Efficiency Is an Ultimately Empty and Unattainable Life Goal

An app nearly prevented me from picking up my own child this week. My younger daughter’s day camp has a convoluted, high-tech authorization system. Before camp started, I needed to log into its website, download an auto-generated code and activate it. When I meet the bus, I type my code into a counselor’s phone.

In the best of circumstances, this is an extra — and to me, unnecessary — step. As Let Grow, a nonprofit supporting childhood independence, points out, a child is five times more likely to have a conjoined twin than to be kidnapped by a stranger.

But on Monday, the app wasn’t working. I observed an increasingly frantic and sweaty counselor (not equipped with a backup paper version of the codes) try to deal with an angry line of guardians, the honking city traffic behind the bus and a passel of grumpy, tired children who just wanted to go home.

After some negotiation we were allowed to grab our kids, just this once, without the app’s say-so. But it was a glaring and painful example of the degrading over time of service on tech platforms. The bus incident also represented something else: the failed promise of technology to make our lives more efficient and the ultimate emptiness of peak efficiency as a buzzword or an organizing principle of modern life.

New technology — from a sewing machine to an A.I.-enabled assistant — is often sold with the promise of speed. The idea is that the drudgery will happen more quickly, so you’ll have more time to devote to the things that really matter: the more satisfying, creative parts of a job or more time for friends, family or leisure.

But we have had granular time-use data from the American Time Use Survey for the past 20 years. The A.T.U.S. suggests that even as we have tiny computers in our pockets that swear they can save us from tedious tasks, the way Americans work has barely shifted even as technology has rapidly evolved. If anything, we spend more time doing domestic work and roughly the same amount of time doing paid labor.