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

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СКАЧАТЬ their ears stopped by headphones, their eyes fused to tablets and DVDs, are glazed into silence by technological dummies. They look happy, as do adults ogling smartphones. But whatever our age, let hypnotic media syphon off opportunities to conduct conversation, to notice and engage, and wellbeing suffers. Why do we need to silence children anyway? Are they not interesting – or at least, not quite as interesting as emails?

      Being online teaches us to be impatient, to want more and more – right now! That is why computers have spinning daisies: to show us that something is really happening, that the screen has not frozen – to soothe us when we are forced to wait three seconds for data to upload. But we are too ready to imagine that we are not responsible for our impatience – as if rush were some impersonal force, a malignant god whom we must helplessly follow.

      ‘I do not have time for this’ is the message that we send the world, and the people we profess to love, when bustling about in myopic fugs of busyness. There is a recognized phenomenon of ‘time entitlement’, in which people imagine time moves more slowly because they consider wherever they are or whatever is going on around them to be unworthy of their attention. It suggests an explanation for why we need our time to be so full – and to proclaim as much, burrowing into busyness as if to make ourselves feel more important. Rather like paranoia, all this time-stuffing resembles a self-cure for insignificance. We are one of six billion, after all, so we cannot hope to lay a fingerprint on posterity.

      We may have less time to play with in future. Quantified working policies prevail in many companies, with employees’ actions monitored and timed throughout their working day. In 2005, the Ford Motor Company permitted workers a total of forty-eight minutes per shift to go to the bathroom. By 2014, Chicago’s WaterSaver Faucet company felt six minutes a day would suffice for ablutions (presumably saving water). It appeared refreshing in 2016 when Aetna, a US insurer, paid staff a $25 bonus for every twenty nights they managed to sleep seven hours or more rather than stay up late on their gadgets. But how telling that such incentives are necessary.

      Manipulating our time, nudging it in a remunerative direction, is where the money will be; it always has been. Already we have Google spectacles to steer us to the nearest coffee shop. Next AI will infiltrate our clothing. When self-driving cars rumble along our streets, it seems inevitable that certain routes and information will be preferred, leading the traveller to certain stores and rest-stops, past certain billboards, which will sponsor the technology provider for the privilege.

      ‘Quality time’ is the phrase parents and lovers murmur when trying to justify how little they spend with us. It always sounds like a crap excuse. But we desperately need to think about the quality of our time. The greatest beneficiaries of our new sort of time recognize this. Microsoft’s Bill and Melinda Gates are masterly time managers, scheduling meetings to discuss their children’s progress, treating each strand of their lives as a project to be nurtured. Carving out space to let their interests blossom – and to have a date – is their religion.

      Custom-fitting time to suit you is a noble goal, but also rather high-maintenance. Personally, I would prefer the rhythm of my life to do the time management, leaving more for me. As Paul Dolan writes in Happiness by Design, ‘It’s worth thinking about how you could find more time without having to plan more time.’

      For some, busy will always be a boast. No problem – unless the resulting tradeoffs do not stand up to scrutiny. Fixate on being on it, all the time, in the tense present, and we feel we have no time. Because the Achilles heel of lightning-speed living is us: we cannot keep up with it. Tragically this does not stop us trying.

      As boundaries dissolve, distraction breeds distraction, and pressures seem to intensify. It is easy to believe time itself is beyond our control. Or to overpack our days, leaving no slack time, space or pause for thought. This overwhelms us. No wonder procrastination is also rising. If it seems crazy, consider this: what better way to assert that you will do things in your own good time? Now that our relationship with time is dysfunctional, it seems only logical that our timekeeping should go awry too.

      The result?

      Never enough done. Never enough time.

      We need time in all its dimensions in order to live fully and well. Daydreams. Plans for the future. Spontaneity. Time for reveries about nothing. And the ability to think things through, then carry them out in linear, organized stages, not chaotic flexitime.

      I will defend unto death your right to fritter away your time, but having it stolen is another matter. Throw it away and we are complicit. Control is the heart of the matter: it is what makes us feel that we are living by our own priorities, or constantly racing to catch up. That way lies the hurry trap.

      Fast incites us to speed up, but changing our response changes the situation. The range of choices available to us may be daunting, but slow down and you can exercise them. No need to turn your back on the wonders of this fast-forward world. Transformation is available at the point where you encounter it, the bit that you are in charge of. You.

      To survive in a world without limits is simple. Set your own.

BUSY

      When I am in a flap – texting, talking, eating, fixing meetings to discuss meetings I did not attend – I often think of the fly in Aesop’s fable, the one who sat on the wheel of a chariot crying, ‘What a lot of dust I raise!’

      ‘How are you?’ friends ask.

      ‘Busy.’ I may smile, but basically it is a non-answer, just one boastful notch up from ‘Fine’. Like a stock cube, the word condenses life’s banquet into a deadly four-letter word. This makes it ideal for shutting down unwelcome lines of conversation. Curiously, although everybody understands that busy is dull, it is our proudest alibi for whatever we do all day. Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, suspected that a lot of busy is a time-filling tactic – one that enlarges the vacuum it aims to fill:

      The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time that is ‘empty’. Paradoxically enough, this bulging time is often frighteningly empty when viewed in retrospect.

      In the short term, busy makes us feel important, the buzz of even bogus tasks generating a seductive sensation of efficacy, like static fuzzing a TV. But while engaged in our frenzied show of bustle, what are we omitting to do? It is a question posed by two very different men, both of whom transformed civilization in their way.

      The first was Socrates, a lapsed stonemason with a face like a punched potato, who is said to have cautioned, ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life.’ By all accounts he lived out this philosophy, downing his tools to become a free-range teacher. He roamed Athens with a retinue of wealthy students, collaring citizens with sly questions that made them feel silly, expertly getting up the noses of the elite while leaving his wife to bring up their three sons, whom he ignored. Until 399 BC, when he was put on trial as a public menace. The guilty verdict brought a choice: exile or execution. Typically, he argued that leaving Athens was not worth the bother and downed a cup of hemlock. A noble death, wept the flower of Athenian youth, perhaps forgetting Socrates’ family, left with neither wealth nor a noble name to protect them.

      Socrates became the wellspring of Western thought without writing a word (he left that to students such as Plato). It is tempting to take his warning against busyness for the counsel of the original dude. But he was too subtle a thinker to underwrite a slacker manifesto. Why else would his warning have been echoed twenty-four centuries later by the СКАЧАТЬ