A Well-lived Life is Wildly Inefficient

The bill has been paid. One woman has already put on her coat, though she’s still sitting down. Her friend folds the receipt in half and says, “I think I’m going to tell her I don’t want the job.”

They’ve spent most of lunch talking about other things. The job came up once, briefly, and she said she was excited. She meant it when she said it. She’d spent six months trying to mean it.

Her friend takes off her coat.

There’s a perfectly sensible version of this afternoon in which both women get up when they’ve finished eating. One picks up a prescription on the way home. The other answers a few emails before her next meeting. Both have accomplished exactly what they meant to accomplish, and the woman with the job offer goes home still telling herself how lucky she is.

A well-lived life is full of time that would be difficult to justify in advance. Try putting “wait for my friend to change her mind out loud” on a calendar. You’d have a hell of a time knowing how much of the afternoon to block off.

Efficiency has done plenty for women. Anything that makes laundry take less of a Saturday has my blessing. I’m interested in what happens to the Saturday we get back. A woman discovers a way to do three hours of work in two, and almost immediately someone has a good idea about what she could do with the third. Often it’s her own good idea. She’s had years of practice spotting an opening and filling it before anybody has to ask.

By noon she’s put away the laundry, returned a package, booked the dentist, and used the drive home to call the woman she used to spend whole Saturdays with. They get twelve minutes before she pulls into the driveway. She loves this friend and is genuinely glad they got to talk. She also has no idea what her friend was about to say after “Actually, things have been a little strange at home.” She was halfway out of the car by then, holding her purse and a carton of eggs.

We admire a woman who can find twenty minutes to do somebody a favor. Let her take twenty minutes to get into a dress she loves, with a row of tiny buttons down the back and nowhere especially important to go, and suddenly we’re all very interested in whether she has the time. Of course she has the time. We just saw her find it for somebody else.

Even a woman who lives alone can feel obliged to make a case for an afternoon she spends entirely as she pleases. Ask what she did on Sunday and she’ll tell you she did nothing, though she walked down to the water, bought a peach from a man selling fruit out of his truck, and ate it on a wall in the sun. She took her shoes off. She stayed until she could feel the heat of the stone through her skirt. When she says she did nothing, she might mean it was the first afternoon in weeks she’d happily live through twice.

I think of deoptimization as choosing to spend a little more of yourself on something you actually want to experience. You walk to the bakery on the long route because a house on that street has a jasmine hedge, and this is the week it’s in bloom. You read five pages of a book and go back to the first one because you suspect you missed something delicious. You cook with a friend who takes forever to chop an onion. By the time dinner is ready, you know something about her mother you never would have thought to ask.

Some pleasures need the time they take. You can smell the jasmine from the car with the windows down. On foot you might notice that the woman who lives there is out with her pruning shears. You’ve walked past her house for years, and this time she asks if you’d like a cutting. Now you know her name, and there’s a jar of water on your kitchen windowsill with a twig in it that may or may not take root.

And sometimes you take the long way and all you get is the smell of jasmine. A woman ought to be able to say that was worth twenty minutes and let the conversation end there.

There’s an appetite in those choices that a well-managed day can quietly starve. You can get very good at moving through your life and go whole weeks without lingering over anything long enough to find out how much you like it. You can get so accustomed to fitting pleasure in around the edges that when you finally have a free afternoon, you spend the first hour looking for something to get out of the way.

It takes a little nerve to find out what you enjoy when you give it more than the scraps of your attention. You might discover you want to see a friend every week, even though the two of you have been saying “we should do this more often” for seven years. You might want to learn something you’ll be mediocre at for a long time. You might get attached to a perfectly ordinary Thursday and start taking that attachment seriously when somebody offers you a very respectable reason to give it up.

Back at the café, the woman who’s thinking about turning down the job admits she already knows what she wants to do with her Thursdays. There’s a ceramics class she’s been looking at. It starts at four, which is an absurd time to ask a room full of adults to put on aprons and make bowls. She’s had the registration page open on her phone for three weeks.

She’s embarrassed to bring it up in the same conversation as the salary, which is generous. She tells her friend the salary again anyway. Her friend says, “Well, shit. That is a lot of money.”

They sit with it. A server comes by and takes the water glasses. The woman who was ready to leave checks the time, puts her phone facedown, and asks what her friend would make first.



A bowl, she says. A big shallow one, blue on the inside, for the lemons she keeps buying and leaving in the bag.

By then the table has been cleared. They order two more coffees.