GO SLOW: Fast and Furious

Another article of mine that was rejected by chowk editors


When Simon and Garfunkel wrote the song... Slow down, you're movin' too fast, you’ve got to make the moment last, we were not living in a world where you have to run like crazy just to keep pace with the surroundings that are moving twice as fast. Imagine how much more we need to slow down now when we travel in supersonic jets and trains, power read, skim through TV channels at the speed of 60 channels per minute and eat, what else, but fast food, at least, thrice a week.

The present day need for speed is best described by Klaus Schwab, founder of World Economic Forum, “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to the one in which the fast eat the slow.”

Everyone feels that there is not enough time and they have to cram as much stuff and at the fastest possible speed in a day as possible. In 1982, Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term ‘time sickness’ to describe the belief that time is getting away and that one must pedal faster to keep up. We all, at least the metropolitan or mega polis dwelling citizens, belong to the cult of speed. We want to get to our destination in the record time, we want the fastest Internet access, we want our news as fast as it can be delivered, and if we don’t get that, we fret.

What pains me most is the way media portrays the virtue of speed. TV news analysis is run by fast thinkers with glib answers for everything. They are analysing events as they are unfolding. It’s another matter that they are proven wrong at times, but who remembers something one week down the road these days. Knowledge and wisdom do not have much currency in this age of information. It is all about here and now, not how.

It is said that we live in the ‘age of instant gratification’. But the way things are going, that too has become passé. We are looking for things that are beyond instant. We are living in the ‘age of rage’. This fixation with speed leads to road rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage and at times, even gym rage. I have seen it happening; people mutilating gym equipment because they want to do it all in 25 minutes flat. Imagine the harm done to their bodies in the long run.

Consumer capitalist economy is contributing its part in this time sickness. It is getting too fast –– even for its own good. It is interesting to know that at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, one of the first things to come out of Gutenberg press was the calendar of 1448.

Lewis Mumsford once said, “Clock is the key machine of the Industrial Revolution.” Another indication of the long history of time sickness is that most of the 15,000 machines registered at the US patent office in 1850 were for “acceleration of speed and for the saving of time and labour.”

Urbanisation, another feature of the industrial era, helped quicken the pace. Cities have always attracted energetic and dynamic people which accelerated the general pace of living. Terms like time rich and time poor are also coined in the super fast age of industrialism.

Industrial capitalism feeds on speed and rewards it as never before. The business that manufactures and ships its products fastest can under cut rivals. If one pauses long enough to notice, one would see that there is a human cost to this turbo capitalism. These days, people exist to serve the economy rather than the other way around. Have we ever stopped and asked why are we working so hard? The obvious answer is money, but the endless pursuit of consumer goods means we need more and more cash.

In a corporate set up, gone are the eight-hour working day and 40-hour week, everyone works for as long as it takes to make one’s mark. After years of downsizing, companies expect employees to shoulder the burden left behind by their laid off colleagues. With the fear of losing their jobs hanging over their heads, people regard overwork as a way to prove their worth and this turbo capitalism offers a one-way ticket to burn out.

Most people have unrealistic expectations from themselves. We all want to be over achievers; with the most promising careers, ability to speak at least one foreign language, ability to discern art and sing, time to work out at the gym, read the newspapers and best sellers, play some sports, spend time with friends and family, watch TV and movies, listen to music, shop for gadgets and travel to exotic places. If we don’t do it all, we are not content and keep on craving for more. We fail to realise that there is an unrealistic difference between what we want and what we can actually achieve and there is no guarantee that we will achieve it all.

What is forgotten is the fact that long hours on the job are making everyone unproductive, error prone, irritable, unhappy and ill. It is because of such work environment that stress related diseases are on the rise and people are burning out in their 20s.

Japanese, the ever creative nation, even added a new word to their vocabulary, ‘karoshi’ which means death by over work. Consumerism and its pressure for speed are taking its toll on everyone.

We live in a 24/7 time frame. We can be reached 24/7 via cell phones. We shop on our days off, we pay bills after hours. We are online all the time and take our laptops to bed with us. We all need to ask if we have lost the capacity of doing nothing. Taking pleasure in sitting in a park and enjoying the cool evening breeze can be as pleasant an experience as staying cooped up in a dark room and playing a super fast game at Xbox.

I was once travelling from Edinburgh to Manchester on train and I realised that not a single person was either gazing out of the window or sitting idle. They were either reading, playing games on their phones, texting messages or listening to music or news, working on their laptops or yammering into their mobiles.

I too, have been one of those people who wanted to do it all as quickly as possible. Rushing on from one task to the other was the norm, I was the kind of person who would curse everyone who was slower or crossed my path at a slower pace.

Things changed for me when I took time off to go back to university for another degree. Being a student for a year has changed the perspective for me. Multi-tasking sounds so cool, and I too, was quite proud of my prowess at multi-tasking but when I realised that when I read the newspaper and watch TV at the same time, I get less out of both, I decided to give it a miss unless absolutely necessary.

There is a ‘Slow Food’ movement founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to combat fast food. Geir Berthelsen created ‘The World Institute of Slowness’ and coined the term ‘Slow Travel’ in 1999 citing a vision for an entire ‘Slow Planet’.

Carl Honroe in his book, In Praise of Slow says that there is a growing trend in people who are looking for a more holistic attitude which can be seen in increased use of alternative medicine and popularity of yoga. Even the aerobics queen Jane Fonda, who sold millions of tapes and books on aerobics, now, swears by yoga.

Leisure was declared a human right in 1948 by United Nations. We need to go back to more leisurely pursuits such as gardening, reading, painting, making crafts and learn to be happy with it. Feminism denounced homemaking as a curse on womankind; hence modern woman does not know the pleasure in knitting, making crochet, and sewing. Even though denounced, it nevertheless is a creative process and has a therapeutic effect to it.

Debbie Stoller, an American feminist, hailed knitting as the new yoga and a lot of young women have taken to it, including the woman with a 20-million-dollar smile, Julia Roberts. I hope it now makes knitting officially cool. BBC recently reported that even Prince Charles has urged people to slow down and allow themselves more time for reflection. The prince said modern life had got out of balance, and needed to return to the rhythms of nature.

I agree that most of us do not wish to replace speed with lethargy, but finding the right balance is the key to a balanced personal and professional life. Like Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Originally published in The Review, Dawn