It's Not a Patient World: Blame Technology

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 11th, 2008

This is not a patient world. I blame technology.

Before there were answering machines, you never expected anyone to phone you back, you just kept trying at different times on different days until your schedules matched. I do not remember this system stressing me out at all.

With the advent of the answering machine we expected people to get back to us within a few days at the most -- and that assumed they were on vacation or something.

Next we invented the fabulously useful and yet insidiously stress producing cell phone -- which made us think that people were inherently reachable wherever they were and whenever we wanted. Almost immediately this made us treat things like the morning commute as work opportunities instead of the radio listening mind numbing relaxation centred experiences they were meant to be. Still, I think we would give people a period of grace in terms of calling us back, and hope they got to us today or tomorrow.

Grace, that is, until the epidemic of e-mail.

E-mail created an environment where we expected that the person who was not on their cell phone was in fact in front of the computer screen, with nothing better on their mind than responding to each and every individual query from both well meaning and intentionally time wasting compatriots.

Ask yourself, in this technologically savvy world, how much time you would give someone to respond to a message?

For most of us our patience starts to wear thin after a couple of hours. Just stop and think about this for a moment -- how much time do you spend at the gym, on the road, at lunch, or asleep?

I don't return cell phone calls during those moments -- but I am anachronistic. I try not to return phone calls on the day they come in just on principle. I can therefore tell you from experience; it makes people irate when they cannot immediately be in touch with you.

Don't get me wrong, I am no Luddite; I own every single imaginable piece of technology and love it. I am writing this on a laptop that has my ipaq handheld computer and my iPod nano plugged into it. My iPod has a nike sensor so that I can keep track of and download my running; my cable box records 40 hours of programming so I can pause and rewind or even walk away from the few new programs that are actually dribbling out of the writer barren TV-land. I have a cell phone and an Xbox. And my life would not be complete without any of it . . . but that does not mean that we need to let technology control us.

There is a book by a journalist named Carl Honoré called In Praise of Slow which looks at various aspects of our lives as Canadians in order to challenge our assumption that bigger and faster is always better.

Even the sleeve notes from this book are intriguing; they say, among other things, that the average Canadian sleeps 90 minutes less a night then we did a century ago, that we average 72 minutes behind the wheel of a car each day, and that we spend 68 hours a year on hold.

We have sped up and stressed out almost every aspect of our lives from work to play, food to love; and we are killing ourselves because of it.

Here are some scary facts: every day in the United States there are one million employees off on stress leave; one third of all North Americans are obese; the use of drugs in the workplace has risen 78 per cent since 1998 (the drug of choice being crystal meth which lets you work like a superhero till you die); traffic fatalities now stand at somewhere near 1.3 million worldwide, many of which are caused by fatigue (11 per cent of people say they have fallen asleep at the wheel); and there are now 24-hour day cares in many cities.

Why do we need everything to happen right now when it is clearly so harmful to how we should be living?

Why are we so impatient?

It is not like anything is better because of our sense of haste; which you can prove using some simple experiments.

Please try these at home. First, go to any fast food restaurant for a burger and fries (I suggest A&W or Wendy's just to give them a fighting chance) for lunch. Now, go to the market or even a superstore and buy some sirloin steak, some aged blue cheese, and Yukon gold potatoes. Make yourself some bread while grinding up the sirloin in the food processor, make your own fries and season them with sea salt -- use the blue cheese for the cheeseburger and add whatever you like to any of it.

I guarantee you will not even be able to convince yourself you are eating the same meal as lunch.

Next, devote a whole day to doing nothing and see how relaxed you are the following day.

Finally, spend three hours awake and in bed with your spouse -- do anything you want to do, read, talk . . . and see if suddenly you are not way more connected.

Slowing down and becoming more patient does not actually mean giving up anything. It means reclaiming the value in what we already have.

Unless you have chest pain or are bleeding profusely, there is absolutely nothing that needs to be done right now. So put down this paper and go for a walk, take a nap, listen to a song, or just stare into space.

Whatever you do, just try to wait, it will make each task a little more fulfilling and life will be better.