On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ has long been both the goal and the index of human progress. The history of civilization hops and skips in innovative leaps that let us do more in less time: from the invention of the wheel, to bank notes that let us transmit funds without trundling about caskets of gold, to machines for washing clothes. Swift communication unleashed scientific discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries via epistolary relationships between the likes of Galileo and Kepler, thus hastening the Enlightenment. In the same way, great cities are superconductors of knowledge, gathering together like-minded people – as in California’s Silicon Valley, where dreams of the future led to where we are now, with the boundaries of space and time defeated, and more or less every idea under the sun available more or less instantly, Wi-Fi server permitting.

      It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary today’s fast is. When the Royal Mail relaunched in 1662 after the restoration of Britain’s monarchy, a letter dispatched in London would reach a continental city between three and twenty-five days later. Postmen travelled on foot at a regulated seven miles per hour between March and September, five miles per hour in the winter months. (Horses were not used, since they lacked staying power, while ‘footmen can go where horses cannot’.) Priority was given to letters of state, carried in a separate bag known as the ‘packet’. If the packet went astray, an official letter was easy to recognize by the forbidding motto on its exterior: ‘Haste, Post, haste for thy life’. In case the postboy was illiterate, it was accompanied by a grim sketch: a gallows with a corpse hanging in a noose. Arguably today’s fast should also carry a health warning.

      Undeniably speed enlarges minds and fortunes. It is an article of faith among management consultants, citing a popular study, that a product that runs 50 per cent over budget will be more profitable than one that strolls in six months late. Fast technology conjures myriad new businesses, some great, some questionable – such as high-frequency stock trading, in which tech-savvy individuals exploit differing lengths in computer cable between exchanges to skim lucrative sales data milliseconds ahead of the pack, thus creaming off millions. We are a long way from this complaint, made to the Royal Mail in the seventeenth century, about a conniving merchant who ‘has had most singular advantages, having had his letters many hours before a general dispatch could be made to all the merchants’.

      But the advantages of acceleration and unfettered access via digital media bring new time pressures. Businesses routinely purloin customers’ time, cheekily passing this off as being for our convenience. Is it liberating to have a dehumanizing supermarket experience, swiping produce at the automated till, or to act as data inputters, filling in forms to order something online, then lose ten hours indoors awaiting the delivery, or to go to the shop and wait ages for a runner to disembowel your item from the store? Each unpaid minute we work for the retailers, freeing them to employ fewer of us.

      Worse burdens fall on employees. Lengthening working days reach into the home, as companies swallow the creed that staff should be on standby on their portals of perpetual availability, as if each were a branch of the emergency services. Only France has sought to protect employees’ right to disconnect. It is easy to see why we may imagine we are always working – even if we are enjoying those fabled leisure hours that the statisticians claim we have, watching television with half an eye on office emails rather than actually doing anything with them. Then again, is time really free if, like a dog, you are attached to a leash that may at any point be yanked, dragging you back to the cares of the office?

      Constantly larding our minds with pending tasks is time theft. It may be self-inflicted, but not entirely, if – given the pressure to hold on to jobs today – monitoring work from dawn until midnight is part of your workplace culture. What it is not is efficient.

      The most notable weakness of our superfast world is ourselves: we cannot seem to apply the brakes. A study of 1,500 Dutch people revealed that those who constantly rush feel as if time is also going faster, and this perception encourages them to rush yet more. Humans are wired to mirror the world around us, setting our pace in tune with our environment, a phenomenon known as entrainment. This is why we bustle in a busy city like London but wander in Wyoming. Unfortunately bustling has side effects. Not least that it becomes addictive.

      Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines hurry as ‘the dispatch of bunglers’. Although everybody knows this intuitively – doing things at speed requires skill – speed encourages us to overreach ourselves. The more we can do, simultaneously, at the touch of a computer button, the greater the temptation to overdo it. Multitaskers often imagine that they are faster and more efficient, working harder and longer than they are in reality, because busy, distracted hours feel fuller – when in fact they complete tasks 30 per cent more slowly. Really they are servants of fast – trying to match the fluid possibilities of technology. Worse, tackle eighteen tasks at once and the probability that one will go wrong is far higher than doing them sequentially. Screw up and it is the difference between breaking down on a sedate B road and crashing on a motorway. More is the pity, because a smooth tempo is best for mind, body and productivity. In effect, in our alacrity to make the most of our super-fast tools we render ourselves deficient.

      There is no sign that we are ready to wean ourselves off speed: on the contrary, we celebrate it. In 2015 Nike, the iconic sports brand, refreshed their legendary anti-procrastination slogan, ‘Just Do It’, with a campaign that urged us to ‘find your fast’. That same year boxes of Tampax were jazzed up by cartoon women on the run, their hair flying, their flailing hands clutching bags and phones. Advertisers select images either to flatter or scare us into buying a product. But the multitasking tampon lady does both. Like a doctor dashing about the emergency room, saving lives, this testament to heroic female dynamism also appears ripe for a heart attack.

      Sure enough, statistics also reveal that the citizens of faster countries show higher rates of smoking, coronary-related death and of greater subjective wellbeing. In other words, we imagine that we are happier pursuing a lifestyle that actively harms us. And what makes it deadly? Stress of a particularly pernicious variety: the unpredictable, uncontrollable stress we get when life’s beat is erratic. The type that we overdose on if interruption, hurry and time pressure are our daily diet.

      The side effects of busyness help to answer a puzzle that has long preoccupied economists: why, after incomes reach a certain level, does a rise in a country’s wealth have no power to lift its population’s happiness?

      The usual explanation is that we exist on a hedonic treadmill. In other words, wealth and the stuff we buy with it makes us happier in the short term, but soon we adjust. Even lottery winners, after the initial ecstasy, revert within months to their former level of contentment. What we are beginning to realize is that hedonic adaptation often occurs because we are poor at investing our surplus time and money in pastimes or objects that enhance our wellbeing or manufacture enduring daily happiness.

      According to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher famously associated with pleasure (although his life was pretty ascetic), ‘Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.’ Could you disagree? But speed and wealth interfere with our capacity to delight in our abundance. Yes,

      happiness = having choice over how to spend time

      and also

      wealth = having more choice over how to spend time

      But unfortunately

      wealth = more complicated choices over how to spend time

      No account of happiness is complete unless time is factored in.

      Weirdly, acceleration seldom liberates extra hours: more often it creates extra work. 2011’s European Social Survey, studying twenty-three countries, found that people had the least leisure not in the richest places but in those where economic expansion was most rapid. (The СКАЧАТЬ