Life Hacking vs. Delayed Gratification

Hacks for productivity. Hacks for travel. Hacks for getting fit. Hacks for organizing our closets. Hacks for — don’t get me started — losing weight.

There is an entire section of the internet, it seems, devoted to making life easier: any article that has the words “10 ways to…” or “how to be a better…” or “how to be more…” belongs in this genre.

At first, it’s easy to get sucked in: of course I want to be better! Maybe this article will give me a secret that I haven’t heard and will therefore make my life easier!

The danger of these sorts of articles, is that they want us to believe that life can and even should be easier, in order to have a “good” life.

Listicles — those omnipresent “10 ways to…” articles — have been rising as a writing form since the early 2000s (there are articles from 2004 describing them).1 They’re not always about hacks, but the Venn diagram for “listicle” and “life hack” articles seem to overlap significantly.

Hacks may seem to be a new thing, as well. But we’re just getting old (and by we, I mean those of us who remember life before the internet and can’t believe just how long it’s been since we first heard the crunchy sound of a dial-up modem): the term “life hack” was first used in 2004 — at a technology conference, perhaps unsurprisingly.2 Unlike many idioms at technology conferences, this one caught on, not just in the tech world, but everywhere as a way to suggest that a piece of advice or way of doing things is somehow gaming the system in order to do something better. Danny O’Brien, the guy who first used the phrase, would see geeks using “secret software” to get them through the day.3

He came to see hacks as “a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix.”4

So yeah, if you’re trying to make a system work better, or write a piece of code that can do something in a fraction of a second as it would take a person to do it (think Excel macro functions, or keyboard shortcuts), hacks make perfect sense.

(A moment to pause to appreciate the fact that I have conjured Venn diagrams and Excel macros into a single piece that’s not actually about science or technology.)

What if we called hacks what they really are most of the time: shortcuts?

Now, in some cases, shortcuts are good. Hacks can be legitimate tricks to make something easier, like peeling and de-seeding a pomegranate, which I still can’t do without leaving the kitchen and the front of my shirt looking like a crime scene.

Shortcuts, in these cases, aren’t so much hacks as instructions for how to do a thing properly. If I don’t know how to peel a pomegranate, I don’t need a “hack.” I need a manual. This isn’t a “nonobvious fix.” It’s just the way you do something. But because the word “hack” is a thing, now, it’s used everywhere.

When we think of our minds and bodies as things to be hacked, we lose a bit of a connection with what it means to be human. Because, really, what we’re trying to do is hack out the suffering. Hack out what makes something hard.

Saying suffering is part of being human isn’t as depressing as we usually make it out to be. I don’t like the triteness of saying, “we need the bad to appreciate the good,” but it’s not all wrong.

We can see it already, I think, due to the fact that we now carry around little computers with us everywhere we go. Need an answer? Google it. Need food? Order it online. Need food that’s already cooked? Delivery! Need to go somewhere and want the closest thing to teleportation? Lyft! Need toilet paper and don’t want to go to the store? Amazon!

The problem with not having to suffer, not having to work, not having just a modicum of respect for delayed gratification, is that we start to expect it. We get annoyed when it takes more than 20 minutes for our delivery, more than 5 minutes for a car to come, when someone gets our order wrong.

We start to expect that there will be a shortcut to processes that are way beyond our control: weight loss (or gain), aging, fitness, appearances, illness, difficult conversations.

So we Botox and fad diet our way to a perfect, Instagrammable image, and then wonder why it doesn’t stick or why we’re not happy.

Instead of saying, ok, well I could stand to lose a few pounds and yeah it would be nice if I could do it in a week by juice-cleansing and putting my body through the wringer. But instead I’m going to cut calories and move a little more and keep going when it gets hard and not only will I lose the weight, I’ll also be proud of myself.

The flip side is that I won’t get down on myself when I do hit a rough patch — because, spoiler alert, there are always rough patches because we’re humans and not systems to be hacked. If a hack is supposed to make my life easy, what happens when life is hard? I’m not doing it right! There will be another hack for that!

Instead of building up our toolkits to take care of ourselves in a way that lets us approach these rough patches with empathy and compassion, we want to skip right over them. We don’t practice experiencing these rough patches, and so it’s feels like a travesty when we do. We don’t “deserve” the rough patches.

Not deserving rough patches translates into a sense of entitlement to cruise through life. A misplaced value on the output rather than the process. A life mantra that the ends justify the means.

But when we’re faced with some of the big systemic issues of the day — racism, misogyny, gun violence, corruption — and can’t hack our way out of them, we give up, because we have no idea how to tackle the hard stuff. We have no idea how to be uncomfortable. We spend time looking for quick fixes that make us feel good in the moment rather than the hard changes that kind of suck in the short term (paying more taxes, driving less) but will benefit everyone in the long term.

So maybe that is actually the simple thing. Not a hack, not a shortcut, but an obvious solution.

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