i’ve been seeing and reading alot recently about “efficient living”.  about “Getting Things Done”, treating your body like a temple, sleeping enough every day, eating right, etc, etc.  as if there is some sort of holy grail of self-discipline that yields success, happiness, and infinite spiritual contentment.

i’m not entirely so sure about all this.

so let me postulate, instead, the opposite: there is no such thing as efficient living.

it is an illusion, a myth grasped desperately as we drown, a byproduct of myopic fantasy.  what i read as “living efficiently” means living selfishly, and therefore alone.  to me it means not making other people’s schedules part of your own.  to me it means having no other responsibilities beyond yourself and your work.  it means setting love, friends, and family aside.  it means a dullness.

or maybe it just means i don’t get it or haven’t figured it out yet.

and the tech world puts such a premium on the rockstars and ninjas who burn their lives up in a magnesium flash of python code, mountain climbing, and locovorian vegetarianism, and at what cost?  mighten we not benefit from the insights and creativity inherent in those founders, developers, and designers, that seek the broad and slightly indirect path?

funny too that this is also in such opposition to the rest of the creative endeavors out there – in playwriting, the premium is on self destruction, as it is in painting, music, etc. is the tech world limiting its creative potential in the service of a false idea? why do i sound like carrie from sex in the city? omfg.

and isn’t this a wee bit of a self serving theory of mine?  and yes, good sir, gentle madame, it is indeed; i am a poster child of inefficaciousness.  let me not be the one to cast the first stone, and for those who have found sustainable, organized, efficient self-regulation, kudos and congratulations and i admit to no small degree of jealousy.

and while, yes, of course, i would like to be more focused and directed, more zenly tasked, as it were, i do still take a certain relish in stepping over legos and into playdough, in answering phone calls at the farmers market or bathside as my daughter plays in her bubbles.  i enjoy the simultaneous juggle of the eggplant parmesan, the recounting by my wife of her most recent humorous episode of life, the soft incoming ping of email in the background, the swill of the 2nd martini through the exhaustion of the previous night’s 11pm conference call between india, dc, vancouver, and my own small little hamlet of vermont. maybe it’s just that i have HDAD or ADD or whatever it is they call it these days.  or maybe there really is something about the inherent disorder of it all that just feels alive?

or maybe it’s just that things are complicated, and i just enjoy it that way. i know you know it’s coming, but here it is anyway: i think it’s time for a little avril up in here; as always, she gets it right.