Get To Work

Why burning calories might save the world

I was house-sitting a few years ago and picked up one of the books from the bookshelf. It was Work: A History of how we spend our time by anthropologist James Suzman. His opening chapter was actually about physics, explaining that “work” is a scientific term which describes the energy transferred to an object that has force applied to it, like a baseball released from a bowling arm. In a world of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs, it was a brilliant opening, reminding us there is actually meaning to “work”: the application of energy to move things along.

Suzman then explained that this application is not a particularly rational directive, revealing the astonishment of a group of ornithologists who could not figure out why the male a particular species of bird spent months building up to 25 nests only to destroy them after completion. South Africa’s male black masked weavers will build up to 25 near-identical nests, each of which can take up to a week to build, and then tear it apart. It was hypothesised that the nests were destroyed after female inspection, but this turned out to be false. Eventually, the researchers concluded that the weaver was spending almost half the year building and destroying nests simply because it has energy to burn.

There’s something truly beautiful about this. We tend to think in terms of energy reserves and surpluses and the need to seek out or top up, particularly in the animal kingdom. The behaviour of animals (including ourselves) has typically been simplified into an equation of needs fulfilment. Yet, the conclusion of these researchers adds a dynamism to the energy question, it speaks to the animation of life, the dance we all engage in. It speaks to energy as, quite literally, the thing that gives us life and, therefore, needs to be dispensed in order to live. Perhaps living, then, is not the consumption of energy, but its expenditure.

If you encounter the parent of a Western child these days—or a teacher, doctor, social worker—they’ll tell you the kids are fucked up. A friend of mine who’s a high school teacher in Scotland recently told me he has 12 year old students who are functionally illiterate but have managed to get by with the help of read-aloud functions on computers. The rest of his class cannot sit still for thirty minutes—he can no longer throw on a documentary towards the end of term to get some marking done because television no longer holds these kids attention. Diagnoses of ADHD are through the roof around the Global North and it’s not uncommon that children’s social and language development is stunted after COVID lockdowns and a lifetime spent in front of screens.

Last year, a deeply cynical person I know commented that the problem with people today is that they’re not tired enough. I laughed it off. But, over the months, I’ve returned to that hypothesis, turning it over in my mind every time I see a child wriggling at a restaurant, or a teenager slumped over their phone ignoring their parents, or a twitter debate conducted late into the night. The first time I heard the comment, it grated against my leftist sensibility that people should be afforded more leisure time to love and create and help their small part of the world. The technological revolution was meant to be socialist: With machines doing everything else, human beings were meant to do what they love. But we’re not. Not only are we still working, we continue working on our down time by becoming ad revenue for social media platforms, a mindless activity that requires far less energy than if we were to grow our own vegetables or build a makeshift carpentry atelier or simply cook from scratch.

We only have to look at the data on obesity to know that the citizens of rich nations simply are not burning enough energy. But we are burning more energy per capita than the entirety of human history combined—the problem is that it’s from other bodies, compressed under the Earth’s crust millions of years ago. And, as far as I’m aware, we are the only biological organism to burn the energy of other bodies to power our lives. No other animal uses even fire. While plenty of our brethren use tools, these tools leverage the power in the animal’s own body. They do not supplant it.

So, yes, we’re not tired enough. We’re not tired enough because we’re burning through energy that isn’t ours, making a mockery of life by turning our own existence into that of consumption rather than expenditure. It’s why our kids can’t sit still.

Too much energy is a faster death sentence than too little. The human body burns what it stores when faced with starvation. It has no defence mechanism against the electric chair. Everything that we have built—or had thrust upon us—minimises the calories we need to burn to get by. We’re like little calorie hoarders, burning through orders of magnitude more energy just so we don’t have to bend over and root around in the soil. Of course that isn’t sustainable, not for our health nor Earth’s. (It’s also why the first act of revolution is liberating the land from over-work, like the farmers we filmed in Colombia.)

We’re not tired enough because we’re demanding trillions of other bodies do the work for us. Yet, that doesn’t make us happy or fulfilled or at ease because we’re not tired enough. Our bodies, like all other bodies, evolved to work (and what a miracle that we can experience physical fatigue after a day chewing over intellectual matter!) We were born to run hot, but our feverish demands on Earth have caused exactly that. She was never our body to burn and, unlike ours, she will burn up.

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Some key news this week:

• Global temperature rise could spike to near 2C for first time in the next five years

• State-owned Indian coal company reopens old coal mines to meet energy demand

• China is winning the trade war with its new export licence scheme for rare earths, shocking global supply chains

• Despite his spat with Musk, Trump is courting Silicon Valley defence start-ups for his stupid space defence project

• He also fired a bunch of pro-Israel officials this week, which means his relationship with the Saudis must be promising

• China a “serious threat to Russian security” says Russian intel

• American AI executive launches eyeball scanner to verify real humans in UK, and it’s pretty obviously all about data harvesting given….

• …another AI billionaire is allegedly trying to buy all the genetic data from 23andMe, the bankrupted DNA ancestry testing company