In Praise of Slow Read online

  Like most people, I want to find a way to live better by striking a balance between fast and slow.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DO EVERYTHING FASTER

  We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched

  by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.

  —FUTURIST MANIFESTO, 1909

  WHAT IS THE VERY FIRST THING you do when you wake up in the morning? Draw the curtains? Roll over to snuggle up with your partner or pillow? Spring out of bed and do ten push-ups to get the blood pumping? No, the first thing you do, the first thing everyone does, is check the time. From its perch on the bedside table, the clock gives us our bearings, telling us not only where we stand vis-à-vis the rest of the day, but also how to respond. If it’s early, I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. If it’s late, I spring out of bed and make a beeline for the bathroom. Right from that first waking moment, the clock calls the shots. And so it goes on through the day, as we scurry from one appointment, one deadline, to the next. Every moment is woven into a schedule, and wherever we look—the bedside table, the office canteen, the corner of the computer screen, our own wrists—the clock is ticking, tracking our progress, urging us not to fall behind.

  In our fast-moving modern world, it always seems that the time-train is pulling out of the station just as we reach the platform. No matter how fast we go, no matter how cleverly we schedule, there are never enough hours in the day. To some extent, it has always been so. But today we feel more time pressure than ever before. Why? What makes us different from our ancestors? If we are ever going to slow down, we must understand why we accelerated in the first place, why the world got so revved up, so tightly scheduled. And to do that, we need to start at the very beginning, by looking at our relationship with time itself.

  Mankind has always been in thrall to time, sensing its presence and power, yet never sure how to define it. In the fourth century, St. Augustine mused, “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” Sixteen hundred years later, after wrestling with a few pages of Stephen Hawking, we understand exactly how he felt. Yet even if time remains elusive, every society has evolved ways of measuring its passage. Archaeologists believe that over twenty thousand years ago European ice age hunters counted the days between lunar phases by carving lines and holes in sticks and bones. Every great culture in the ancient world—the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Chinese, the Mayans and the Aztecs—created its own calendar. One of the first documents to roll off the Gutenberg printing press was the “Calendar of 1448.”

  Once our ancestors learned to measure years, months and days, the next step was to chop time into smaller units. An Egyptian sundial dating from 1500 BC is one of the oldest surviving instruments for dividing the day into equal parts. Early “clocks” were based on the time it took for water or sand to pass through a hole, or for a candle or a dish of oil to burn. Timekeeping took a great leap forward with the invention of the mechanical clock in thirteenth-century Europe. By the late 1600s, people could accurately measure not only hours, but also minutes and seconds.

  Survival was one incentive for measuring time. Ancient civilizations used calendars to work out when to plant and harvest crops. Right from the start, though, timekeeping proved to be a double-edged sword. On the upside, scheduling can make anyone, from peasant farmer to software engineer, more efficient. Yet as soon as we start to parcel up time, the tables turn, and time takes over. We become slaves to the schedule. Schedules give us deadlines, and deadlines, by their very nature, give us a reason to rush. As an Italian proverb puts it: Man measures time, and time measures man.

  By making daily schedules possible, clocks held out the promise of greater efficiency—and also tighter control. Yet early timepieces were too unreliable to rule mankind the way the clock does today. Sundials did not work at night or in cloudy weather, and the length of a sundial hour varied from day to day thanks to the tilt of the earth. Ideal for timing a specific act, hourglasses and water clocks were hopeless at telling the time of day. Why were so many duels, battles and other events in history held at dawn? Not because our ancestors were partial to early rises, but because dawn was the one time that everyone could identify and agree on. In the absence of accurate clocks, life was dictated by what sociologists call Natural Time. People did things when it felt right, not when a wristwatch told them to. They ate when hungry, and slept when drowsy. Nevertheless, from early on, telling time went hand in hand with telling people what to do.

  As long ago as the sixth century, Benedictine monks lived by a routine that would make a modern time manager proud. Using primitive clocks, they rang bells at set intervals throughout the day and night to hurry each other from one task to the next, from prayer to study to farming to rest, and back to prayer again. When mechanical clocks began springing up in town squares across Europe, the line between keeping time and keeping control blurred further. Cologne offers a revealing case study. Historical records suggest that a public clock was erected in the German city around 1370. In 1374, Cologne passed a statute that fixed the start and end of the workday for labourers, and limited their lunch break to “one hour and no longer.” In 1391, the city imposed a curfew of 9 P.M. (8 P.M. in winter) on foreign visitors, followed by a general curfew of 11 P.M. in 1398. In the space of one generation, the people of Cologne went from never knowing for sure what time it was to allowing a clock to dictate when they worked, how long they took for lunch and when they went home every night. Clock Time was gaining the upper hand over Natural Time.

  Following the trail blazed by the Benedictines, modern-minded Europeans began using daily schedules to live and work more efficiently. As a philosopher, architect, musician, painter and sculptor during the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti was a busy man. To make the most of his time, he began each day by drawing up a schedule: “When I get up in the morning, before anything else I ask myself what I must do that day. These many things, I list them, I think about them, and assign to them the proper time: this one, this morning, that one, this afternoon, the other, tonight.” You just know Alberti would have loved a Personal Digital Assistant.

