Hacking Life
Systematized Living and Its Discontents
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far.
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool.They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life, Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class.
Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful, evenhanded book, Northeastern University communications professor Reagle delves into the motivations and mindset of "life hackers," people who work to improve their lives by trading tips and tricks gleaned through experimentation. This study's other purpose is to consider what the popularity of life hacking suggests about the challenges of living well in an increasingly busy, market-centered age that rewards efficiency, competition, and self-disciplined productivity. Reagle devotes chapters to six domains of life often targeted for systematic self-improvement time, motivation, physical objects, health, relationships, and meaning contextualizing life hacking inclinations within a broader scope of American history and culture. The excellent chapter on hacking "stuff," for instance, explores the commitment to "cool tools" and personal minimalism typical among life hackers, and then draws connections to a wide range of cultural artifacts including Thoreau's Walden, the tech-hippie bible The Whole Earth Catalog, midcentury disability advocate newsletters, and Marie Kondo's KonMari method. Reagle argues that life hacking culture has two contrasting strains: one shaped by the manipulative grandiosity of "gurus" selling extreme methods to outcompete others, and one shaped by collaborative amateur "geeks." Throughout, Reagle reiterates the importance of moderation, encouraging readers to understand both the potentials and limitations of the life hacking approach. Readers seeking to understand this "individualistic, rational, experimental, systematizing" and increasingly influential mindset will enjoy this lively, well-written take.
