In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to “life hacks” that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I’ve personally experimented with several life hacks in the past decade, and we’ve even written about some on AoM. But are there downsides to trying to hack your way through life?
My guest took a look at both the positives and negatives of life hacking in his book, Hacking Life: Systemized Living and Its Discontents. His name is Joseph Reagle, and he’s a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. We begin our conversation with a history of the life hacking movement and how blogging in the early 2000s made this obscure cultural movement amongst computer programmers go mainstream. Joseph then discusses how he distinguishes between “nominal life hacking” and “optimal life hacking” and between “geeks” and “gurus.” We then discuss some of the beneficial productivity and motivation hacks out there, but also how there are ways they can go astray — including only working for a certain class of people and becoming too much of a focus in life. We also discuss how the minimalism movement can sometimes lead to contradictory impulses, and end our conversation talking about how using spiritual practices like meditation or Stoicism as hacks can strip them of their deeper contexts.
