How Much of Your Life Is Really Yours?

This being a question is hurtful enough to us as a society.

Historically, “outsourcing”, delegating a task to someone else in exchange for money or goods, was reserved for things we couldn’t do ourselves, like carpentry or masonry. Today, thanks to higher incomes, we outsource daily tasks just to buy back our time for things that feel more fulfilling. But when we delegate so much of our lives just to feel something greater, where does efficiency end and where does losing ownership of our own lives begin?

Life consists of mechanical, emotionless, routine tasks like doing dishes, folding laundry, maintaining hygiene, preparing meals. But where does this list end? How do we quantify the necessity and value of chores that we pursue each day, which slowly shape us into who we are? To differentiate life into categories is disrespectful, but to attempt and fail at it might be forgivable.

My argument is that life is divided into parts, the first being your job, which brings the food on the table, and in this hyper-capitalistic world, you just cannot forsake it. This part of life isn’t truly yours, it belongs to the circumstances you inherited.

For the average person who barely has any ownership of the work they spend half their lives doing, any shortcut to completion or any opportunity to outsource or delegate their tasks must be taken. If the purpose of a task is to generate income regardless of its social consequences, then there is no need to carry the physical burden alone. Modern institutions prioritize revenue over human emotion. When your work is treated purely as a means to an end, outsourcing the heavy lifting is just matching the system’s own logic.

When Outsourcing Makes Sense

Things are rapidly changing across all professional spheres. There are endless possibilities to outsource repetitive tasks and focus on the rewarding aspects of the job. For a software engineer, coding with AI helps you ship faster than ever before. It brings a new avenue for creativity. You free up time to actually think about the users you are catering to, the gaps in existing products, and the unified goal you are pursuing. The time that would otherwise be used to build a stable tech workflow is now used to generate more revenue. If the objective for choosing a career in software was to make money, then outsourcing coding, copilots of course, never autopilot, to AI makes more sense. But the rare section of society who chose software simply because it’s a hell of a lot of fun can also outsource their mundane day job tasks to build and develop side projects that intellectually challenge them and offer true ownership. Either way, gaining back time is always a win win.

Audio engineers have had a notoriously tough job, creating the perfect rhythm for months only to end up in a flop is economically taxing. The usage of Machine Intelligence helps you release songs at a faster rate, and suddenly you are playing a game of chance where you almost have a shot at winning. The more songs you release, the higher chance of making it to the charts.

Cinematographers and graphic designers have been known to have long working hours, but their end product has always been to please the management of production houses that actually funds them. They are artists, but are they really creating art? Or are they simply creating as per directives laid down by a person looking to monetise off of their creation? Why then should artists be criticized for using machines to fulfil their professional contract and use up the cleared time for meaningful art that has the power to inspire generations to come and more importantly, art that belongs solely to them and that is how it will be remembered.

Art, Creativity, and Ownership

You have limited creativity, and if you get a golden ticket to choose where to invest it, you must take it without hesitation. What is life without art? Isn’t that the purpose of living? To explain your life in a way people can resonate with. Every action of yours boils down to something you can pass on as a lesson, a memory, or something to admire. Literature, music, art, poetry, or any form of creation is worth it if it is yours. If it has intention, novelty, and the imperfections of being human, then it is art and it must be created.

This brings me to a grave concern that most art forms are already commercialized. The objective of commercial art is to please the audience rather than serve as a means of expression for the artist. In response, artists have been using AI for creation, which reduces the entire point of art. Books have AI generated plots, songs have ghostwriters and autotune, paintings and photography are extensively edited to almost kill the moment they are supposed to capture. Artists have succumbed to an extraordinary frenzy of panic that has made them insecure and prioritise quantity over quality.

This narrative has to change. The definition of art cannot change because there is none. Art is supposed to make you feel something, and that’s all we know. True musicians who have honed their skills after years of practice will always be cherished more than any computer generated audio, no matter how much it is trending. Any cinematic experience, such as Studio Ghibli or any other with raw, unfiltered human emotion, will not be replaced by soulless machines. A person in times of despair, frantically searching for the last ray of hope, will always protect art created by humans. I can vouch for that.

Outsourcing tasks benefit us to create better and truer versions of ourselves. But outsourcing art itself is a deadlock that defeats the whole purpose of life. What are we even saving the time for? Are we just bowing out of creativity forever?

The Spaces Where Ideas Live

Here is the paradox we must sit with. Outsourcing bought us back time, we said, for creativity and meaning. But what if the very activities we’re outsourcing are where creativity lives? What if there is no separate “reclaimed time” waiting to be filled with genius? What if the genius was always hiding in the dishwater, the highway, the grocery store?

The other part of life are the things we do for ourselves like cooking, cleaning, washing, driving. While for a single person finishing these tasks should be easy and less time-consuming, the rise of overconsumption has led to a higher individual maintenance standard in terms of cost and time both. Outsourcing them creates employment for those in need and clears up your time for the more important things in life like fitness and art.

