The Netflix Challenge

Years ago I joined a large organisation as an interim Vice President of software engineering, and within the first week I discovered something remarkably interesting. A good portion of the engineering team – clever, experienced, properly talented people – were playing a game they'd called the Netflix Challenge. The rules were brilliantly simple: watch as much Netflix as humanly possible during work hours without being caught.

They'd built a leader-board. A shared top-twenty of the best shows with a ratings and review system to go with it. They'd got time tracking, prizes and a full chat system too. It was, being honest, beautifully organised, beautifully crafted and beautifully designed. The sheer level of ingenuity that had gone into building the whole apparatus was, if anything, more impressive than most of what the company had shipped that quarter.

What struck me that this wasn't laziness. It was ability, energy, attention and time – a great deal of it – pointed with genuine commitment in entirely the wrong direction. These weren't people avoiding work so much as escaping meaninglessness and banality. The work they should have been doing, and the people they were doing it for, wasn't offering them anything, so they'd checked out and found a more interesting place to invest their finite resources. And they'd found it on Netflix.

I told that story for years as a story about them. It took me a pretty long time to notice it was also a story about me. And, I suspect, maybe about you.

Because, nearly a century ago, a man called Jay B. Nash proposed a simple model for how people spend their leisure – their time, their life outside of obligation. He called it the Leisure Time Pyramid: a loose hierarchy running from activities that numb and harm at the base, up through passive consumption, then active participation, to creative contribution at the very top. It's old. It's flawed – very 1920s in its moral positioning, light on data, heavy on assumption. And when I first came across it I found myself feeling unsettled, because I recognised exactly how much of my own life was being lived down in the escape zone. The evenings that ended in a few beers on the sofa, a bit of Netflix myself, then into doom scrolling the web. The Netflix Challenge, it turned out, wasn't a quirk of one engineering team. It was actually a salaried version of what many of us do.

The first level of the pyramid is escape: entertainment as an anaesthetic to boredom and the absence of meaning. Scrolling, streaming, killing time. Sure, let's be honest, everyone needs to escape sometimes; the base of the pyramid isn't a character flaw, it's the way many of us unwind and release the pressure in life. No judgement passed, some people wish to live their lives here. For those who want to create, to build, to contribute at work – well, the trouble isn't visiting this level at all, it's living there – that point when escape becomes the default setting of a life. Because down in the escape zone nothing accumulates and nothing improves, except perhaps your ranking on a Netflix leader-board. The evening you meant to do something with, the book you said you'd read, the board game that your kids wanted to play, the skills you've said you'll learn – gives way, consistently and frequently, to six series of the latest drama at No.1 in the most streamed chart. That's escape. So is the meeting you've mentally left while perfecting the art of looking keen, engaged and bought in.

A level up sits passive participation: watching other people do meaningful work. Learning by observation, following someone else's script. This can be a remarkably good way to learn something. It is healthy – necessary, even, at certain stages of anything and different seasons of life. But it's still consumption. You're present, but you're not yet shaping anything of your own. It's the difference between watching the cooking programme and cooking, between reading endlessly about the thing and finally doing the thing, between watching a photographer craft amazing landscape photos and getting out into the hills with your own camera. We shouldn't be too quick to judge at this level either – passive participation is how we learn from people better than us. It is, in a form, a type of information acquisition.

Above that is active participation: doing the work, reliably, within a known frame, set of constraints and guidelines. Playing the songs, cooking the recipe, doing the job well and consistently inside familiar and trusted boundaries. This is the engine of most of a life and work, and it's genuinely valuable – not everything has to be invented from scratch, some things just need doing. A great deal of what's good in the world is simply someone participating actively, and well, day after day.

And at the top: creative participation. Making something that wasn't there before. Solving the problem nobody had solved in years, finding a better way, writing, building, designing, improving, inventing, sharing, filming, teaching. It's effortful, very much so and it asks for attention, for space, for a tolerance of ambiguity and a willingness to risk that it might not work. Which is why it's also where the deepest meaning tends to live for many people. It's the place most people, thinking back, will tell you they felt most alive.

Now here's the part that's worth playing with. The movement from escape up toward creation is not automatic, often not linear and certainly not just a case of willpower. It needs conditions. It needs the right climate. Because, I've come to believe, almost nobody actually wants to live at the bottom of the pyramid for ever. People don't set out to fritter their one life on a leader-board. They nudge downward when creation starts to feel inaccessible or risky, or they've been led to believe it's not for them. When the line from effort to outcome goes blurry, when it gets hard and there's nobody to support them, when the surrounding noise is too loud to think inside, when good work goes unseen, when the direction is so vague that any effort feels arbitrary. When meaning is absent, escape becomes the least costly option available and the easiest to retreat to. It asks for no investment of yourself, it carries no risk of coming to nothing, and it brings the warm and fluffy comfort of not caring about something that wasn't giving you anything back.

Which, I think, reframes the whole pyramid. Where a person sits on it is not, mostly, a report on their character, their motivation, or their talent. It's a report on the conditions they're living in. Change the soil and people rise up the levels without being pushed. Leave the soil poor and even the most driven person will, sooner or later, settle for more and more escape. It's true of a team, and it's just as true of a marriage, a friendship, a Sunday, a whole decade. We are far more shaped by our climate than we like to admit.

And this is where an old Japanese word that you may have seen across this site fits in: mottainai – that little pang of regret at waste, at something precious squandered or not brought to life. We tend to reach for it over food scraped into the bin, or natural resources discarded. But the escape zone is where the genuinely irreplaceable things drain away consistently – time, energy, attention – often with little to show for them. That's the real cost. An evening is finite. A life is a stack of evenings.

So is a day spent watching Netflix at work. To pour rare and inventive minds into staying one step ahead of the leader's eyeline is mottainai of a heartbreaking kind – not because those engineers were bad people, but because all that ability had nowhere better to go. (Their team, incidentally, scored perfectly well on the staff engagement survey – because comfort is easily mistaken for engagement — but that's an essay of its own.)

I've pondered this a lot, and I think there's a fascinating and useful question, when you find yourself parked in escape – or find someone you care about parked there. Not "what's wrong with them?" or "what's wrong with me?" It's "what's wrong with the climate and conditions?"

I've found it a good thing to be extremely kind to anyone playing a version of the Netflix Challenge; the odds are overwhelming that the system around them built the very cage they're so cleverly tunnelling out of. And be exactly that kind to yourself too.

The prompt for this seems simple enough: where is most of my time, energy and attention going – am I creating, participating, or escaping? And what would it take to move up a level: not permanently, not perfectly, but a little more often?

Because most people, underneath it all, want to make something. They want to improve something. They care about something. They want to find out what they're capable of. They want to discover more about themselves. And they want to feel like they're doing something valuable. When they can't, they escape instead – not normally out of character, but out of circumstance. Those engineers weren't lazy. They were some of the most inventive people in the building, and they'd aimed every bit of that invention at a leader-board for watching television, because it was the only place their ingenuity was allowed to go.

The kindest and most powerful thing any of us can do – for the people around us, and for ourselves – is to give all that pent-up brilliance somewhere better to point.

And in case you are curious, we did just that. Slowly, carefully creating the conditions for them to point their ability at something worth doing, rather than handing them their P45 and starting again. The Netflix challenge ended the day I found out about it, but 50 odd people turned their attention to themselves, to the business, to the ideas we were trying to turn into value, and that was worth more in the end than being No.1 on the leader-board. At least I hope it was.