  Scheduling became a way of life during the Industrial Revolution, as the world lurched into overdrive. Before the machine age, no one could move faster than a galloping horse or a ship at full sail. Engine power changed everything. Suddenly, with the flick of a switch, people, information and materials could travel across great distances faster than ever before. A factory could churn out more goods in a day than an artisan could make in a lifetime. The new speed promised unimaginable excitement and prosperity, and people lapped it up. When the world’s first passenger steam train made its maiden voyage in Yorkshire, England, in 1825, it was greeted by a crowd of forty thousand and a twenty-one gun salute.

  Industrial capitalism fed on speed, and rewarded it as never before. The business that manufactured and shipped its products the fastest could undercut rivals. The quicker you turned capital into profit, the quicker you could re-invest it for even greater gain. Not by accident did the expression “to make a fast buck” enter the language in the nineteenth century.

  In 1748, at the dawn of the industrial era, Benjamin Franklin blessed the marriage between profit and haste with an aphorism that still trips off the tongue today: Time is money. Nothing reflected, or reinforced, the new mindset more than the shift towards paying workers by the hour, instead of for what they produced. Once every minute cost money, business found itself locked in a never-ending race to accelerate output. More widgets per hour equalled more profit. Staying ahead of the pack meant installing the latest time-saving technology before your rivals did. Modern capitalism came with a built-in imperative to upgrade, to accelerate, to become ever more efficient.

  Urbanization, another feature of the industrial era, helped quicken the pace. Cities have always attracted energetic and dynamic people, but urban life itself acts as a giant
particle accelerator. When people move to the city, they start to do everything faster. In 1871, an anonymous diarist wrote of the British capital: “The wear and tear of nerve-power and the discharge of brain-power in London are enormous. The London man lives fast. In London, man rubs out, elsewhere he rusts out.… The mind is ever on the stretch with a rapid succession of new images, new people and new sensations. All business is done with an increased pace. The buying and the selling, the counting and the weighing, and even the talk over the counter, is all done with a degree of rapidity and sharp practice.… The slow and prosy soon find they have not a chance; but after a while, like a dull horse in a fast coach, they develop a pace unknown before.”

  As industrialization and urbanization spread, the nineteenth century brought an endless parade of inventions designed to help people travel, work and communicate more swiftly. Most of the fifteen thousand machines registered at the US Patent Office in 1850 were, as one Swedish visitor noted, “for the acceleration of speed, and for the saving of time and labour.” London opened the first underground subway line in 1863; Berlin switched on the first electric tram in 1879; Otis unveiled the first escalator in 1900. By 1913, Model T Fords were rolling off the world’s first assembly line. Communications also sped up as the telegraph debuted in 1837, followed by the first transatlantic cable in 1866 and, a decade later, by the telephone and the wireless radio.

  None of the new technology could be fully harnessed, however, without accurate timekeeping. The clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible—meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts. Lewis Mumford, the eminent social critic, identified the clock as “the key machine” of the Industrial Revolution. But it was not until the late nineteenth century that the creation of standard time unlocked its full potential. Before then, each town kept time by the solar noon, that eerie moment when shadows vanish and the sun appears to be directly overhead. The result was an anarchic mishmash of local time zones. In the early 1880s, for instance, New Orleans was twenty-three minutes behind Baton Rouge, eighty miles to the west. When no one could travel faster than a horse, such absurdities hardly mattered, but now trains crossed the landscape quickly enough to notice. To make efficient rail schedules possible, nations began harmonizing their clocks. By 1855, most of Britain accepted the time transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 1884, twenty-seven nations agreed to recognize Greenwich as the prime meridian, which eventually led to the creation of global standard time. By 1911, most of the world was on the same clock.

  Persuading the early industrial workers to live by the clock was not easy. Many laboured at their own speed, took breaks on a whim or failed to show up for work at all—a disaster for factory bosses paying hourly wages. To teach workers the new time discipline demanded by modern capitalism, the ruling classes set about promoting punctuality as a civic duty and a moral virtue, while denigrating slowness and tardiness as cardinal sins. In its 1891 catalogue, the Electric Signal Clock Company warned against the evils of failing to keep pace: “If there is one virtue that should be cultivated more than any other by him who would succeed in life, it is punctuality: if there is one error to be avoided, it is being behind time.” One of the firm’s clocks, the aptly named Autocrat, promised to “revolutionize stragglers and behind-time people.”

