Going slowly in this fast-paced world

"I attempted to talk to you after class but you left so fast I didn’t even see you leave!"

That was in an email from a student.  I tell ya, I might seem slow in many ways, but I am not always slow.  I am sometimes faster than a speeding rocket! ;)

Ah, who am I kidding!  I am one hell of a slow guy.  I don't like doing too many things. I leave the rushing around to others.

When others rush around, I even attempt to ask them why they are rushing.  But, they are gone even before I get the sentence out of my mouth ;)

Increasingly though I worry that this world is not made for us slow coaches.  People do not have patience for us anymore.

Even in talking.  The young talk a million words a minute and I imagine they see the world in ultra slow motion whenever I start speaking!

Take, for instance, that taxi driver in Costa Rica whose speed in driving and talking fascinated me.  She would perhaps join the people in America who find my driving and talking to be annoyingly slow.

But then there are places where people are even slower than I am.  It is not easy to figure who the tortoises of world are!

I suspect that the Aesops of the world spun stories like the hare and the tortoise only because more often that not, the storytellers were slow people like me. After all, it takes time to tell stories.  The storyteller can't merely say, "there was a young woman named Cinderella, who was horribly ill treated by her stepmother. But, don't worry, it ended well."  What kind of a story is that, right?  It takes time to set up the story.  It takes time to listen to the story. Which is why I think Aesop spun a story about the importance of the slow tortoise.

At least, that is my story, and I am sticking with it! ;)

Life in the fast lane

Back when I was in graduate school, my apartment mate--who was pursuing a doctorate in marketing--always argued in favor of efficiency and speed.  He was a good debater too, which made my thinking life both interesting and difficult.  But, he never managed to convince me about the primacy of efficiency and speed over everything else in life.

Whether it is on the road or in the kitchen, I am not a speed guy.  Life in the slow lane suits me just fine.  Which is all the more why the opener in this essay appealed to me, a lot:

More than 40 years ago, as a young woman in Melbourne, Australia, I had a pen friend in Papua New Guinea. She lived in a coastal village, an hour’s slow boat trip from the city of Lae. I went to visit her. The abundant tropical fruit, vegetables such as taro and sweet potato, and fish fresh from the sea made up for the mosquitoes that plagued me. No one was in a rush to do anything.
We spent an entire day making coconut milk. I suggested a different way to squeeze the coconut flesh that would allow us to make the milk faster. The young New Guineans looked quizzical. Making coconut milk always took a whole day. There was no hurry, they said. Today I see my interest in saving time and increasing productivity as a peculiar and interesting cultural eccentricity.

Now, I admit that I could not adjust to the pole pole pace in Tanzania, where everything seemed to unfold in the slowest speed.  It is not that I love, love a slow life, but seem to have my own pace that is faster than the speed in traditional cultures but slower than, heck, every other person in the US. 

What exactly are we trying to do with this obsession with speed?  As much as we are obsessed with speed, we are also the same people who complain about not having enough time to do everything within the 24 hours of the day.  We are one interesting species!

Are digital technologies at all complicit in our sense of time pressure?

Emails coming in all the time at work.  Text messages from friends and family. Facebook. Twitter. So much so that there are people who actually prefer Soylent over slow-cooked regular food!  Why the subservience to speed and the digital gods?

Human beings build the present and imagine the future with tools designed for certain purposes, and there are more reasons than ever to think about what kind of society we want those tools to advance.

Damn right!  

Articulating what kind of society we want will require us to understand what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humanity, and what it means for us to belong in this cosmos.  But, apparently we do not have the time for all those questions!

It is not that I want to return to a slow life that existed before all these modern technological tools.  But, I can't help wonder why we do not see these as mere tools--a set of tools that we could put to use for a much bigger, richer, understanding of life and its meaning.

So what if I am inefficient!

In graduate school, when I was just about learning to write essays--boy was that a struggle!--I wanted to write a paper questioning the primacy of efficiency and productivity.  But, back in those days, I had difficulty even piecing together a couple of sentences that made sense, leave along a 2,500-word essay.  I tell ya, no wonder I keep getting those nightmares every once in a while! ;)

I am far from a chop-chop guy; I am always wandering about.  The things that I like are never about efficiency either--from cooking to playing bridge to reading to grading essays to ... I mean, even on the "bike" path, I don't care to bike but prefer to walk.  Biking seems like wanting to rush through the experience.  It is not that I am wandering like a cow on a grassy meadow; I have a plan, of course.

