The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock.
Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition
of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain
friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to
dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to … get there!
You
too can measure yourself on the “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome
Scale,” a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon
James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself “acting in a
hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster
than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence?”
Slowness
rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow
Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening
of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get
to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of
society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our
great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now
drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in
the Twitter age.
Once upon a time, cognitive scientists tell us,
patience and impatience had an evolutionary purpose. They constituted a
yin and yang balance, a finely tuned internal timer that tells when
we’ve waited too long for something and should move on. When that timer
went buzz, it was time to stop foraging at an unproductive patch or
abandon a failing hunt.
We now
insist that Web pages load in a quarter of a second, when we had no
problem with two seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006.
“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc
Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of
Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure
we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity.
It gave us the impulse to act.
But that good thing is gone. The
fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It
creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at
all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer
even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of
proportion to the delay.
“The link between time and emotion is a
complex one,” says James Moore, a neuroscientist at Goldsmiths,
University of London. “A lot is dependent on expectation—if we expect
something to take time then we can accept it. Frustration is often a
consequence of expectations being violated.”
“Time stretches,” Wittman says. “We get mad.”
Make no mistake: Society continues to pick up speed like a racer on Bonneville Speedway. In his book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity,
Hartmut Rosa informs us that the speed of human movement from
pre-modern times to now has increased by a factor of 100. The speed of
communications has skyrocketed by a factor of 10 million in the 20th
century, and data transmission has soared by a factor of around 10
billion.
A
down-to-earth gauge was established by psychologist Robert Levine in
the early 1990s, when he sent his students around the world to take the
pulse of 31 large cities. They timed random people as they walked over a
distance of 60 feet. In Vienna, Austria, where I live, pedestrians
covered the ground in a respectable 14 seconds. But in my former home of
New York, pedestrians zoomed by in 12 seconds. In the 2000s,
psychologist Richard Wiseman found worldwide walking speeds had gone up
by 10 percent.
The pace of our lives is linked to culture.
Researchers have shown society’s accelerating pace is shredding our
patience. In tests, psychologists and economists have asked subjects if
they would prefer a little bit of something now or a lot of it later;
say, $10 today versus $100 in a year, or two pieces of food now versus
six pieces in 10 seconds.
Subjects—both human and other
animals—often go for the now, even when it’s not optimal. One study
showed that exposing people to “the ultimate symbols of impatience
culture”—fast-food symbols like McDonald’s golden arches—increases their
reading speed and preference for time-saving products, and makes them
more likely to opt for small rewards now over larger ones later.
Our
rejection of slowness is especially apparent when it comes to
technology. “Everything is so efficient nowadays,” Wittmann says. “We’re
less and less able to wait patiently.” We now practically insist that
Web pages load in a quarter of a second, when we had no problem with two
seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006. As of 2012, videos that
didn’t load in two seconds had little hope of going viral.
Of
course, we’re not going to die if a website doesn’t load immediately.
But in what is probably a hangover from our primate past—when we could
starve if impatience didn’t spur us to act—it sure can feel like it.
“People expect the payoff to come at some kind of rate, and when it
doesn’t come, this creates annoyance,” posits evolutionary
anthropologist Alexandra Rosati, a primate expert, who is finishing a
postdoc at Yale before joining the faculty at Harvard.
The result
is a less-than-virtuous cycle. The accelerating pace of society resets
our internal timers, which then go off more often in response to slow
things, putting us in a constant state of rage and impulsiveness. Your
mileage may vary, of course, but overall, “we are getting to be a more
and more impulsive society,” Wittmann says.
Recent research
points to a possibility that could make this cycle worse. As my
slow-walking friend and I strolled at a snail’s pace down the street, I
started to fear that we would be so late for our reservation that we
would miss it. But when we got to the restaurant, we were no more than a
couple minutes behind. My sense of time had warped.
Why? Rage
may sabotage our internal timer. Our experience of time is subjective—it
can fly by in a flash, or it can drag out seemingly forever. And strong
emotions affect our sense of time most of all, explains Claudia Hammond
in her 2012 book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.
“Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that there is no such
thing as absolute time, neither is there an absolute mechanism for
measuring time in the brain,” she writes.
Can we stave off the slowness rage and revive patience? We need to find a way to reset our internal timers and unwarp time.
Time
stretches when we are frightened or anxious, Hammond explains. An
arachnophobe overestimates the time spent in a room with a spider; a
fearful novice skydiver, the time spent hurtling to Earth. People in car
accidents report watching events unfold in slow motion. But it’s not
because our brains speed up in those situations. Time warps because our
experiences are so intense. Every moment when we are under threat seems
new and vivid. That physiological survival mechanism amplifies our
awareness and packs more memories than usual into a short time interval.
Our brains are tricked into thinking more time has passed.....MORE
