An app nearly prevented me from picking up my own child this week. My younger daughter’s day camp has a convoluted, high-tech authorization system. Before camp started, I needed to log into its website, download an auto-generated code and activate it. When I meet the bus, I type my code into a counselor’s phone.
In the best of circumstances, this is an extra — and to me, unnecessary — step. As Let Grow, a nonprofit supporting childhood independence, points out, a child is five times more likely to have a conjoined twin than to be kidnapped by a stranger.
But on Monday, the app wasn’t working. I observed an increasingly frantic and sweaty counselor (not equipped with a backup paper version of the codes) try to deal with an angry line of guardians, the honking city traffic behind the bus and a passel of grumpy, tired children who just wanted to go home.
After some negotiation we were allowed to grab our kids, just this once, without the app’s say-so. But it was a glaring and painful example of “enshittification” — the degrading over time of service on tech platforms. The bus incident also represented something else: the failed promise of technology to make our lives more efficient and the ultimate emptiness of peak “efficiency” as a buzzword or an organizing principle of modern life.
New technology — from a sewing machine to an A.I.-enabled assistant — is often sold with the promise of speed. The idea is that the drudgery will happen more quickly, so you’ll have more time to devote to the things that “really matter”: the more satisfying, creative parts of a job or more time for friends, family or leisure.
But we have had granular time-use data from the American Time Use Survey for the past 20 years. The A.T.U.S. suggests that even as we have tiny computers in our pockets that swear they can save us from tedious tasks, the way Americans work has barely shifted even as technology has rapidly evolved. If anything, we spend more time doing domestic work and roughly the same amount of time doing paid labor.
The A.T.U.S. released its 2024 survey in late June. Fully employed men are doing slightly less work than they did in 2004. Fully employed women are doing slightly more work. Both men and women are doing more child care, regardless of work status, and everybody is doing much more overall domestic work, like cooking, cleaning and house maintenance. Leisure time is pretty similar is basically unchanged.
At first, such a small shift surprised me; people were already complaining about the stress of “intensive mothering” in the ’90s, but the ante on time spent on domestic work and child care keeps increasing, for both men and women. “More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave,” a book by the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan that was published in the mid-80s, explains why. Cowan argues that for every new technology introduced, expectations of time spent on cleanliness, care and food preparation were heightened.
One vivid example Cowan gives was when commercially milled white flour hit the market in the 19th century. Quick breads, which were easy to make and required little labor, went out of fashion. Elaborately created yeast breads and pastries became some of the first “symbols of status in the industrial period” for “educated and refined” ladies because they “indicated that the household could afford both the cash that was necessary for the purchase of the flour and the housewifely (or servantly) time that was required for its preparation.”
Cowan isn’t arguing to turn back the clock to hand-milling all of our grain or claiming that a microwave isn’t helpful. She concludes that it’s important to recognize that a lot of the “rules” we live by are governed by fear of not keeping up, and that fear is exploited by corporations. “If we can learn to select among the rules only those that make sense for us in the present, we can begin to control household technology instead of letting it control us,” Cowan wrote.
The problem with the technologies of 2025 — household, work or personal — is that we don’t have control over whether we use them, which perhaps is part of why we don’t see Americans gaining any more leisure time despite the wild advances of the past two decades.
I can’t opt out of the system that requires me to have an authorization code to pick up my child for this particular camp, just as most parents can’t opt out of an online grade book or communication app used by their school system, even though they often create more hassle and time suckage than they prevent. At work, we can’t just refuse to stop answering multiple messaging systems or reject the use of A.I. out of hand if our employers insist on it. The fantasy of a perfectly efficient world that also delivers more “quality” time is perpetually out of reach.
By Wednesday, the weather had cooled down a bit, so waiting for my daughter on the city sidewalk was more pleasant. Two counselors, with two phones, were now involved in logging our authorization codes, and the process went much more smoothly.
As my daughter bounded down the bus steps, I tried to focus on her shining face. I felt the soft and pleasing weight of her hand in mine as we crossed the street. Still, it was not a particularly efficient trip. We took the long way home.
End Notes
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I have been haunted by the headline of this ProPublica article since I saw it on Tuesday: “A ‘Striking’ Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage.” In February, ProPublica wrote about how rates of sepsis increased after Texas banned abortion in 2021. In 2021, I wrote a sadly prescient article about how overturning Roe would make miscarriage care worse; this was depressingly predictable.
I plan to write about how changes to Medicaid may affect pregnant and postpartum women. If you have relevant personal experience as a patient or provider, feel free to drop me a line about it, or anything else, here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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