The most valuable gift of all is free time – 12/25/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

The world is going down the drain. Broken democracies, economic liberalism that only serves the richest, extremes of temperature and climate, increasing misinformation and inequality, including in how science is done (I’ll come back to this in the next column, I promise). Why? I dare venture a rather simple answer: the rampant complexity of the world we are creating today far exceeds the time we have available to learn how to deal with it.

I see the problem in the doors that we let close left and right precisely because we lost control of the speed at which we generated what once brought new opportunities to what, looking back, we call our species: technology. I’m talking about technology in general, which set in motion the snowball of our destiny by turning previously hard and difficult-to-eat foods into pulp and giving us the most valuable gift of all: free time.

By definition, technology is anything that generates free time to do other things and use our neurons creatively. In the case of human history, technology has been triply transformative because mammals with more neurons (courtesy number one of technology) have increasingly more capacity to solve problems here and see new ones there (courtesy number two) and longer and longer lives to continue seeing and solving problems (courtesy number three).

Elephants have a lot of neurons, but they eat grass, so their reality is they don’t have time for anything other than eating all day. Humans, on the contrary, are those primates who invented tricks to eat the energy they need faster, and thus became at the same time more capable of both making their own lives easier and… complicating it.

The reason is exactly the same as why no adult still likes tic-tac-toe or checkers: what used to be difficult, but we learned to solve it quickly, is no longer any fun, because the effort is no longer worth it when there is nothing again there to be learned. Therefore, what every animal wants is scabies to scratch.

The problem is that, for the human animal, the scab we want to scratch is technology itself. Since learning to use technology is necessary and fun, we use the free time we have thanks to technology to create and use… even more technology. Our modern history is the snowball resulting from these achievements that feed on each other — and which is now becoming an avalanche that fewer and fewer people have the skills to understand.

Stopping the avalanche, or at least mitigating its damage, requires citizens who learn to make good use of the free time that technology gives them: citizens who use this time to look back, to look around and at each other, to learn to cope. with the complexity of several contradictory truths of the modern world and, above all, to remain intelligent. Because intelligence is the ability to act to keep doors open, and our growing inability to deal with an increasingly complex world makes humanity stupid, making decisions that close doors to its own future — exactly like the misuse of technology that a day made us human today just makes us fat.

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