What is Lifehacker? What are Lifehacks?
I'm impressionable, young, driven, find productivity an adulatory end in itself, want to be more present for my friends and more excited by my life and work, so yes, I read up on lifehacks. I read up on all of the lunatic secrets there are to lose that extra weight, to get that extra hour of sleep, to remain calm and engaged in all settings, to have all of my demands met with a smile. I am constantly trying to optimize things, because I place the responsibility of happiness and unhappiness squarely on myself.
You probably have your little lifehacks too, your little neat tricks you swear by. And you have the same goals. And you have some of the same solutions. Even if you disdain the microdosers, the Soylent-drinkers, the sadsacks who seem to always want to cut corners to success or optimize their sex networks, you also value little tricks that can save your life. I have a friend that can't stand the Bay Area optimizer, but frets over which word processor would be best for writing her novel in. She wants success with her novel, and wants to use any little trick, even so small as choosing a word processor, to ensure that outcome.
We all lifehack because we want success.
And so, I am indeed an avid reader of Lifehacker, G/O Media's platform for Lifehacks. But reading through its encyclicals, one gets mixed messages on what constitutes our individual pursuits of greatness, good life, and happiness; or at the least, one gets confused as to what exactly a lifehack is. Lifehacker's advice is often of tenuous relationship to our quality of life, like when it recommends the Best Streaming Movies With Public Domain Characters. Unless there is some tax write-off for consuming public domain media of which I am unaware, I generally doubt that increasing consumption specifically of public domain characters affords benefits to one's life. Perhaps a specific obsessive may measure their life's worth by such a yardstick, but I doubt this applies generally. Here we have a lifehack that does not appear to improve anything, and if it did improve anything, it doubtless would do little to improve life in general, so that whether we define a lifehack as something which improves some specific element in life or something which changes the cumulative tenor of our experienced life, I doubt this meets the criteria. The meaning of lifehack seems so stretched: How to Buy a Ghost Town seems a how to guide with little value, or how to get involved with the AirBnB of pools whose explanatory power rises barely to the level of a hack (you download the app, you use it, and that's how you rent or rent out pools; the article is an ad), or other articles about media, like 21 Movies and TV Shows The Are Basically 'Kindness Porn'. The kindness porn one at least purports to be about healing the collective trauma of COVID-19, but it seems a bit derisive a headline.
And the r/lifehacks subreddit, a more democratic vision of what a lifehack constitutes, is equally as zigzagged. There, you can learn how to use a hard boiled egg for plumbing purposes, or how to heighten your hedonism by watching more TV in the shower. Once more, I suppose these are simple tricks which assist in some cranny of life, but is my life all that better if I waste time and water in the shower because I have hooked it up to play Futurama episodes while I bathe? Should I also find a lifehack on how to ignore my shower television so that I bathe efficiently and save money on my water utilities? These don't seem to me, exactly, to beget the ubermencsh.
Sanrio, the company behind Hello Kitty and other beloved mascots, is currently hosting the 2021 Sanrio Character Ranking. In this contest, fans of such lovable figures as Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Aggretsuko vote to rank the ultimate Sanrio character. I bring this up only for the tagline of this contest: Take Action for Our Brighter Future.
The brighter future, here, seems to me similar to our stretched definition of lifehacks. Determining the best Sanrio character may improve our lives somewhat, may make our future a little brighter, but I don't think it turns up the bulb that much. If anything, this is just so Sanrio can figure out what socks and sweaters they should keep in stock, and which, featuring less beloved characters, should be discontinued. It won't optimize our future, but it may optimize Sanrio's.
Every election, we are told, is the most important of our lives, and I don't want to cheat Sanrio out of making such a claim. But I am skeptical. I am skeptical that we always invoke the lofty verbiage of improvement, of saving the world, when doing things as small as picking out software or voting for characters. It speaks to some deep anxiety I think we all have that the things we do don't matter, or that we aren't working hard enough to get the things we need. The novelist who frets over good software, the media-obsessive worried that showering cuts them off briefly from Netflix, we put so much meaning into things that are essentially meaningless. It seems, it is, exhausting.
Here's my favorite lifehack from r/lifehacks.
How to find the perfect gift
The perfect gift is something they will use a lot, but can't justify spending their own money on.
Is this really the sort of thing that a lifehacker can bring their expertise to? Clearly not, given that the heuristic above is slippery and open to interpretation. And why are we looking for expertise when giving gifts? It seems about as useful as optimizing our pasta sauces.
Initially, I saw the Nothing New Challenge as a bit of a lifehack. With this one easy trick, I would reduce my guilt as to how I am personally tarnishing the planet, and I would save more money.
It's mostly failed in this regard. I think that my personal guilt has only risen, a truth I think that comes for many who attempt to earn repentance, since now, having gone vegan and committed to reuse, I feel like any small infraction I make against the environment--e.g. picking rush shipping instead of regular shipping--a very bad thing. The easiest way to not feel guilt is to the ignore the crime, not to serve a sentence, though that sounds like an awful lifehack by which to abide. And as for money saved, even that's hard to read, since I was never much a big spender anyways, and COVID-19 has so thoroughly nuked our economy that it's hard to tell what is unrealistic and realistic consumption. I've bought numerous train tickets. Does this make me a heavy spender?
What the challenge has given me though is a heightened awareness of products, and the writing I have done for this blog likely would not be possible without me taking this more introspective look towards consumption. I think it has made me more aware of what it means to own things in this world, to buy things, what makes a product work and what makes a product unusable.
But is this a lifehack? One could say yes, since we value introspection so greatly; the life unconsidered is not worth living, said Socrates. But this seems so flimsy next to the practicality of more traditional lifehacks, those lifehacks which protect your internet privacy or which let you eat everything that you want when you want and still maintain a slim summer figure. (If those ever existed: lifehacking may be our Paul Bunyan, our intimate modern American tall tale).
I wish I had a way to be introspective, but more importantly, I wish there were a lifehack to help me suspend my introspection. I suppose were there such a lifehack it would be talk therapy.
Which brings us, one again, to the amorphous nature of the genre, that thing that makes it such a background radiation to our lives, the gentle radio hum telling us to always and ever improve: most lifehacks aren't singular quick fixes, which is what is implied by hack, for when a programmer hacks together something it means she's bandaged it together right quick in a way that should absolutely not be used long term. Most real lifehacks are the opposite; they're small, everyday improvements. Akin to a programmer who spends an evening commenting their code and fixing the little bugs rather than developing the next killer feature. Eating more whole grains. Drinking less. Doing a sun salutation every morning and using your standing desk converter to ensure your posture is straight. Saying you're grateful each morning even when you think you can't. We all desire and think about lifehacks daily, we embody this constant self-improvement, or I do at least, because I do sincerely want to get better, despite how boring and incremental the path may be. And the path is boring and incremental.
It's all lifehacks, and nothing is lifehacks, and it's all rather unsexy and plodding like brushing your teeth everyday, or relatively useless like clogging your bathtub using a boiled egg, or based on an ill-defined understanding of what it means to be better and more productive like whether or not introspection as attained by a no-buy is a good thing or not, and therefore the entire word rests on a specious philosophical notion of productivity, but it is this very notion which is our main ideology, the main ideology of the young. We all believe in getting better, and we all wish that, like the tooth fairy or Bernie Madoff, there were some easy fix to get there.