Happiness and Time

At tne NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews happiness expert Laurie Santos:

Garcia-Navarro: I also spoke to Robert Putnam, and his prescription was, to put it succinctly, “Join a club.” But I think a lot of people feel that they don’t have time for that, in between work and caretaking. 

Santos: This is something that social scientists are also really clued into. One of the coolest bits of work coming out of modern-day social science is on this concept of what’s called “time affluence.” This is lovely work by Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy in time. It’s not how much objective time you have, but it’s the subjective sense that you have free time for yourself. It’s the opposite of what so many people are experiencing, which is what’s called time famine, where you’re literally starving for time. This term “famine” works physiologically, because when we feel like we don’t have enough time, it’s almost like famine. It increases inflammation. It does all these bad things to our body. But there’s lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. And this time crisis is worse for marginalized people and people who don’t have enough income and are worried about putting food on the table. That crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis.

Garcia-Navarro: But is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time. It’s watching a Netflix show, sitting on my sofa, or bed rotting, as it’s called on social media, as a way to “relax,” when it’s really not that relaxing at all. So is our time crisis manufactured by our bad choices?

Santos: I’m going to say yes and no on that one. Yes in the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence — the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia — they have a 35-hour work week. So people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge. They’re joiners, in part because they have time. I think that does matter. If we set things up structurally to have more time in the United States, maybe with a four-day workweek, it’s happiness-inducing, good for companies and so on. I think we could get there. So there’s something about the time crisis that is real. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like it.

I love the concept of "time affluence". Time truly is the most valuable resource, the thing that you need to use most carefully in your life.

My personal experience is that I actually have a lot of time, I just need to make the effort to use it well. That sometimes requires advance planning, like arranging to see a friend or finding something fun to do, but it is always worth it to use your time well.

Claude Code and the Problem of Utilizing Any New Technology

Back in the 1970s, people began making personal computers. Everyone thought they were really cool but nobody really knew what to do with them, beyond playing primitive games. Then we got the internet and useful software like spreadsheets and word processors, and they became indispensable tools for work and life.

It took a while for people to figure out how to use the new technology.

Now we have AI, or LLMs to be precise. They are amazing, but what are they good for? Writing essays for lazy students? Generating shlock internet posts?

So for a while serious analysts were looking at the AI companies and thinking that they might end up being economic failures.

And then Anthropic created Claude Code, an "agent" that writes software. Suddenly the money started pouring in from tech companies who never thought they had enough programmers or could write code fast enough. Profits at Anthropic and OpenAI soared, and people started to say that AI had finally found the "killer ap" that would justify all the money invested in it.

But as Noah Smith explains, it isn't that simple:

Now AI had found its killer app — the equivalent of e-commerce and search for the internet, or spreadsheets and word processing for computers. Suddenly, everyone in the world was “tokenmaxxing” — trying to use coding agents as much as humanly possible.

An entrepreneur breathlessly told me that he ordered his employees to “spend their salary in tokens” — that is, to create so much code with Claude Code and Codex that it cost as much as their entire paycheck. I remember asking him: “What are they using all those tokens to create?” I don’t think I got a straight answer; I’m not sure he knew.

He wasn’t alone, though. Plenty of companies encouraged their employees to use AI coding agents as much as possible. Meta even briefly had a leaderboard for who could use the most tokens. One company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude Code — equal to one percent of Claude’s annualized revenue!

Reading these reports, I just kept wondering: What are all these tokens actually producing? There never seemed to be a clear answer. 

John Loeber:

The stuff I’m hearing is just insane. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens? Guys, what are you shipping?…I am seeing people fully enraptured by illusions of productivity. They have swarms of agents coordinated by Byzantine Octopus harnesses. They’re munging thousands of tokens a second. They’re doing all this stuff, churning unfinished marginalia faster than ever before. Spinning their wheels and shipping absolutely jack shit for their customers…[W]e’re getting a lot of utility from AI for engineering at our company. I think we would really struggle to burn more than $5K per engineer per month.

Smith again:

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said it wasn’t yet possible to draw a link between raw AI usage and useful products actually being shipped: “That link is not there yet, right?” 

Microsoft and several other tech firms have begun canceling Claude Code licenses and placing limits on how much can be spent. 

What's going on? 

As I see it, the price of coding just fell by a lot, but nobody knows yet how to productively use all that new coding power. Tech executives felt that they were being held back by a lack of coders, and maybe they were, but their overall process was adapted to the speed of what their people could actually produce, and they really had no idea what to do with this additional capacity. So much of it was just wasted.

And what use will we make of all this coding power and the new software it will create? I don't know, but I imagine people will find lots of uses. I curse every day about some stupid web site that doesn't work how it is supposed to, some process that is way more complex than it needs to be, games with too many glitches, and so on.

But it will likely to take years for all of this to really translate into better products for us, and more profits for tech firms.