On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast

In 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, Bannister had changed history. But he would be prouder of his later achievements, becoming a leading authority on the autonomic system – the hidden clock that controls the most vital beats in your life and mine, our heart and breathing rate.

The lessons of Bannister’s early breathing experiments are transferrable. We can increase our pace, mental or physical, given the right resources. But our mind is in charge. Unless it has the means to remain in control, speed wears us out, fast. Yet we can test the limits, and even feel, as he did in Iffley, that time no longer exists. Controlling time makes us powerful if we take choices.

So what do you want to do today?

Perhaps this seems a frivolous question. Perhaps you are fully occupied by what you need to do. Before you answer, it is worth reflecting that your ability to ask it is a privilege unique to our species.

‘We all have our time machines, don’t we,’ wrote H.G. Wells in The Time Machine. ‘Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward, are dreams.’

Being aware that one day we must die is the cruellest term of the human condition. But to compensate, we also have the capacity to appreciate that since this is a one-way ticket, why not embrace the adventure?

Our powers of mental time travel make this possible. They endow us with the riches of culture and knowledge, not to mention aeroplanes that (in theory) run on time, as well as computers, virtual worlds and machines to roam outer space. And how wondrous it is to be able to walk outside after a hard day and – if you are lucky, if the night sky is not cloudy or gelded orange by city lights – turn your eyes heavenward, as I just did, spot a white smudge hovering above the shoulder of Pegasus, and appreciate that there is Andromeda, our nearest major galaxy, one trillion stars and 2.5 million light years away – a vision that began travelling to earth around the time that your immediate ancestor, Homo habilis, ‘handy man’, first picked up a tool, 2.3 million years before a mind like yours or mine existed.

And here we are. Here is your hospitable consciousness, meeting mine, leaping through time, long after I flung these words into a laptop, late one summer’s day. It is impressive, given that we started out as apes and, rather longer before that, as stardust.

Time travel – the ability to understand and organize our actions – is a commonplace marvel. It matters because each conscious instant of our life presents a decision: where to allocate our time and attention. Consciousness enables this, not only by performing the feat of simulating our outside environment inside our head, but also furnishing us with an inner reality. Our every moment is infused by previous moments, anticipated moments – giving life depth and perspective, and us our sense of self.

Grace of these riches, our mind’s eye, as if wearing magical spectacles with lenses fashioned from a clairvoyant’s crystal ball, is able to serve as a questing prosthesis for our other five senses: it supercharges the insights they glean from the world around us to let us see beyond where we are into the possible future, supplementing it with information drawn from memory and knowledge to plot a wise and (it is to be hoped) safe course through space and time.

The desire to peer around life’s corners is surely the evolutionary mechanism that summoned consciousness. Certainly, it distinguishes humanity from other animals, freeing us to control our path. These faculties enable you to remember birthdays, plan a surprise for somebody you love, cook a meal without burning down the house, force yourself to study for exams, judge exactly how long it is safe to loiter in Starbucks before running to catch that plane, know you will never like liquorice, watch Dirty Dancing, sing along and have the time of your life. Time is the foundation of your sense of self. Your sixth sense.

Strangely, although everyone agrees that time is scarce and precious, it is remarkable how readily we give it away. Statistics suggest that whilst we wonder where the time goes, in truth we have plenty to spare. In 2013 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey found that on average men aged 15 and over had 5.9 daily hours of leisure. Women had 5.2 hours, and employed workers an average of 4.5 hours – a sizeable chunk of the waking day.

This does not tally with how busy we feel. Are we deluded?

What these numbers do not reveal is the form this leisure comes in: whether those free minutes are scattered through the day or available in useful blocks. Time leaks from us in many ways, after all. Count them, however, and you may feel queasy.

In 2014, Ofcom found UK adults spent 8 hours 41 minutes a day on media devices, 20 minutes longer than they spent asleep. Of this tally, four hours went on TV – the same for children. (On average, Britons donate nine irreplaceable years to box-goggling.) Across the Atlantic, in 2014 the average US citizen watched six hours of TV per day, spent an hour on a computer, another on a smartphone, and almost three listening to radio. Tot them up. It sounds a lot like leisure.

Yet other information suggests that the pace of life is accelerating. The rate at which we walk is a good indicator. In 1999 sociologist Robert Levine led a study of cities and towns across thirty-one countries and found that urbanites march significantly faster than their less wealthy country cousins. London, one of the world’s richest cities, topped the speed list. A decade later, similar research concluded that the average tempo had risen 10 per cent. Far Eastern cities accelerated the most, with Singapore (up 30 per cent) becoming the new global leader.

