Disclaimer – It may take you several minutes to read this in its entirety. I know your attention span will most likely opt out after reading this disclaimer, but if you commit to read through, you may have some food for thought to slow down and enjoy your weekend the way it is meant to be enjoyed.
We used to have more patience. A lot more patience. We were aligned with the rhythms of the seasons and of the day. Things were done slowly and with care; with intention and grace. Their used to be something called “pride of workmanship” and our hands were used to create beautiful things that stood the test of time.
“We used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. Of course, we used to date; now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow, we try to speed them up too. I was in New York recently and I walked past a gym and they had an advertisement for a new course and it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga.”
~ Carl Honore
If you are reading this, you are probably guilty of reaching maximum stress and frustration waiting for a website to load or while on hold on the phone, going through endless automated prompts. It’s a fact that today; tolerance for delay is in very short supply. What bothers me most about this trend is that this impatience is most pronounced in the children, embedded in them since birth as they observe mommy and daddy rushing through, well… everything. Today’s children have grown up not having to wait for anything and it has become an expectation that their every whim is served in a second’s time.
They don’t have to wait for months to save a whole nickel for the Saturday movie show. They don’t have to wait for mom and dad to take them to the video store on Friday night to rent a movie. They don’t even have to wait 5 days for the mail to arrive with their new movie. With a click of a button, they can get their movies instantly via Netflix. Interesting how it’s called “on demand”. And we do grow to demand things… now!
A computer science professor named Ramesh Sitaraman, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, examined the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users in an study he conducted. The study was about viewer patience. How long were the subjects willing to be patient? The answer: two whole seconds. “After that they started abandoning,” Sitaraman said. “After five seconds, the abandonment rate is 25 percent. When you get to 10 seconds, half are gone.” Yup, on demand.
My sister recently took my daughters to Walt Disney World in Orlando. I was surprised to hear that that offer a special pass so you do not have to wait in line. “FASTPASS is a revolutionary guest enhancement at Walt Disney World Resort enabling guests to have an alternative to waiting in lines for the most popular attractions.” Now we can all bypass waiting in line. I remember going to Disneyland back in 1975. Waiting in line was a part of the anticipation of the surprise that waited within. Families used this time to talk to one another and the discussion was about the fairy tales, our family vacation, what we had planned for the rest of the summer. While it was hot and we were impatient, the impatience was exciting and a part of the experience. Again, it was anticipation.
Wikipedia defines it this way “Anticipation, or being enthusiastic, is an emotion involving pleasure, excitement, and sometimes anxiety in considering some expected or longed-for good event.”
Whereas impatience has a whole other “vibe”: “Impatience: The quality of being impatient; lacking patience; restlessness and intolerance of delays; anxiety and eagerness, especially to begin something.”
Impatience is always on the menu. We do not want to wait for anything, but worse is that it is an angry waiting rather than a waiting filled with joy. Our culture has become so fast paced, we are literally running people over. Always hustling and bustling, we quickly skip from one “to-do” to the next, the list seemingly endless. We rush through conversations and have limited responses to mere letters: OMG, LOL, K. We speed past each other on the freeway, one hand on the wheel and the other texting our immediate response to a friend we know is as impatient to know as we are, risking our lives and the lives of those around us in the process.
Constantly bombarded by our fast-paced, instant-gratification culture with distracting push notifications, pinging phones, and 24/7 communication options, our relationships and interactions with people are constantly interrupted and disrupted. As a result, we have become shallow consumers of information, taking in sound bites rather than the whole story. The sad fact is that very few have time for the whole story anymore. There is just too much to do!
From a recent Boston Globe article: Darrell Worthy, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University who studies decision making and motivation, has found evidence of what some already feared: We’re becoming more focused on quick fun – such as a game of Angry Birds on the iPhone – than on reading books or magazines. Researchers found the rapid pace of technology can lead to more nimble thinking, but that “trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information.”
“A lot of things that are really valuable take time,” Worthy said. “But immediate gratification is the default response. It’s difficult to overcome those urges and be patient and wait for things to come over time.”
Our Families:
We used to have time for each other, time to just be. Working together in the fields, sitting together by the hearth as mother sewed and mended while father played some music. We sat at the table together and prepared food together, always conscious of the possibility of scarcity due to a bout of bad weather and we said our blessings at each meal, truly thankful for what we called “the bounty” which was usually no more than corn meal and bean stew. There were family chores to tend to and the family operated as a unit, relying heavily on one another like cogs in a wheel, without one, the entire wheel useless. On Sundays, we put on our finest clothes and went to church, accountable to something bigger than us, a God that we sang praises to. And we would picnic by the river with other members of the community, saving our best pies or preserves to share with our neighbors. We would discuss what each person needed and organize in a way to help, looking after one another as a larger extension of family.
