Consider the Washing Machine

What are we doing with all the time we've gained?

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

One of my part-time jobs is working as a staff writer for a podcast called Where Parents Talk. Each week, I have the privilege of listening to some of the top parenting experts from across Canada and the U.S. talk to host Lianne Castelino, and then my task is to turn those interviews into engaging articles for readers. It’s fun and interesting and I’m always learning new things.

Every interview is interesting in its own way, but occasionally one comes along that resonates deeply with me. Such was the case with Dr. Jean Twenge’s recent interview in December 2023. She is a researcher and professor of psychology at San Diego State University whose work I’ve admired, read, and quoted extensively over the years. You may know her as the author of iGen and, most recently, Generations.

Twenge has become an outspoken proponent of limiting excessive smartphone usage for teens, explaining that three key factors—too much time online, reduced in-person time, and disrupted sleep—are a disaster for mental health. Her takeaway advice for concerned parents: (1) Don’t allow phones or other tech in the bedroom overnight, and (2) delay smartphone ownership for as long as possible.

Then Twenge said something I can’t stop thinking about. She described technology as being so much more than just digital media. It’s enhanced medical care. It’s better transportation. It’s labour-saving devices—and this is where her words stopped me short. She started talking about washing machines, acknowledging her perspective as a woman.

“Think about how much time it used to take us—basically, the whole day for a group of women working together, boiling water over an open fire, and using very harsh soaps that were bad on the skin. And now, how do we do laundry? We throw it in the washing machine and then go do something else, and then switch it to the dryer. It’s really incredible, [along with] grocery stores and ovens and all of these things that have saved us so much time.”

I can vouch for this. I spent one long year washing all my clothes by hand in northeastern Brazil and it was a ton of work! But then, what do we do with that time that we’ve been given back by technology? Twenge continued:

“Are we going to use it to enjoy each other? Or enjoy the world around us and enjoy nature and get exercise and read a good book? Or are we going to use it watching TikTok videos? And mostly, we’ve done the latter. But … is that really the best way to use the time that labor-saving devices and better medical care have given us? Probably not.”

I contemplated her words. All too often, we forget about the surplus of time that we have gained, thanks to labour-saving devices (aka technology). We forget that we used to spend most of our time gathering or growing food, preparing meals, scrubbing fabric till our knuckles turned raw, walking long distances, washing dishes, hauling and heating water, chopping firewood and stoking wood-fired cookstoves to eat, heat, and survive.

And when you imagine that life, and then imagine all of that hard work disappearing, and how mind-bogglingly incredible it is to have all that extra time suddenly at our disposal, it is staggering to think how readily we squander it on inanities, on light amusement, on fluffy entertainment, on things that do not enhance us, enrich us, or make us better or kinder people.

Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, made a similar comment in an interview I listened to several years ago. She said, “We’ve engineered this world that actually allows us to have leisure time, to reflect on these deep moral questions, and instead of doing that we’re playing League of Legends.”

We forget so easily, which can be a good thing sometimes, but in this case makes us look like profoundly foolish animals who do not realize the gift and privilege we have been given.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

This is not to say that every moment of our days must be spent productively (how tedious), but there is a spectrum of quality when it comes to time usage, and to fritter away many of those free hours on empty activities that have little inherent value seems deeply tragic, especially when you consider what technological advances were required to gain that time in the first place. It seems almost disrespectful to the clever minds that innovated and developed those devices to throw the time surplus away so readily.

Austin Kleon wrote in Keep Going, “Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful. There is no time for despair.” Nor, one might say, for scrolling through social media news feeds that leave us feeling doubly awful about our own lives—about all that we don’t have or want, and about the time we’ve thrown away when we could have been building something great in our own lives.

The next time I get sucked into mindless screen time, I plan to pull myself out by reminding myself that, “This is washing machine time!” This is time that, in the past, my great-grandmothers spent scrubbing clothes by hand in a laundry tub. Is this how I want to use it? The answer, of course, is no.

Instead, I will strive to take Goethe’s advice and incorporate the following activities into my daily life, along with some others: “Hear a little song. Read a good poem. See a fine picture. Speak a few reasonable words.” I encourage you to do so, as well.

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