“In the midst of such overwhelming existential change, the pace of our daily lives will continue to increase as our world continues to shrink. Fear and anxiety are natural reactions, yet no one in the political realm acknowledges this”. (Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, March 2016).
Speaking as an older person I can second her concern. My wife and I were recently subject to card fraud in New Jersey, while physically being nowhere near New Jersey. Last week we were pic-pocketed in a foreign country, losing two credit cards and a lot of cash. That’s three credit cards stolen within the space of a month, and a good deal of fear and anxiety. The banks have been helpful and correct, but we spent a morning in a foreign police station reporting the crime, spent an hour at least on the phone to the banks reporting the incidents, accompanied by the usual interminable waiting time. Each time we have had to update our card particulars with a variety of companies. Netflix, for instance, insist on verifying new particulars by sending an SMS message that you have to enter into a box on- screen and press “return”. O.K, but an SMS message is useless to me – I have no mobile phone. More hassle.
All sorted out now and safely at home, but what a massive waste of time! Time is our most precious commodity, more precious than the credit cards and the cash. Stress and anxiety are foreign, I’m sure, to cool dudes in their twenties, but what it means to me is less time for creativity, enjoying life and, if it comes to that, this very blog. And for what?
Epicurus was smart. The politics of his time were equally turbulent, but the speed of life was the speed of normal human beings – or donkeys, if you prefer. If you paid, you paid with a good old silver Drachma, a name that derives from the Greek verb meaning “to grasp”. It’s original value was equivalent to that of a handful of arrows. Ah, simplicity.
If digital technology saves time, how come so many of us feel rushed and harried? Technological utopians once dreamt of the post-industrial society as one of leisure. Instead, we are more like characters in Alice in Wonderland, running ever faster and faster to stand still. Is digital technology at once the cause of time pressure and its solution? Is Tim Wu, a leading authority on net neutrality, right when he says that ‘attention’ is the new scarce resource?
I don’t believe I am alone. I am daily deluged with emails and information from news outlets and websites. I try hard to make the postings on this blog as short as possible. But the fact is that many articles I quote from, useful in themselves, are ridiculously prolix. It can take an hour or more to precis a long- winded article that, with more thought for the reader, could have taken up but two paragraphs.
Why do writers do it? Because they can. You are not being attentively read, guys!
But if you were in charge, what would you do differently? For all the hassle and stress that technology causes, it also saves time. For me its more a matter of using technology well- by both companies and customers.
There is absolutely nothing one can do. You can’t stop people wasting your time and their time. It would be nice if people were more considerate, more Epicurean, but they are not and most don’t seem to care. One has to live with it. On the other hand it is right to protest. Sheep are generally fleeced!