The Pursuit of Frivolity

In his recent book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley notes that "prosperity is simply time saved." This insight achieves that rare dual feat of being both obvious and profound. Consider, for instance, how much you are able to accomplish because you have a washing machine and do not, as a result, have to spend hours down at the river laundering your unmentionables. Or ponder for a moment how much less you'd be able to do if oxygen didn't occur naturally or if rain didn't fall on its own (putting aside the obvious fact that we couldn't very well do anything without either of these). 

Point is, as societies become wealthier, humans have more time on their hands. With these additional minutes, hours, and days, some folks devote their energies to finding ways to give us even more time (via email, airplanes, medicine, etc.), thereby making us even more prosperous. Others, meanwhile, dedicate themselves to what I'll call "the pursuit of frivolity," that is, to bringing pure happiness, for its own sake, to the world. My favorite examples of these latter pursuits, as I've written before, include Bumper Nuts and The Pooter. (Of course, happiness is itself another variety of wealth, so perhaps the creators of these treasures are not so different from those who improve pharmaceuticals or fine-tune Wal-Mart's logistical operations.)

To Bumper Nuts and the Pooter - those wonders of our modern world - I can today add the video above, in which some blessed soul took the time (and what time it must have required) to synchronize scenes from classic American musicals, such as those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, to the Bee Gees' disco classic "Stayin' Alive." I suspect that if we were able to transport our hunter-gatherer ancestors to the present day, they'd ask not where we got the technology to produce such a video, but rather where we got the time. 

This video, then, which embodies technology and time, is prosperity itself.