All art is creative, all creativity comes from chaotic ideas, and all ideas come from strange feelings. Feelings do not have a daily fixed schedule. Their beauty lies in their uncertainty of timing. This brings me to my next argument. If you cannot set aside time for having an idea or a feeling, what is the point of saving time? The greatest ideas came from a falling apple while sleeping or a long bath that caused the Eureka moment. In my experience, all my favourite ideas have come to me when I’m least looking for them, almost when I’m in a mechanical, meditative trance, personally, it’s doing the dishes, which I absolutely hate but do occasionally. Daily chores require no brain activity, only some involuntary muscle movement that creates a trance. So is it really needed to outsource the one activity besides sleeping that puts your brain to rest and still lets your mind run freely, which is the epicentre of creativity?

Consider the cascade. When you outsource the manual, you lose the meditative. When you lose the meditative, you lose the space where ideas drift in without permission. You are left with only the time you’ve “saved”, and you fill it, desperately, with more of the same kind of work that exhausted you in the first place. You have bought back an hour and spent it answering emails.

What Gets Lost When We Outsource

It makes no sense to outsource tasks like driving. You can’t really achieve much in the backseat of your car except let your mind free, which is achievable while driving too. In fact, I have noticed that I am closer to nature while driving and closer to people while in the backseat. Talking of nature, one of the best ways to inspire yourself is to go out into the open to walk, cycle, or simply sit. No great idea comes indoors, and hence outsourcing daily chores clears up time for you to be one with nature.

Cooking, too, has always been outsourced by many people, but as an activity to me, it connects me with the smaller parts of nature. There is an affectionate feeling while cooking for someone you love that cannot be replaced by telling the cook what to make.

As a generation, we have stopped going to the grocery store to buy things. Everything gets delivered to our doorstep. We have outsourced shopping almost completely. This makes us lose memories. As a generation, we cannot differentiate between organic and hybrid products, nor do we know the difference in taste between Iranian Dates and Arabian Dates. When everything is a click away, we feel like we have too many options, but the truth is we are in an ever shrinking portal of freedom of choice. A manufactured choice is different from an experienced choice. In this process, we are also losing simple anecdotes we collect by going to the vegetable mart, meeting people of all ages and backgrounds, listening to their stories, telling them ours. Any task that involves interaction with the community must not be delegated. Interaction is the easiest form of art.

The joy and stories brought by travelling are unmatched. Travelling is known to be the most cherished activity by humans. Exploring new places is fodder to the soul. Historically, travelling was admired because of the damn inconvenience it caused. The best stories come out of uncomfortable situations. But today, if you have enough money, travelling is pretty easy and enjoyable. However, navigating a city with Google Maps has absolutely no thrill. It is safe, and it must be new, but is it worth a story if you didn’t lose your way or end up talking to 10 new people asking for directions and still didn’t end up reaching your destination? Should exploration be outsourced to Google Maps? Flights and means of travel must definitely be outsourced to save time and general safety, but navigation I’m against.

But there are tasks that go beyond mere efficiency. These are the ones where outsourcing doesn’t save time. It saves you from having to show up.

The worst blow that outsourcing brought was dating apps. It hurts my soul to see them floating around. Did we really need to give up the process of finding love? Meeting people, checking compatibility, and all this by chance encounters and fate. Today, meeting people through dating apps is so shallow, it feels like browsing through objects with different product descriptions and rejecting them based on a predefined checklist. Are we outsourcing emotional labour to fall in love, get our hearts broken, and even meet new people?

The reason this cuts so deep is that we have not simply outsourced a task. We have outsourced the vulnerability that comes with wanting someone. We have outsourced the courage of a chance meeting. We have outsourced the part of ourselves that was always most alive.

Our lives have been revolving around our jobs and the market imperative to go out there and make more money. Money is never going to be enough, and hence we are stuck in an endless loop of work. One drawback of this chase behind money is that we now have to outsource parenting, too. Due to work requirements, people have to leave their children in crèches or hire external help to keep the child occupied. The major development years of a child have to be outsourced to external sources. We are so damaged as a society that we have no choice but to give up on the best years of a child, being emotionally and even physically absent in their life for a significant time if counted as a whole.

We outsource not just our time, but our space too, the one place where we’re supposed to be most ourselves. Houses were the most permanent mark left by humans. It was the only materialistic thing capable of identifying humans. The objects in your house for the purpose of show and decoration were a part of your life that you chose to display to the world. Today, it breaks my heart to see that interior decoration has been outsourced. There is really no story to be told in your own house of memories. Outsourcing personal choices just takes away all things that make you human. They strip you of your identity and leave you with proof of how much money you used to have.

We’ve been chasing money in an endless loop, convinced that outsourcing will free us for something better. But we’ve outsourced work, cooking, dating, parenting, even the decoration of our own homes. We’ve cleared our calendars for... what, exactly?

The question isn’t how to outsource more efficiently. The question is, what parts of your life are you willing to lose in exchange for time? Because somewhere in that equation, you stop being you.

So, I ask again. How much of your life is truly yours? And more importantly, is it the parts that matter?