Reject the Religion of Efficiency

During holiday season 1943, Philip Van Doren Stern mailed out two hundred Christmas cards to his friends. Except these weren’t typical Christmas cards. They were hard copies of a short story he had tried for years to get published, without any success. Having largely given up hope of a professional publisher, Stern sent the story to loved ones as a Christmas gift. Somehow, one of those copies ended up in the hands of a movie producer, who showed it to Cary Grant. Grant liked it, RKO studios bought the rights, and three years later director Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart would adapt the story and give the world It’s a Wonderful Life.

Twenty years later, a documentary producer named Lee Mendelson was struggling. He had spent all almost everything creating a documentary about Willie Mays. It sold to NBC but did not open any bigger doors for Mendelson. Suddenly, Mendelson had an idea for another documentary, this time about Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. It would include animated footage of Charlie Brown and friends. After spending months and thousands of dollars creating the animation and real footage, Mendelson could not find a single network to buy his documentary. A year later, Mendelson’s phone rang, and a New York ad executive told him that he had seen the documentary and thought Mendelson might be able help his client, Coca-Cola, find a holiday program to sponsor. In less than 72 hours, Mendelson and Schulz wrote up a treatment for A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The only reason It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas exist is that someone created something that failed at first. Philip Van Doren Stern and Lee Mendelson struggled in relative anonymity to create something they thought beautiful, and for a long time, nobody cared. The publishers said no, and the networks weren’t interested. It took chance providential encounters with specific people, none of which could have been remotely predicted, to bring these projects to the light.

In the history of art, there are thousands of stories just like these. The entire journey of worthy things tends to be grossly inefficient. Sunk costs abound. There is much wasted money, many fruitless meetings, and innumerable unanswered letters. Strewn across the floor in real-time, they all point in the same direction: This isn’t worth it. It’s not going to work. Give up and try something else.

When we visualize a future of A.I., many tell us to visualize a world without inefficiency. In this era, we are told, waiting is an artifact of the past. Answers to questions are available now. A brainstorming partner is here to help now. And ultimately, the art and relationships every human being craves is said to be here now. No waiting. No struggle. No inefficiency.

Our digital lives to this point have trained us to desire the end of inefficiency, to pine for the death of all waiting and friction and sunk costs. That’s why the logic of A.I. is almost unassailable to most people. When you try to convince them there’s something lost by giving our questions and emotions to a computer system, they might acknowledge that this sounds bad, but they don’t feel the way. Why? Because we’ve been doing this for decades.

But what will the death of inefficiency really mean? I fear that it might mean that the math of our lives suddenly makes stories like the two above nearly impossible. It’s not just that the ability to summon things into existence makes the patience and thinking of creating them ourselves less plausible. That’s very true. But it’s also this: the kind of people we are becoming are the kind of people who won’t be able to tolerate a meaningful gap between our effort and a positive result. Everything around us is primed to deliver satisfaction this instant. If anything fails to do this—if, for example, the story we wrote isn’t being published, or the documentary we’re making isn’t selling—the dissonance will be too much. We can’t wait. We have to try different input. We have to change the prompt. We have to give up.

This low tolerance for inefficiency is the death of good work. How many good ideas came after 100 bad ones? How many successful pitches followed dozens of rejections? How many careers were found unexpectedly, as a plan-B or even plan-Z? Forget work. Think about everyday life. How many children were born after multiple miscarriages? How many friendships happened because somebody was in the wrong place at the right time? How many people have come to Christ after years of rejecting him? Trying to measure life in anything other than the longest measures of time is dishonest.

Doing anything of value in this world requires a high tolerance for wasting our time.

And this is one of the great reasons to push back on the religion of efficiency. The next avoidance of inefficiency could be the moment where I miss a stray thought or random realization that bears wildly unpredictable fruit. Think of Philip Van Doren Stern, sending his friends some Christmas cards with a rejected short story attached. Think of Lee Mendelson, burning through cash to finish a documentary about cartoon characters that nobody wanted to buy. This past Christmas, our family got to enjoy the treasures these two men created only because they held onto long after the logic of efficiency said there was no point.

Creating valuable things is worth failing at. Doing good work is worth failing at. Loving people well is worth failing at. The wise man prays, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” We often quote that passage to remind ourselves that life is short. But I think we also ought to quote it to remember that it’s long, too. And that’s a kind of math a computer will never do.