Claude, Don’t Touch My Lump

Economists refer to this as the “lump of labor” fallacy, the mistaken idea that there’s one long list of all the jobs that need to be done, and that list only ever gets shorter. Technology has obviously displaced human labor; if it hadn’t, we’d all still be farmers, like we were until a few hundred years ago. [1] It just hasn’t replaced human labor on average.

But the fact is all jobs are unnecessary. In the strictest sense, we don’t need financial advisors, IT guys, kindergarten teachers, or any other professions. Humans survived just fine for several hundred thousand years doing only two jobs, namely, “hunter” and “gatherer”. The fact that our modern luxuries feel like bare necessities is proof of our limitless capacity to upgrade our nice-to-haves into must-haves. This is why the labor-lump doesn’t shrink, and why the lump of labor fallacy would perhaps be better called the finite desires fallacy.

Hominids apparently evolved the ability to make plans and imagine things at least 2 million years ago. Once we started thinking about the future, however, we never evolved the ability to stop. Like the clairvoyant Nicholas Cage character in the movie Next, a piece of our mind is always scouting ahead of us in time and attempting to warn us about what it sees there. We only live half of our existence in the present; the other half we spend in tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow. The only known antidotes to our inveterate next-ing are lots of meditation or lots of drugs.