It's time to slow down

The acceleration in the pace of life has altered our ideas of what we can expect of one another. So muddled are we by 'progress' that we are hooked to processes that turn virtual real and real virtual. The rewards? Trembling fingers, churning stomachs and pounding hearts. With words now like 'hurry sickness' and 'achiever fever', this inability to slow down is making us sicker. VISA RAVINDRAN looks at how we are spinning out of control.

"How can people believe themselves to be free if they have no space in their lives where nothing is expected of them, and if they are always late or in a hurry?"

An Intimate History of the World, Theodore Zeldin

"Time has become a commodity and one wants to get the most of one's commodities."

Geoffrey Goodbey, Professor of Leisure Studies, Pennsylvania University

YAHOO! has equipped cabs with a hand-held computer and a wireless Internet connection, it is reported, to make it possible to surf the web while riding a cab. The cabs were expected to start service in New York on September 18 last year. Trying to find out if they had, in fact started plying, I came across the reverse - a website called NY-Taxi.com where you cyberride in the world's first internet cab and see the world through a cabbie's eyes. So you can ride a real cab and live in the virtual world provided by Yahoo! Or enter the virtual world to see what one version of the real world could be. The ultimate technological triumph, of course, would be sitting in a real New York cab, logging on and then watching the world through the eyes of the website-cabbie - a true meeting of worlds, real and virtual. We are so muddled by our "progress" that we are hooked to processes that turn virtual real and real virtual, and the rewards are trembling fingers, churning stomachs and pounding hearts. We have voluntarily put ourselves on a treadmill that never stops.

Technology has changed our actions and reactions. The acceleration in the pace of life has altered our ideas of what we can expect of each other, what is possible and what is not. The revolution in the knowledge and communication industry (the very fact that we can talk of a knowledge industry is quite disturbing and something of an oxymoron) and the advantage of mechanisation were expected to free men from drudgery and create the leisure for the pursuit of more creative activities but now, not only have those initial expectations been grossly belied, but leisure itself has been converted into another frenzied pursuit. So the concept of saving time by using machines has created such a need for speed that we can no longer wait for anything. We are obsessed with "doing" to the dire cost of "seeing" or even "staring". Time has become an addiction and obsession, and "not doing" a sin. Jonathan Rowe, author of Redefining Progress, says: "We like being busy. Five hundred years of the work ethic have given 'busy' a huge status. We flaunt our packed diaries, our meltdown phones and chattering faxes. We work ourselves to death hooked on the adrenaline of the busy buzz, never questioning what we are doing because we haven't got the time."

So we have words now like "hurry sickness" and "achiever fever" to describe this inability to slow down, this sense of urgency, this need to be on fast forward all the time because we have worked ourselves into such a frenzy of keeping busy, even when unnecessary, that we find ourselves unable to enjoy the idle moment let alone truly relax in the best sense of the word. This takes its toll on the body and the mind that were not meant to be so mistreated and the uncommon stress and tensions that we needlessly create spill into society as various types of rage.

A Detroit News article (Karen Peterson, July 27, 2000) speaks of this and other social phenomena contributing to rage and general bad behaviour in what it calls this new "age of anger", where accelerating change, loss of privacy resulting from instant communication, a lack of responsibility and "an increasing sense of entitlement - materialism, consumerism and advertising - have joined together to create high expectations. According to its author, time and technology are the major factors contributing to the stress which leads to the anger epidemic: "There is not enough of the first, and there is a strong fallout from the second". Impatience gets inbuilt into a society constantly trying to move faster. James Garbarino, human development professor at Cornell University - whom Peterson quotes - says such factors are interacting with a shifting of social paradigms: "There is a general breakdown of social conventions, of manners, of social controls. This gives a validation, a permission, to be aggressive".

Another factor that strikes us in this context is that we are now constantly seeking ways of reducing the time taken to do a chore not so much to save time but to free ourselves more quickly from the anxiety of completing a job in a given time. Thus we are often not even able to relish what we enjoyed doing at a gentler pace, trying to beat the deadline to be relieved of the stress and anxiety of delivering the goods on time. But, unfortunately, the pace set becomes almost impossible to mitigate, hurry sickness sets in and achiever fever takes over.

Theodore Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity is a fascinating investigation of emotions and interpersonal relationships made up of a series of piquant topics such as why people have not been able to find the time to lead several lives or how people choose a way of life and how it does not wholly satisfy them. He describes the work of William Grossin, who spent years studying how the French spent their time. Grossin found that two-thirds suffered tensions in their relation to time and that the rich and the well-educated had the most problems with it. To continue in Zeldin's words (Grossin found), "The wider the choices before them and the more numerous their desires, the less time they had to give each one. Leisure has become organised, and so full of opportunities too tempting to miss that it does not necessarily offer freedom. The wish to live as intensely as possible has subjected humans to the same dilemma as the waterflea, which lives 108 days at 8' Centigrade but only 26 days at 28'C, when its heartbeat is almost four times faster, though in either case its heart beats a million times in all. Technology has been a rapid heartbeat compressing housework, travel, entertainment, squeezing more and more into the allotted timespan ..." Our whole theme succinctly presented in a nutshell and with a telling example.

This of course has spawned a whole industry of stressbusters and enablers of "personal control". From jetsetting gurus and New Age CD makers to aid everything from insomnia to a better sex life, all through scientific exploitation of music and mantra (there are some genuinely well developed pearls in this Sanskrit sea of precepts and poojas, one must admit). Organisations are in the grip of stress relief measures offered by various outfits, some merely exploiting new age jargon and some trying to give a scientific basis to what is essentially a matter of faith and belief. Other outfits in other climes, use other remedies: Franklin Covey is one of the biggest time management companies with an annual turnover of $650 million, running seminars and training sessions for 50,000 people a month. "As long as there is anyone in the planet who is out of control, there is a market for what we do. You think our marketplace will ever evaporate?" says Hyrum Smith, its founder. His partner is Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, whose Lesson number four says: "Two of the biggest industries in America at the moment are storage warehousing and Prozac. You see, you need the storage space to keep all the stuff that you brought but haven't got time for and barely have time to open the packages, and you need the Prozac (because) once you hire the storage space you know you are going barmy." ("How to Beat the Clock": BBC Online).

We are a sick society making ourselves sicker and our children will take up where we leave off. What is needed now is to rethink the whole idea of work and reward, time and money and the whole whirligig of instant gratification, constant connectivity and the endless chain of acquisition whose only theme is bigger and better as fast as possible. What loses out in this race is the mind and spirit.

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