations positioned to take over certain countries (ie Arab immigrants in France have more children than the average French couple – so in 20-40 years, does France cease being French?), see the collapse of certain countries into others (ie Monaco lacks enough Monegasques for it to make sense to continue as an independent principality and it gets folded into France). 

All important questions.

It led me to wonder if we really have anything to worry about on the population front.

In the 1970's books like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and reports like The Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth created serious worry that the world was on track to widespread famine and resource depletion, due to unchecked population growth. Good and back came from this fear. Recycling and conservation efforts got more support and discussions of sustainability took shape on the positive end. However, for countries like China – and even Singapore – fears about resource constraints led to family planning policies that turned out later to have problematic results. Singapore gave financial incentives not to have more than two children (now it pays people to have a third) while China's One Child Policy created untold grief resulting in untold abortions and both the abandoning and killing of girl babies by families desperate to have a son because of a son's significance in Chinese social structure. 

The primary reason Ehrlich, Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping were wrong is because they hadn't considered certain aspects of human behavior and economics. In an industrial and post-industrial economy, children are no longer an economic benefit as they are in an agrarian one. Settlers in Nebraska benefitted from large families to help work the farm and get the labor-intensive housework done. However, even agrarian societies changed because of industrial inventions. Farm machinery, methodology and crop engineering created once unimaginable efficiencies that have led to only 1.57 percent of the American population working in agriculture – which includes forestry, fishing and hunting, meaning an even smaller percent work on farms and ranches. 

In today's developed nations, having children is something we do because want to have children – ideally because we have love to share and there's a richness to family life. Moreover, as the average income has increased and technologies have advanced, quality of life has also increased (in basic measurable forms – we can leave discussions of people's inner well-being for another time). Throughout most of the developed world, people began having fewer children so they can maintain a higher standard of living. Homes, vacations, after-school activities, nice holiday presents are all more attainable with fewer children.

Between having numerous effective options for birth control and more economic opportunity per person that in the entire history of humanity – people have the unprecedented option of optimizing their quality of life which in part, is done through smaller family sizes.

So the existential crisis of overpopulation was averted without even trying. It turns out the unexpected cocktail of Free Love and Reaganomics saved the world….

While I know people who dispute this, I think it's safe to say Climate Change is a real concern. And if you're someone who doesn't believe that – I think we can all agree industrial activity and expansive human construction create pollution and environmental damage.

The Neo-liberal response to these issues has been encouraging people to make do with less. Buy one car, not two. Buy green products. Regulate factories and polluters.

Yet even with so many countries participating in the Paris Accords, global energy consumption and pollution both continue to rise. In fact, our paper consumption has declined dramatically since people no longer print as much as they used to – but we all use more devices and equipment which in turn connect to cloud computing infrastructure – and it all uses a lot of electricity. 

While we should always seek ways to make factories cleaner, be responsible with what we consume and how we dispose of our waste – going backwards seems an unlikely direction for humanity. Realistically, restaurants are going to package takeout in plastic containers because new plastic is cheaper than recycled materials and paper. I think it sucks – but it's also facts and we can hope the economics around materials changes. 

Isn't another option to sustainability simply shifting the demand curve? And wouldn't that happen if people are having fewer children?

It strikes me that just as we avoided an imagined Armageddon from overpopulation, the continued reduction in family size – which is happening even in China and India – could be an organic solution to a pressing issue.

Put another way, does our entire system HAVE to be as large as it is. We were a smaller global population one hundred and two hundred years ago – and environmentally, those were better times. What if we were a smaller population again – by choice – able to enjoy a higher standard of living?

This dovetails well with the fears around Artificial Intelligence. One of the most popular headline categories is how AI is coming for people's jobs. The economy is going to change drastically in ways we have yet to imagine. AI displacing too many people creates economic hardship. A perennial worry about new technologies is that they will take away jobs that won't be replaced elsewhere – that the economic pie is finite. So far, that hasn't been proven to be true. Buggy-whip makees gave way to assembly-line workers. Blue collar work has increasingly given way to white collar work. Not that there aren't people who end up collateral damage each time there's a shift – because there are. Yet in the aggregate, robust economies and employment endure.

Ai could be different because as Yuval Noah Harari says, all prior technological innovations have involved humans creating new tools. Both wrenches and laptops work for human operators – increasing our efficiency. Developing AI means creating agents who work autonomously and may eventually get beyond our control. So who knows?

Either way, a smaller population is likely to see fewer negatives and possibly more positives from AI. 

In other words, I'm not sure the mark of success is the size of a country's or the world's population. 

Does any of that address the ethnic composition concern around France or the Netherlands? Not really – although I believe in an increasingly technology-driven economy, power moves towards the people with more skill, education and capital. That doesn't look promising for today's immigrant populations in Western Europe. But you never know. Britain's changing complexion with a increasing Indian-British population is another matter in large part driven by the fact that the Indian population has embraced the British system and found success within it.

The aftermath of Empire is complicated.

All of that to say, maybe people aspiring to only one or two kids they can afford to enroll if extracurriculars and take on vacation isn't such a bad thing. Maybe the easiest path to sustainability comes less from figuring out how big a carbon footprint your choice of produce creates and more on reducing carbon footprint from feeding fewer mouths – wherever the romaine for the salad was grown.

In the end, everyone is trying to maximize their own utility. Generally, people decide to maximize their own welfare based on the best information they have when deciding. Certainly, the quality of information these days is up for question. But a family's revenue and expenses are usually pretty clear to them. Clearly, through much of the world people are opting to have fewer people living better. Maybe this is one of those rare and wonderful cases where what optimizes the individual's and the collective's utility is one and the same. If so, maybe it's time to learn to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.