Jam Tomorrow

“For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment.” — Oliver Burkeman quoting John Maynard Keynes.

I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately. In 1930, Keynes published Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. He predicted that by now, we would have solved the "economic problem." We would be working fifteen-hour weeks and the biggest challenge facing humanity would be how to occupy our leisure time.

He was wrong. We didn’t take the leisure. We just filled the space with more work, more tasks, and more stress.

The culprit is what he calls "purposiveness." It is the nagging feeling that the present moment is not enough. That everything we do must serve some future end. It’s an epidemic. We can’t just do a thing for the sake of doing it anymore. It has to be "useful." It has to be optimised.

I see this in myself constantly. I wrote recently about the enjoyment sponge. The moment we find something enjoyable, there’s a tendancy to turn it into a project. To squeeze value out of it for some reason or another, ruining the experience and diluting the enjoyment.

We treat time as a container to be filled with productivity rather than a medium to live in. You see it in the obsession with "hacks." We try to hack our reading habits to consume more information, worrying if it counts if we skimmed it, rather than just enjoying the prose. We go to the gym not to move our bodies, but for the physique we might have in six months.

I felt this most acutely with running. For years, I ran for the data. I ran for the PB. It was miserable. It wasn't until I accepted that slow IS fast that I started to actually enjoy the act of putting one foot in front of the other.

Keynes points to the cat as the antidote. The cat doesn't worry about the future. It is entirely present. It deals with the immediate. It enjoys the jam today, not the promise of jam tomorrow. The modern world wants us to chase the jam tomorrow. It sells us the course, the app, and the productivity system, all promising a better future if we just sacrifice our present peace.

We are so concerned with the remote future results of our actions that we forget to check if the action itself is worth doing. Sometimes, the quality of the moment is the only metric that matters.