Surrogate Activities
The work of Christian pacifist, sociologist, and philosopher, Jacques Ellul, addressed all sorts of topics, but he's become especially well-known in recent decades for his thoughts on modern technology and how it influences human thinking and freedom.
In particular, he believed that the developmental path our technologies have taken have resulted in a loss of intellectual and practical liberty: we've basically diminished ourselves in order to integrate our increasingly sophisticated tools into our lives and societies.
This implies, in his thinking, that we should refocus our energy and attention so as to achieve absolute efficiency for our current level of development, using our tools to free up time and cognitive space we can apply in our pursuit of the divine—which might mean the theological divine, but might also mean our higher calling, a sort of natural sacredness, or other such things.
Ellul's work was already fairly popular throughout the 20th century amongst philosophers and sociologists, but his notoriety reached new heights in 1995 when a fan of his work, Ted Kaczynski, riffed upon his ideas in a widely disseminated manifesto called Industrial Society and Its Future.
Kaczynski, who lated became known as the Unabomber, was very into the idea that technology is rotting society from the inside and killing humanity's potential, though he arrived at substantially different conclusions from the, again, pacifistic Ellul about how this issue should be addressed; Ellul shared ideas and arguments, Kaczynski killed people with bombs.
This is interesting in part because it demonstrates how a worldview, deeply felt and believed in, can lead people down radically different life paths.
But it's also interesting in that these sorts of ideas can have second and third lives, carried in the mouths and other communications of intellectual descendants.
The most recent iteration of this collection of concepts can be found on social media platforms, like Twitter and Medium, where people are leveraging the Ellul-derived idea of Surrogate Activities, which refers to anything we do that isn't necessary for our survival and base level of flourishing (and which thus stands in the way of us being as efficient as we might otherwise be), as a sort of productivity-focused lifehack.
Surrogate Activities include things like playing sports, fiddling around on social media, and working out beyond the level necessary to perform one’s most fundamental labors.
We create additional challenges for ourselves, this theory posits, because otherwise we get bored with or overwhelmed by the necessities of raw survival.
Were we not busily trying to beat that new video game or pursuing ever-more-impressive job titles, we would evolve faster as individuals and societies, becoming impressively efficient at all the stuff that actually needs doing.
Instead, it's posited, we fixate on all these other, self- and society-invented tasks and journeys. We expend our time, energy, and resources on the wrong things, basically.
There's nothing inherently incorrect or vile about this way of thinking, and it's arguably important to be able to find meaningful, valuable ideas even in the works of people we consider to be abhorrent.
At the same time, it's worth acknowledging that the path ideas take can be meandering, that we all respond to the same ideas differently because of the variables that have shapes our lives, and that sometimes ideas will be presented out of context—intentionally or unintentionally—and that can lead to a decontextualization of those ideas, denying us hard-earned understandings of how their application might (in some situations, for some people) lead to different real-world outcomes.