Reflecting on this more...
🏭 In a dissociated, transactional system (eg typical corporation) efficiency is ~external: output per input (widgets/h, energy/$, etc)
🕸️ In an integrated, generative system, efficiency is ~internal: value & meaning per unit struggle
The thing I'm pointing at here is that if you have one system measuring the efficiency of another system, that it considers to be separate from itself, it will tend to try to extract maximum output, with minimal regard to the health & flow of the system in question.
If you read accounts of cultures not based on this (eg in Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept (1975)), you can see that they're approaching life in a totally different way than this.
< also Christian de Quincy's bit about pre-conquest societies >
Here's an excerpt from Christian de Quincey's Radical Knowing quoting someone talking about a kind of culture based on a "lush sensuality", and caring for well-being.
It's possible to run a company as an integrated, generative system (a fuckton of contemporary business books are trying to point at this) though by default the attractor basin for most companies doesn't really care about human experience, due to measuring efficiency as out/in.
I'm tentatively putting struggle as the denominator of the generative system efficiency... I basically mean internal friction or dukkha.
Clearly time or energy isn't it—spending more time or burning more calories at ecstatic dance doesn't reduce the measure of