Children were not coddled and spoiled. They were treated as useful and important members of the community who worked their share and therefore had the rights of freedom of their time once chores were done. They would discuss their plans with their parents as early as age 9, 10, 11 often knowing with conviction what they wanted to do in the world and how they could contribute. Free time was spent in discovery, on long walks independently or sitting at a familiar fishing hole. There was time to think, to breathe, to dream, to be. One only need to pick up books like “Farmer Boy” and “Little House On The Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder to see a glimpse into how families lived just 150 years ago.
My belief is that we need to be firm and conscious of our family time and adopt a strict “people before technology” policy. This means specific phone and computer time and actually turning the devices off as to not be interrupted.
Our Food:
There were no grocery stores and fast food drive through’s in pioneer times. Stores of the day, called “mercantile’s” were far and few between and would just carry the most basic staples focusing more on the equipment needed such as tools and cloth. Families had to plan ahead, months at a time and prepare their food in rations to make it through harsh winters. They needed to have stores of food in case bad weather would destroy a crop, literally putting them 6 or 8 months into foodstuffs debt. When food was abundant, they would can and dry the food, always aware and conscious of harder times ahead. Meats were hunted for and once they made the kill, the work just began with making it prepared for storage. They would skin the animal and remove the insides, then cut the meat into large pieces which had to be rubbed in salt to preserve it for a long time. Remember that they did not have the convenience of putting it into the freezer. Despite their efforts, meat would often go bad and even after a good scrubbing, would not be fit to eat.
Today we give little thought to our food, taking for granted that we’ll find fast food, restaurants and supermarkets around every corner. We expect them to be filled to the brim with the largest variety of anything our taste buds dream up. When we go to the market and they are out of a particular food we complain and behave as this is an outrage of the greatest magnitude. Giving even less thought to how our food is produced, harvested and prepared, we gorge ourselves in a gluttonous frenzy to the point of death. (Obesity causes premature death and this is the first time in history the life expectancy of our children is less than of our own.)
My belief is that we need to dedicate time to home and hearth and by this I mean a conscious effort to teach our children more about where food comes from and how precious it is. Shop local farmers markets, commit your weekend to cooking and enjoying a family meal, make a goal to not eat any “fast food” for 3 days.
Our Communication:
We used to communicate with hand written letters. I have a box of letters written to my first penpal, my friends from summer camp, my first love. They are keepsakes and tell the story of my life and how I saw and experienced the world. They are wrapped carefully to protect them and are stored with my mother’s letters, and my grandmother’s letters. When unwrapped and read they tell a story, the story of our family.
The first westbound Pony Express trip left St. Joseph, Missouri on April 3, 1860 and arrived ten days later in San Francisco, California, on April 14. The letters traveling the 1,900-mile route were delivered in 10 days, a duration many said was impossible. The route was dangerous and many riders ended up getting robbed and killed. Their want ad even called for “young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” The riders received $25 per week as pay. A comparable wage for unskilled labor at the time was about $0.43-$1 per day. Yes, it was a big deal to have your letter delivered in less than 2 weeks. Now written letters have all but faded into the archives of history.
Seriously, think about it – how many people do you know that hand write letters anymore? How many letters have you written, and then compare that to emails, posts or tweets? While doing some research for an upcoming book, I located this:
“In today’s fast-paced culture, communicating with your child is more important than ever. Try communicating with your child through current technology, such as text messaging or email. This is a method most children are comfortable with, which can help them let down their guard and be more candid with you.”
I confess, it made my hair stand on end. Who are these children? Are they someone else’s? Why are they “on guard” to begin with? The fact is we have taught them to communicate differently and the exchange is often shallow and superficial. We only need to look at Facebook and consider that people really think they are saving the world or making a difference when they click “like”.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is known for the instant culture he established with: “Move Fast and Break Things.” The St. Louis Post Dispatcher writes “Facebook absorbed Silicon Valley’s hacker ethos and amplified it. Tech companies normally do controlled beta versions of their technologies. Facebook doesn’t beta anything. It runs as an unending series of quick, on-the-fly tests with actual customers. Engineers race to put up new features, see if they work, and make tweaks to fix them if they don’t. Each day, Facebook processes 2.7 billion ‘Likes,’ 300 million photo uploads, 2.5 billion status updates and check-ins, and countless other bits of data, and uses that mass of transactions to guesstimate which ads to serve up.