Why are we hurrying up? Researchers concluded that several factors increase a country’s pace of life: economic growth, large cities, rising incomes, accurate, plentiful clocks, an individualistic culture and a cool climate. (Asian tiger economies sped up with the spread of air conditioning.) Imagine those lonely hordes, their collars upturned as blistering wind chases them into their skyscrapers to put in another twelve-hour stint.

The picture these statistics paint is confusing: of fast-moving, exhausted individuals, who spend half their existence slumped in armchairs while imagining they are hurtling about at full throttle. This contradictory image begins to add up when you consider the engines behind economic growth: flexible hours (of employment and consumption) and hyperfast communications.

If the steam engine fired the industrial revolution, the driver behind wealth in recent decades has been semiconductors. As they got cheaper and faster, so did computers, enabling us to do more, faster, without moving an inch. The possibilities are endless. What is less obvious is that acceleration has psychological, physiological and practical side effects which are increasing time pressures, with complicated consequences.

Speed has long been both the goal and the index of human progress. The history of civilization hops and skips in innovative leaps that let us do more in less time: from the invention of the wheel, to bank notes that let us transmit funds without trundling about caskets of gold, to machines for washing clothes. Swift communication unleashed scientific discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries via epistolary relationships between the likes of Galileo and Kepler, thus hastening the Enlightenment. In the same way, great cities are superconductors of knowledge, gathering together like-minded people – as in California’s Silicon Valley, where dreams of the future led to where we are now, with the boundaries of space and time defeated, and more or less every idea under the sun available more or less instantly, Wi-Fi server permitting.

It is worth pausing to consider how extraordinary today’s fast is. When the Royal Mail relaunched in 1662 after the restoration of Britain’s monarchy, a letter dispatched in London would reach a continental city between three and twenty-five days later. Postmen travelled on foot at a regulated seven miles per hour between March and September, five miles per hour in the winter months. (Horses were not used, since they lacked staying power, while ‘footmen can go where horses cannot’.) Priority was given to letters of state, carried in a separate bag known as the ‘packet’. If the packet went astray, an official letter was easy to recognize by the forbidding motto on its exterior: ‘Haste, Post, haste for thy life’. In case the postboy was illiterate, it was accompanied by a grim sketch: a gallows with a corpse hanging in a noose. Arguably today’s fast should also carry a health warning.

Undeniably speed enlarges minds and fortunes. It is an article of faith among management consultants, citing a popular study, that a product that runs 50 per cent over budget will be more profitable than one that strolls in six months late. Fast technology conjures myriad new businesses, some great, some questionable – such as high-frequency stock trading, in which tech-savvy individuals exploit differing lengths in computer cable between exchanges to skim lucrative sales data milliseconds ahead of the pack, thus creaming off millions. We are a long way from this complaint, made to the Royal Mail in the seventeenth century, about a conniving merchant who ‘has had most singular advantages, having had his letters many hours before a general dispatch could be made to all the merchants’.

But the advantages of acceleration and unfettered access via digital media bring new time pressures. Businesses routinely purloin customers’ time, cheekily passing this off as being for our convenience. Is it liberating to have a dehumanizing supermarket experience, swiping produce at the automated till, or to act as data inputters, filling in forms to order something online, then lose ten hours indoors awaiting the delivery, or to go to the shop and wait ages for a runner to disembowel your item from the store? Each unpaid minute we work for the retailers, freeing them to employ fewer of us.

Worse burdens fall on employees. Lengthening working days reach into the home, as companies swallow the creed that staff should be on standby on their portals of perpetual availability, as if each were a branch of the emergency services. Only France 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 (1738–40). Neglecting the joys of the present is no wiser. We need both. But if we are losing sight of the future, it could be because our present is so drenched. It has never been harder to live in the moment, never mind see beyond it.

2. The great time heist

‘If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time,’ wrote architect Norman Juster in 1961. Sadly humanity’s artistry at dreaming up new essentials on which to spend money is exceeded only by our ingenuity at confecting fresh tosh on which to waste time.

In the decades since Juster made his joke, the industry of easy and useless grew exponentially. As it did, his joke turned into a prediction. Free time is increasingly a thing of the past.

I have nothing against wasting time. It is a joy, a right and a duty, and an aid to creativity. This is why we have so many plum terms for it: bimbling, dallying, dawdling, dillydallying, dissipating, frittering, idling, lazing, loitering, lollygagging, mooching, moseying, pootling, pottering, slacking, squandering, tarrying, tootling. I am grateful to the nameless men and women who bumbled away their hours conjuring these delicious words. ‘Forget your cares,’ they seem to say. ‘Savour us.’