has sought to protect employees’ right to disconnect. It is easy to see why we may imagine we are always working – even if we are enjoying those fabled leisure hours that the statisticians claim we have, watching television with half an eye on office emails rather than actually doing anything with them. Then again, is time really free if, like a dog, you are attached to a leash that may at any point be yanked, dragging you back to the cares of the office?
Constantly larding our minds with pending tasks is time theft. It may be self-inflicted, but not entirely, if – given the pressure to hold on to jobs today – monitoring work from dawn until midnight is part of your workplace culture. What it is not is efficient.
The most notable weakness of our superfast world is ourselves: we cannot seem to apply the brakes. A study of 1,500 Dutch people revealed that those who constantly rush feel as if time is also going faster, and this perception encourages them to rush yet more. Humans are wired to mirror the world around us, setting our pace in tune with our environment, a phenomenon known as entrainment. This is why we bustle in a busy city like London but wander in Wyoming. Unfortunately bustling has side effects. Not least that it becomes addictive.
Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines hurry as ‘the dispatch of bunglers’. Although everybody knows this intuitively – doing things at speed requires skill – speed encourages us to overreach ourselves. The more we can do, simultaneously, at the touch of a computer button, the greater the temptation to overdo it. Multitaskers often imagine that they are faster and more efficient, working harder and longer than they are in reality, because busy, distracted hours feel fuller – when in fact they complete tasks 30 per cent more slowly. Really they are servants of fast – trying to match the fluid possibilities of technology. Worse, tackle eighteen tasks at once and the probability that one will go wrong is far higher than doing them sequentially. Screw up and it is the difference between breaking down on a sedate B road and crashing on a motorway. More is the pity, because a smooth tempo is best for mind, body and productivity. In effect, in our alacrity to make the most of our super-fast tools we render ourselves deficient.
There is no sign that we are ready to wean ourselves off speed: on the contrary, we celebrate it. In 2015 Nike, the iconic sports brand, refreshed their legendary anti-procrastination slogan, ‘Just Do It’, with a campaign that urged us to ‘find your fast’. That same year boxes of Tampax were jazzed up by cartoon women on the run, their hair flying, their flailing hands clutching bags and phones. Advertisers select images either to flatter or scare us into buying a product. But the multitasking tampon lady does both. Like a doctor dashing about the emergency room, saving lives, this testament to heroic female dynamism also appears ripe for a heart attack.
Sure enough, statistics also reveal that the citizens of faster countries show higher rates of smoking, coronary-related death and of greater subjective wellbeing. In other words, we imagine that we are happier pursuing a lifestyle that actively harms us. And what makes it deadly? Stress of a particularly pernicious variety: the unpredictable, uncontrollable stress we get when life’s beat is erratic. The type that we overdose on if interruption, hurry and time pressure are our daily diet.
The side effects of busyness help to answer a puzzle that has long preoccupied economists: why, after incomes reach a certain level, does a rise in a country’s wealth have no power to lift its population’s happiness?
The usual explanation is that we exist on a hedonic treadmill. In other words, wealth and the stuff we buy with it makes us happier in the short term, but soon we adjust. Even lottery winners, after the initial ecstasy, revert within months to their former level of contentment. What we are beginning to realize is that hedonic adaptation often occurs because we are poor at investing our surplus time and money in pastimes or objects that enhance our wellbeing or manufacture enduring daily happiness.
According to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher famously associated with pleasure (although his life was pretty ascetic), ‘Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.’ Could you disagree? But speed and wealth interfere with our capacity to delight in our abundance. Yes,
happiness = having choice over how to spend time
and also
wealth = having more choice over how to spend time
But unfortunately
wealth = more complicated choices over how to spend time
No account of happiness is complete unless time is factored in.
Weirdly, acceleration seldom liberates extra hours: more often it creates extra work. 2011’s European Social Survey, studying twenty-three countries, found that people had the least leisure not in the richest places but in those where economic expansion was most rapid. (The pace of development was measured by internet use and car ownership – not, coincidentally, things that make us speedy.) Employers’ demands intensified when salaries rose, driving up the pace. But workers’ choices changed too. The more they could earn, the less time they spent on other activities.
Self-consciousness about time depletes our ability to relax and relish it. Fascinatingly, if you trick someone into feeling richer, studies find that instantly he also feels more time-pressed. Just remind somebody what they earn in an hour and relaxing to music becomes harder for them. Why? An hour feels less disposable the more we are paid for it, increasing the pressure to squeeze out every penny – even if in theory you can better afford to slack off.
No wonder that when time pressure intensifies, we often make rum choices. In a 2008 survey, 57 per cent of respondents who identified themselves as busy cut back on hobbies, 30 per cent on family time, but only 6 per cent on work. Perhaps in an era of credit crunch, then at its nadir, these priorities were understandable. Equally, it is possible that those questioned preferred to see less of their family. In order to thrive, love needs space, yet in an age of Velcro unions and widespread divorce, investing time in love instead of a career can feel risky, and deafening cries for me time suggest that our priorities are less collegiate. Fostering love is even harder if we are distracted and the continuum of relationships is interrupted, whether by business trips or our chirruping smartphone.
When we design our lives, it is easy to underestimate the importance of unhurried time – even those of us who should know better. Such as behavioural psychologist David Halpern, who confessed he is a commuter. ‘We’d probably have been happier in a smaller place with more time at home.’ In his defence, he argued that such trade-offs are common: ‘We buy expensive presents for our kids that they rarely play with, when they – and we – would probably be happier if we had spent the money and the time on doing something with them.’
Opting to go home instead of earning overtime – even if it means missing those you love – is difficult. Love is shown by what we provide, is it not – and if we do not put in the hours, what will it mean for our promotion prospects?
Of all the curiosities of time in our speedy world most striking is that our horizons seem increasingly short-termist. Our huge 1,000-month lifespan gives us a greater stake in the future, yet fewer save for old age than in past generations, and external mechanisms, such as government initiatives to compel us to invest in pensions, are weak or vanishing. ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing,’ remarked economist Avner Offer.
In business too, grab and go is the order of the day. ‘Silicon Valley venture capital firms are starting to seek fantastically short life-cycles for the companies they finance: eighteen months, they hope, from launch to public stock offering. Competition in cycle times has transformed segment after segment of the economy,’ wrote James Gleick in Faster, noting that the turnaround in car manufacturing from design to delivery, traditionally five years, was down to eighteen months by 1997. Everyone wants a fast buck – and they want it faster. Can it be that as a whole we are reluctant to look ahead – to imagine the planet, the climate or the hands that steer the tiller of our global future?
‘There is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote,’ wrote philosopher David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature