A great question: "What does it say about a culture when schedules take precedent over the life in front of your eyes, when the ticking of a clock discourages compassionate behavior?"
The following article engages this question and reminds me that in my desire not to be disorganized or "waste time," I often over-schedule myself and focus too much on the self-centered and material goals of my life. Many of the goals are worth, even noble. However, by over-focusing on these goals, I tend to miss opportunities to be compassionate, helpful, thoughtful, loving, kind, supportive, etc. I may reach my scheduled goals and miss the life that is happening all around me.
Here is an article by Professor Levine at the University of California, Fresno, that deals with this issue. Given the Holiday Season that is upon us,and how this Season affects me, I think the article raises some interesting points and merits attention.
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Time is money in the West. Workers are paid by the hour, lawyers charge by the minute, and advertising is sold by the second ($117,000 per second at this year’s Super Bowl). Think about this: The civilized mind has reduced time, the most obscure and amorphous of all intangibles, to the most objective of all quantities—money. With time and things on the same value scale, I can tell you how many of my working hours equal the price of the computer I am typing on.
Can I really? As a
social scientist, I’ve spent much of the last 25 years studying the “personalities”
of places. Much of this work has focused on the attitudes toward time held by
those who inhabit those places. My colleagues and I have found vast cultural
differences in definitions of what constitutes early and late, waiting and
rushing, the past, the present, and the future.
Perhaps the biggest
clash is between cultures that operate on clock time and those that work on
event time. Under clock time, the hour on the timepiece governs the beginning
and ending of activities. Lunch begins at 12 and ends at 1. Punctuality is the
governing principle. When event time predominates, schedules are spontaneous.
Events begin and end when, by mutual consensus, participants “feel” the time is
right. Many countries exhort event time as a philosophy of life. In Mexico, for
example, there is a popular adage, “Give time to time” (“Darle tiempo al tiempo”).
In Liberia it is said, “Even the time takes its time.” In Trinidad it is
something of a cultural bedrock that “any time is Trinidad time.”
Our own research has
compared the pace of life in different cities. In an early study we conducted
field experiments in the largest or other major city in each of 31 countries.
One experiment, for example, timed the average walking speed of randomly
selected pedestrians over a distance of 60 feet. Another experiment sampled
speed in the workplace—specifically, how long it took postal clerks to fulfill
a standard request for stamps. All measurements were taken during main business
hours in main downtown areas under similar conditions. More recently, my
colleague Stephen Reysen and I replicated these experiments in 24 cities across
the United States.
We’ve found large
differences in these studies. The fastest big cities in the international
study, for example, tended to come from Western Europe and prosperous Asian
countries, while those from traditional event-time countries (such as Mexico,
Brazil, and Indonesia) tended to be slowest. The differences were often
substantial. For example, on the walking-speed measure we found that
pedestrians in Rio de Janeiro walked only two-thirds as fast as did pedestrians
in Zurich, Switzerland. (For further details, see, for example, Levine, A
Geography of Time [Basic Books]). We’ve found these differences are to at
least some degree predictable by demographic, economic, and environmental
characteristics of the places, and, more importantly, they have consequences
for the well-being of individuals and their communities.
The consequences are
mixed. On the positive side, people in faster places tend to say they are
happier with their lives. We believe this reflects the economic rewards that
result from making every minute “productive”: Faster cities in our studies
tended to have healthier economies, and we know from other studies that people
who have difficulty meeting their minimal needs tend to be less happy. (A
sidebar: Money does not, however, appear to affect happiness beyond poverty.
There is little difference in happiness between moderately wealthy and very
wealthy individuals.)
But a fast pace of
life has its costs. In another series of experiments, conducted in many of the
same cities, we compared the likelihood that a passerby would assist a stranger
in need. In one experiment, for example, we observed the proportion of people
who went out of their way to return an inadvertently dropped pen. In another,
we observed the proportion who assisted a man with an injured leg trying to
pick up a dropped magazine. Not surprisingly, there were strong differences
between cities (see “The Kindness of
Strangers”). Perhaps the most notable finding was a negative
relationship between the pace of life and helping: People in faster places were
less likely to take the time to assist a stranger in need.
The problem may not
be speed per se so much as feeling rushed. In a now-classic
experiment, John Darley and Daniel Batson gathered a group of Princeton
University Seminary students for what they understood to be a study about
religious education. The students were told they’d be giving a brief talk,
either about the types of jobs seminary graduates are suited for or about the
parable of the “good Samaritan.” They were then directed to walk to a recording
studio across campus. Along the way, they passed a man slumped in a doorway who
was coughing and groaning loudly. The students were divided into two groups.
Half of them were told there was no need to rush in getting to the recording
studio. Almost two-thirds of this group stopped to help the suffering man. The
other half of the students were told they were late and needed to hurry to the
studio. Among this group, only 10 percent helped. Ninety percent were
apparently too busy to stop. “Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student
going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped
over the victim as he hurried on his way,” Darley and Batson recalled.
People may ignore
strangers for a variety of reasons. They may be too busy to notice, or too busy
to care. They may fear how the stranger will react. Or they might simply be
uncaring jerks. To the stranger in need, however, reasons are beside the point.
The only thing that matters is whether they get help.
When did it become
acceptable in America to treat helping strangers as “wasted time”? Everyone in
the world agrees—they should, anyway—that time is our most precious commodity.
But peoples’ definitions of “wasted” are another great cultural divider. To a
time-is-money clock-timer it refers to anything that distracts from the task at
hand. To an event-timer, however, there is nothing more wasteful than carving
one’s life into inflexible, inorganic units.
I’ll never forget a
conversation I once had with an exchange student from Burkina Faso in Eastern
Africa. I was complaining that I’d just wasted my morning yakking in a café
instead of doing my work. He looked confused. “How can you waste time? If you’re
not doing one thing, you’re doing something else. Even if you’re just talking
to a friend or sitting around, that’s what you’re doing.” He said he was taught
that what’s wasteful—sinful, to some—is to not make sufficient time available
for the people in your life.
What does it say
about a culture when schedules take precedent over the life in front of your
eyes, when the ticking of a clock discourages compassionate behavior? There are
plenty of experts in the United States you can pay to help plan your days more
efficiently. Here’s another suggestion. Try beginning your day with a question
people often ask in Brunei: “What is not going to happen today?” While you’re
at it, don’t forget to give time to time.
Reprinted with permission. Dr. Robert Levine is
a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Fresno. He is the
author of the award-winning book “A Geography of Time”, and “The Power of
Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold[H1] ”.
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