  Punctuality got a big boost when the first windup alarm clocks hit the market in 1876. A few years later, factories began installing clocks for workers to punch at the beginning and the end of each shift, embedding the “time is money” principle in a daily ritual. As the pressure mounted to make every second count, the portable timepiece became a status symbol. In the US, the poor joined clubs that raffled off one watch each week. Schools also backed the punctuality drive. A lesson in the 1881 edition of McGuffey’s Readers warned children of the horrors that tardiness could unleash: train crashes, failed businesses, military defeat, mistaken executions, thwarted romances: “It is continually so in life, the best laid plans, the most important affairs, the fortunes of individuals, honour, happiness, life itself are daily sacrificed because somebody is behind time.”

  As the clock tightened its grip and technology made it possible to do everything more quickly, hurry and haste seeped into every corner of life. People were expected to think faster, work faster, talk faster, read faster, write faster, eat faster, move faster. One nineteenth-century observer quipped that the average New Yorker “always walks as if he had a good dinner before him, and a bailiff behind him.” In 1880, Nietzsche detected a growing culture “ … of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once.”

  Intellectuals began to notice that technology was shaping us as much as we shaped it. In 1910, Herbert Casson, a historian, wrote that “ … with the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and sluggish mood has been sloughed off … life has become more tense, alert, vivid.” Casson would not be surprised to learn that spending long hours working on computers can make people impatient with anyone who fails to move at the speed of software.

  The culture of hurry cranked up a notch at the end of the nineteenth century thanks to a proto-management consultant by the name of Frederick Taylor. At the Bethlehem Steel Works in Pennsylvania, Taylor used a stopwatch and a slide rule to work out how long every single task should take to the nearest fraction of a second, and then arranged them for maximum efficiency. “In the past, the man has been first,” he declared, ominously. “In the future, the System must be first.” But though his writings were read with interest all over the world, Taylor himself enjoyed mixed success putting his brand of “Scientific Management” into practice. At the Bethlehem Steel Works, he taught one worker to move four times more pig iron in a day than the average. Many other employees quit, though, complaining of stress and fatigue. Taylor was a hard man to get along with, and was eventually fired in 1901. But though he lived out his final years in relative obscurity, a hate figure for the unions, his creed—schedule first, man second—left an indelible mark on the Western psyche. And not just in the workplace. Michael Schwarz, who produced a 1999 TV documentary on Taylorism, said: “Taylor may have died in ignominy, but he probably had the last laugh, because his ideas about efficiency have come to define the way we live today, not just at work but in our personal lives as well.”

  Around the same time as Taylor was calculating how many hundredths of a second it took to change a light bulb, Henry Olerich published a novel called A Cityless and Countryless World, which depicted a civilization on Mars where time is so precious that it has become the currency. A century later, his prophecy has virtually come true: time is now more like money than ever before. We even talk about being “time-rich” or, more often, “time-poor.”

  Why, amid so much material wealth, is time-poverty so endemic? Much of the blame rests with our own mortality. Modern medicine may have added an extra decade or so to the three score years and ten originally laid down in the Bible, but we still live under the shadow of the biggest deadline of all: death. No wonder we feel that time is short and strive to make every moment count. But if the instinct to do so is universal, then why are some cultures more prone than others to race against the clock?

  Part of the answer may lie in the way we think about time itself. In some philosophical traditions—Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three—time is cyclical. On Canada’s Baffin Island, the Inuit use the same word—uvatiarru—to mean both “in the distant past” and “in the distant future.” Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going. It is constantly around us, renewing itself, like the air we breathe. In the Western tradition, time is linear, an arrow flying remorselessly from A to B. It is a finite, and therefore precious, resource. Christianity piles on pressure to put every moment to good use. The Benedictine monks kept a tight schedule because they believed the devil would find work for idle hands to do. In the nineteenth century, C
harles Darwin summed up the Western obsession with making the most of every minute with a stern call to action: “A man who wastes one hour of time has not discovered the meaning of life.”

  In Japan’s native Shinto religion, which exists in harmony with the local form of Buddhism, time is cyclical. Yet after 1868, with almost superhuman zeal, Japan set about catching up with the West. To create a modern capitalist economy, the Meiji government imported the Western clock and calendar, and began promoting the virtues of punctuality and making the most of time. The cult of efficiency deepened after the Second World War left Japan in ruins. Today, when you stand at Shinjuku station in Tokyo and watch commuters run to catch a train when another will be along in two minutes, you know the Japanese have swallowed the idea of time as a finite resource.

  Consumerism, which Japan has also mastered, is another powerful incentive to go fast. As long ago as the 1830s, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville blamed the shopping instinct for jacking up the pace of life: “He who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it.” That analysis rings even more true today, when all the world is a store, and all the men and women merely shoppers. Tempted and titillated at every turn, we seek to cram in as much consumption and as many experiences as possible. As well as glittering careers, we want to take art courses, work out at the gym, read the newspaper and every book on the bestseller list, eat out with friends, go clubbing, play sports, watch hours of television, listen to music, spend time with the family, buy all the newest fashions and gadgets, go to the cinema, enjoy intimacy and great sex with our partners, holiday in far-flung locations and maybe even do some meaningful volunteer work. The result is a gnawing disconnect between what we want from life and what we can realistically have, which feeds the sense that there is never enough time.