So, where was I?  ;)

Contemporary economic conditions prize efficiency and productivity.  The drive to more and better while being faster. All the speed for what?  Especially when it is even in our personal lives?

If I’m using Google Maps, it’ll quickly alert me when a faster route becomes available. I speed even when I’m not in a hurry, just to see the minutes disappear on my ETA—to see that I’ve saved precious time. The very idea that I’ve “saved time” can give a sensation of pleasure and satisfaction.
Meanwhile, commercials offer quick-and-easy alternatives to any and every cooking, housecleaning, or maintenance job. Dinners get hurriedly prepared in microwaves or crockpots, coffee in Keurigs or even instant packets. Because efficiency—time saved—beckons to us like sirens from every corner.

What the hell do people then use that "saved time" for?

There’s nothing wrong with such desires. But when efficiency becomes an obsession, our lives become a constant, headlong rush. Our obsession with saving time results in no time—at least no time for the sorts of slowness that lead to bursts of intellectual creativity, physical health, and spiritual contemplation.

The ones who "saved time" and are in a rush always seem to be in a rush.  And then there are people like me who seemingly move like sloths but get the job done anyway.  What is with the speed?

 Speed has become the measure of success—faster chips, faster computers, faster networks, faster connectivity, faster news, faster communications, faster transactions, faster deals, faster delivery, faster product cycles, faster brains, faster kids. Why are we so obsessed with speed, and why can’t we break its spell?

Maybe speed is nothing but a fear of being alone.  Wait, let me explain.  In the old days, men and women in the villages were in their group settings.  They talked, laughed, cried, together--essentially wasted time.  That was the life they led.  Now, after the efficiency revolution, we are increasingly by ourselves.

Over time, technological developments have enabled workers to move away from a reliance on colleagues for support and instead trust in a system for getting things done.

Alone at work and at home.  We then don't know what to do with ourselves.  We want to run far away from that loneliness.  But, as much as we run, well, we find that we are alone all over again.  And then we run at even faster speeds!

I often wonder, too, if our obsession with productivity—with “filled time,” in essence—is stemming from a fear of free time. If we’re ever stuck in a moment of silence, we usually turn on the radio or television, grab our phones, or log onto our computers. We have to fill the empty space.

Exactly!

You see how quickly got to this point? ;)

Life in the slow lane suits me just fine

"How are things going?" I asked as I placed my groceries for the clerk to ring them up.  You know, the small-talk.

But, I didn't expect some serious response from him.  All these years, whenever I went to his lane, he has always been a nothing more than a typical response kind of a guy.  Not today.

"Am trying to speed through" he said.

Before I could figure out what was going on, he added, "that's what everybody wants these days.  Rush, rush, rush."

Perhaps it was a bad day for him.  Or, perhaps he recognized a simpatico in me.

I have no idea where everybody is rushing faster than ever.  On the road, they zoom past.  In the stores, they whiz through. Sometimes I wonder if these are the same people who are at the fast-food places and the drive-through coffee kiosks.  I, on the other hand, take my own sweet time walking in the stores, driving along the winding roads, preparing my own foods and eating them slowly, and brewing my own coffee and relishing every drop as I sip the black elixir of life.

"I know what you mean" I told him.

That encouraged the clerk.  "It wasn't this way when I was growing up" he said.  I doubt if he is even forty and he already feels this way?

"I talk with people born in the 1940s and 1950s, and they talk about everyday life that was slower."

I nodded.  I was impressed that unlike me, he was able to talk and do his job even though he was also a male.  I either lose my thought, or ... wait, what are we talking about? ;)

As I walked back to the car, I thought about the article that will frame the discussions on Wednesday.  "Speed kills" screams that title, with "Fast is never fast enough" as the subtitle.  The author asks there:

Speed has become the measure of success—faster chips, faster computers, faster networks, faster connectivity, faster news, faster communications, faster transactions, faster deals, faster delivery, faster product cycles, faster brains, faster kids. Why are we so obsessed with speed, and why can’t we break its spell?

Another simpatico.  We are becoming an endangered species, ahem, really fast!

The author observes:

Acceleration is unsustainable. Eventually, speed kills. The slowing down required to delay or even avoid the implosion of interrelated systems that sustain our lives does not merely involve pausing to smell the roses or taking more time with one’s family, though those are important.

My foot is steady on the pedal, sometimes even easing off, as I slowly ease through the rest of the third.