How can we even process such information on any deeper level? The entire media is superficial and breaks our pattern of building real relationships. Social media is not a substitute for real social connection and community.
“The environment demands that we come down into first gear. The immense mobility of the world is going to destroy us. All the flying around, all the driving around, the big lit up cities, the factories… The excessive consumption of fossil fuel is already choking our planet. We also know that nuclear power is not an option. The way out is to keep the best of half a century ago- the community, the simpler homes, the romance of real experiences instead of media. Can we get off our addiction to speed? To conveniences? To grab and steal? To corruption? To me-me-me world?”
~ Bulbul Mankani
Our Work:
The typical American workplace obviously isn’t cut out for stress-free and slow-paced living. Most people work for a company, and the goals of the company are to maximize profits. Their needs are to ensure that everything runs like a well oiled machine with no hiccups or pauses in the schedule. They do not pay you to go at your own pace, they pay you to speed it up and move at their pace. They serve their board members, investors and owners and usually, you are their last priority.
If you are a part of the work force, then you know that the company does not care if you get sick, if you need to stay with a friend in the hospital or if your car breaks down. The company does not have time for your loved one’s funeral, needing to spend time talking things over with your child or wanting to stay in bed because you have really bad cramps. The company expects you to come to work and do your time. They make it very clear that if you cannot, they will quickly replace you with someone who will. They need someone in the position you were hired for and if you are not there, another number will quickly take your place. If you want to earn more money or get a promotion, you must come-in early, stay late, work through lunch and come in on your days off to prove your dedication. You virtually have to forgo all of the needs of your personal life. These are the requirements necessary if you want to get ahead in your career. This is because the company is an artificial entity created in the spirit of instant, efficient and sure.
“These days, even instant gratification takes too long.”
~ Carrie Fisher, Actress
Our Spirit:
The instant gratification of today’s world does not cultivate the virtue of patience, yet all religious teachings hold it in the highest regard.
In Buddhism, patience is one of the “perfections” (paramitas) that a bodhisattva trains in and practices to realize perfect enlightenment (bodhi).
Patience in Islam is one of the best and most valuable virtues of life. Through patience, a Muslim believes that an individual can grow closer to God and thus attain true peace.
In the Christian religion, patience is one of the most valuable virtues of life. Increasing patience is viewed as the work of the Holy Ghost in the Christian who has accepted the gift of salvation.
In Judaism, patience and fortitude are prominent themes. The Talmud extols patience as an important personal trait. The story of Micah, for example, is that he suffers many challenging conditions and yet endures, saying “I will wait for the God who saves me.” Patience in God, it is said, will aid believers in finding the strength to be delivered from the evils that are inherent in the physical life.
Our Wiring:
It is also interesting to look at our lust for instant gratification from a scientific perspective. In a 2005 there was a study involving common marmosets and cotton top tamarins. The study had was based on a self-control paradigm in which the individual animals had to choose between taking an immediate small reward or waiting a variable amount of time for a larger reward.
Under these conditions the marmosets waited significantly longer for the food than tamarins.
This difference cannot be explained by life history, social behavior or brain size. It can, however, be explained by feeding ecology: marmosets rely on gum, a food product acquired by waiting for exudate to flow from trees, whereas tamarins feed on insects, a food product requiring impulsive action. In this case, foraging ecology is what provided a selective pressure for the evolution of self-control.
Our Health:
Living under unnatural time pressures causes a myriad of psychological, social and physical ailments.
The Mayo Clinic writes: “Your body is hard-wired to react to stress in ways meant to protect you against threats from predators and other aggressors. Such threats are rare today, but that doesn’t mean that life is free of stress. On the contrary, you undoubtedly face multiple demands each day, such as shouldering a huge workload, making ends meet and taking care of your family. Your body treats these so-called minor hassles as threats. As a result you may feel as if you’re constantly under assault.”
In her new book, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, Linda Buzzell reminds us that “not so very long ago, humans – like the rest of the animals and plants on earth – moved through our natural cycles at nature’s pace. Time was marked by the passing of the seasons, the life cycles of human, animal and plant life and the yet grander cycles of the moon and the other celestial bodies.”
Carl Honore, an award-winning journalist, author and TED speaker reminds us “In a world of fast talkers, fast drivers, and fast tempers, it’s essential to maintain your own ideal speed.”
REFERENCES:
· Little House on The Prairie Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
· Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind by Linda Buzzell
· In Praise of Slow by Carl Honroe
· The Slow Fix by Carl Honroe
