Leavitt: Time flies, but maybe not as fast as we think
By Irv Leavitt for Chronicle Media — January 23, 2019
Irv Leavitt
In some unfortunate parts of Africa, there is such a short supply of clean water that the good stuff has become a de facto currency. But don’t feel too superior. Here in America, we’re now trading on an even more basic component of life: time.
Cutting the amount of time it takes to do things has become the fastest-growing segment of the American marketplace.
It’s especially apparent in the way we eat. At the turn of this century, most people still cooked their own dinners, and in the mornings, packed forlorn, soon-soggy sandwiches and salads into their lunch buckets and briefcases, just as their parents did. Delivered meals, for most, were largely confined to pizza on weekends. Only the lazy, rich, or feeble went beyond that.
Now, if almost any restaurant doesn’t deliver, it’s leaving considerable money on the table.
People are even getting deliveries from McDonald’s. These are real Earth people, who know that McDonald’s has a drive-through that provides food, or something that looks like food, in, what, 45 seconds?
And for our less-frequent cooking, millions of us have our groceries shopped for by someone else, then shipped out to us.
We are Americans, who turn up our noses at bananas with spots on them, but are now willing to accept whatever comes in the box.
If you want to go to a grocery store in person, you can’t chill while you choose from among the 700 kinds of barbecue sauce now available.
As soon as you stop moving, somebody is likely to say, “Excuse me.” But that phrase is no longer an apology. Now it means, “Get the hell out of my way.”
Seconds count in the grocery aisle, like everywhere else.
What’s the rush?
With the rise of the Layoff Economy in the 2000s, people had to do their work plus the work of the guy who walked out of the place with a box under his arm. That meant unpaid overtime. Frenzied lives.
But for a lot of people, that didn’t last forever.
Yes, layoffs continue, but eventually, many of us probably just slowed down on all that extra labor. We realized that it made little difference how much extra work we do, because the most important criterion for who gets let go is who makes the most money.
But lots of us act like we’re spending a ton of extra time with our noses to the grindstones, even if our noses are fine, thank you very much.
If you’re not one of those who has to work two or three jobs to pay rent, and you’re not obsessed with accumulating money, you’ve probably got about as much leisure as you or your parents did a few decades ago.
After all, American households are watching almost eight hours of television a day. That’s traditional TV, not including Netflix and Netflix-like things. It’s only an hour less TV than we were watching at TV’s peak — which came in 2010, which is probably later than you thought.
This also does not include how much time we spend with our smart phones.
Do you have one of those apps that shows you how much time you spend on the phone every time you turn the thing on? Scary, isn’t it?
You may not be reading newspapers anymore, but you’re reading a whole heck of a lot of some kind of material on a screen so small that you’d have refused to even try using it 20 years ago.
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Most of us don’t seem to be working through vacations. In 2017, tourism in Chicago set a record of 55 million visitors. In 2018, 58 million.
And despite all that restaurant delivery, the restaurants are relatively full, too, at least those that haven’t poisoned anybody recently.
There’s a burgeoning market in craft beer, small-barrel booze, and exotic drugs, all of which demand time to enjoy properly.
And yet, everybody’s rushing around. Over the last two decades, about a third of all traffic deaths are caused by one thing — not alcohol, but speeding.
The truth is that since we discovered the Internet, we want to do everything fast, preferably with the push of a button or two, or barking at a machine that listens and obeys. This is the way we usually buy our necessities and desires, the way we choose our lovers, and the way we elect our leaders.
We don’t rush because we’re short of time. We do many things fast because that’s the way we’ve come to do them.
Everybody gets it. Beto O’Rourke recently released a video of himself interviewing a dental hygienist about her immigration situation while he was getting his teeth cleaned. He couldn’t do it normally. He had to multi-task, like everyone else.
The same day, the college national champions visited the White House during Donald Trump’s partial federal government shutdown, and he fed them fast food, which was a relatively quick, but not very cost-effective or tasteful, solution to a labor shortage.
But Trump gets us, and to an extent, we get him.
Some say that people voted for Trump because they don’t read newspapers. The truth is that many people don’t read newspapers for the same reason they like Trump, and many other unusual people and things, too.
That’s because when we’re able to get what we want by pushing buttons, there are basically two outcomes.
On the one hand, we might browse all the possibilities, and make relatively informed choices. On the other hand, if we feel pressed for time, we can move quickly and get it over with. If so, we are probably confined to a relatively narrow range of choices proscribed by our intentions at the start.
It’s a Whack-a-Mole way of making decisions. Reading a newspaper doesn’t fit into that. Good papers are full of conflicting information, and they force a process that makes deciding what’s best an activity requiring a little time and patience.
So it’s better to just click through social media, which tends to filter out news and information that doesn’t fit into the way we thought when we woke up this morning.
When people purposely avoid thinking about significant negatives in order to help bad leaders do bad things, that’s very bad. It’s willful ignorance. But this is not quite the same.
Here, we’re missing the point because we’re living at high speed, and not caring enough to slow down and pay attention. This is drive-by ignorance.
What do we get when we have millions of people moving fast, but unwilling to investigate changing lanes?
We get a lot of people impatiently saying “Excuse me, excuse me,” but not necessarily going any place we’ll like when we arrive in plenty of time.
