Got Schmilk?
Fifty years ago, it was common for prognosticators to peer into their crystal balls and forecast a brave new world of leisure that awaited us in the future.
Automation would whittle our workweeks down to three days – at the very most – and the most pressing problem we would face is how to fill all the spare hours that would stretch before us.
Well, we all know how that turned out. Technology has led to productivity increases in leaps and bounds, but it has not led to increases in the amount of leisure. In fact, large numbers of Americans toil at their jobs well beyond the standard 40-hour workweek, and, in the United States, workers tend to get fewer paid days off than their counterparts in other industrialized nations. The danger that society will confront a crisis of bored people looking for ways to while away their days seems like a very, very long way off.
This is underscored by the fact that some of the go-getters of Silicon Valley have recently taken to guzzling down protein-laden, powdered concoctions that blend together milk, water and assorted nutrients so they don’t have to leave their desks for even the brief respite of a meal.
According to The New York Times, some of these products go by the names Schmilk or Schmoylent, and they provide a quick calorie hit apparently so filling that, in the words of one enthusiast, “It just removes food completely from my morning equation up until about 7 p.m.” Another hard-charger told the newspaper, “Let’s do away with all the marketing facade and get the calories as quickly as we can.”
Schmilk and Schmoylent may, from all accounts, provide enough fuel to keep a dedicated techie chained to their desk so they can hammer out endless amounts of code, but the drinks are not all that tasty. Sam Sifton, the Times‘ food editor, likened them to “a meal made of milk left in the bottom of a bowl of cut-rate cereal, the liquid thickened with sweepings from the floor of a health food store, and you have some sense of what it is like to consume the protein-packed shakes that have replaced Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Red Bull in the diets of some tech workers …”
Boy. Sounds positively yummy.
If the reward for slaving around the clock is slugging down a savorless shake, you have to wonder what all that work is for in the first place.