As the price of fuel goes up, shiny new SUVs look shinier than ever; we’re not washing them more often, we’re just driving them less—especially in Alaska, where some drivers pay more than seven dollars a gallon for gasoline.

But this is not another anti-cartel, anti-big business, anti-government rant. If you’re looking for a reason to be miserable about the state of the economy, you won’t find it here. I was a university student living in Alexandria, Virginia, during the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. High fuel prices were a frustrating fact of life then, as they are today, and the lines at the gas station were a lot longer.

Instead of complaining about the spike in fuel prices from Anchorage to Alexandria, we should be grateful.

Think about it. If the U.S. has made progress in energy and the environment over the past forty years, the 1973 OPEC Embargo was a major turning point. As someone who remembers asking his parents why Pittsburgh smelled so bad when we drove through it in the late 1950s, I can attest to the fact that real progress has been made.

Big problems create even bigger opportunities to find a better way to do things. Whether we face challenges as individuals or as a society, problems are a necessary goad. They’re painful, but they’re the only thing that gets us moving in the right direction.

In The Harried Leisure Class, Staffan Linder described a society that needed to be goaded into a change of direction. Forty years ago, Linder predicted that the tempo of life would become increasingly hectic. He showed why increases in productivity in rich countries would lead not to an increase in leisure but to less free time for average wage-earners.

Linder’s main point was that economic growth entails a general decline not only in the quantity but also in the quality of leisure. Linder realized that “consumption time” would replace “culture time” in prosperous economies. “Just as working time becomes more productive when combined with more capital, so consumption time can give a higher yield when combined with more consumer goods,” he explained.

When tourists film family members climbing a Mayan pyramid, the “goods” added to the leisure activity—a camera, in this case—actually reduce the pleasure derived. Instead of imagining what it might have been like to scale the pyramid 1,000 years ago, we worry about the quality of the images we’re capturing.

“If total consumption time is constant,” Linder theorized, “there will thus be a decline in absolute figures in the time devoted to activities that are not particularly dependent on goods.”

Buying the most expensive digital camera on the market will hardly increase the pleasure derived from a candlelight dinner with your spouse. But a bigger and more expensive flat-panel television set will certainly heighten your enjoyment of the Super Bowl.

As productivity increases and goods become cheaper, people spend more time watching the Discovery Channel and less time trying to discover a vision for their lives. The bottom line: as the economy grows, we will have bigger and better Super Bowls and fewer candlelight dinners.

Chilling Questions

Social media websites attempt to increase the yield on consumption time by adding consumer goods to activities that aren’t dependent on them. Simulated experiences like Second Life, the online world where residents use real money to buy and sell virtual real estate, reveal deep confusion about wants and how to satisfy them.

The explosion of social media websites is a result of two things: our growing technological capability and our increasing scarcity of time. The Web, of course, is the perfect platform for speeding everything up; social media sites accelerate the process of meeting people and developing new relationships—and, presumably, of ending relationships when they go bad.

But are travelers on the Information Highway driving in the dark about the things that matter most? Does the Internet lead to decisions based more on impulse than on analysis? Does the accelerated pace at which all kinds of transactions take place on the Internet lead us to expect faster results in all areas of our lives?

Few economists today take the time to ponder the chilling questions that Linder asked 40 years ago:

“The requirement that the yield on time must increase as the level of income rises is a general one; it relates to time spent on all different purposes, including, as we have seen, in making decisions. And it must apply to the time spent in making all sorts of decisions, not just economic ones. Only half in jest, one can perhaps claim to find examples of a declining quality of decision-making in all possible fields. Is it possible that we devote less and less time to forming our opinions on a life after death? Is it that we spend less and less time thinking of the ultimate purpose of our economic growth?”

Economics is all about choices. In Linder’s view, a solution “presupposes that people desire to spend their time in a way that does not involve consumption centered on goods.”

Every time we hear someone complain about the high price of gasoline, we have a choice: we can go on worrying and complaining about it, or we can exchange a trip to Starbucks for quiet time at home. We can use the time to write a personal mission statement or to discover how to help a hungry child.

If you live in Alaska, you might even find a reason to be grateful for $7-a-gallon gasoline.