Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
By James Gleick
1999, Pantheon Books
Impatience. Humans have never liked to wait. But before we were smart enough to invent technology that could speed up our lives, we couldn’t do much to change the slow pace of life.
Then, starting with the Enlightenment, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, we have been inventing technologies and methods to overcome our impatience, to do everything faster than before. All of which has made us more impatient.
“You hear the voices of men and women, at home and in the workplace, talking about their hectic lives, their need for time-saving, their hunger for speed, their fear of overload,” writes Gleick. “It hardly matters what product: fast computer or fast telephone service or fast athletic shoes…. A more stately and deliberate tempo would frustrate you now” (pp. 201-202).
He’s right. Standard commercial jets are not fast enough; we want supersonic jets. Internet service with 40 mbps download speed is too slow; we want 100 mbps. Gleick describes all the ways that we hunger for instantaneity: instant messaging, instant coffee, instant replay, instant political polling, instant gratification, instant downloads, instant shipping. We design elevators with door-close buttons. Day traders buy and sell stocks within seconds.
“It used to cost enough and take long enough to buy a hundred shares of IBM that investors would actually have to think about it,” writes Gleick. “Now, second by second, day traders are delighted if they can measure their profits in quarters, eighths, or ‘teenies’” (p. 72).
So much happens in what we call “real time.” Fast computer processing made real time possible. Our machines enable us to process transactions, communicate across oceans, watch TV programming, and track weather as it happens; that is, in real time. Our passion for real time has dethroned “natural time.”
“Artificial, constructed, industrial-age time gave people a sense of its presumed opposite, natural time, a flow unbroken by machines, punctuated only by the swings or cycles of nature, and thus gentler in its effect on our true selves,” says Gleick (p. 44).
Our desire to do everything faster could be making us dumber. Today we base opinions about myriad topics on little more than “sound bites.” We would rather skim quickly across an ocean of disconnected information than use our time to gain a deep understanding. Our love for everything fast means that we don’t have the patience to gain wisdom and knowledge.
Gleick’s book is an excellent opportunity for readers to think critically about our ancestors’ philosophies and values; specifically, the underlying motivations that led them to design a fast-paced culture. The book is not philosophical, but it reveals how Enlightenment thinkers began to prioritize economic efficiency and productivity. And those goals require velocity.
Frederick Taylor injected these values into workers’ daily lives, starting in the last part of the 1800s. His time and motion studies, when applied to factories and domestic labor, were designed to push workers toward doing the most work possible in the least amount of time. His ideas did, in fact, raise productivity and, therefore, profits. But Taylorism—“the ideal of efficiency applied to production as a scientific method”—enslaved society to “profitable” time.
“With the world’s economy resting more and more on competition between manufacturing enterprises, someone had to notice that the key variable in the arithmetic of production was always time,” writes Gleick. “The calculus of productivity, anything per unit time, is so ingrained in the post-industrial world that we can barely conceive of a workplace psychology omitting it. Yet it did not exist before ‘Speedy Taylor’ forged his methods and ideas in the factories of the Northeast in the 1870s, as the Industrial Revolution reached its height” (p. 213).
The problem, however, is that it is impossible to save time. The speed of light is a cosmological constant. Humans have no power over the flow of time. In fact, we don’t know the answer to the common question, “Where does the time go?” We cannot put a minute or an hour in a bank for later use. All we can do is choose how to spend the time we have.
Nevertheless, today’s plethora of time management books offer strategies for saving time. What these books really imply is that saving time is about doing more work in the same amount of time. By contrast, people in previous centuries believed that it was more important to think about the best ways to spend time, to be wise about using time in meaningful ways.
“It might be simplest to recognize that there is time—however much time—and we make choices about how to spend it, how to spare it, how to use it, and how to fill it,” says Gleick (p. 232).
This book will inspire you to question our modern views of time. We hope that you read it—if you have time.
Quote to Ponder
“Adrenaline! Our rhythms are radically different. We’re constantly accelerating the visual to keep the view in his seat…. I don’t know that we demand more content—we demand more movement. We’re packing more in, but the irony Is that it isn’t more substance. We all become part of that. We all become less patient.” — Film director Barry Levinson on the fast pace of movie scenes