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Is time crunch a global phenomenon?

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Eva Hoffman, author of a new book called Time. She says the faster tempo of modern life isn’t just a western phenomenon: the feeling of a “time crunch” is increasingly a global experience.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  Another year is just about over, and though it’s a cliché for many of us, the years seem to spin by more and more quickly.  But the faster tempo of modern life isn’t just a western phenomenon, so writes Eva Hoffman in her new book, called, simply, Time.

EVA HOFFMAN: Certainly, people in the developed and developing world do seem to have this ubiquitous experience of shortages of time, you know that there isn’t enough time that we seem to feel that we need to cram more and more activities into every moment in order to catch up with ourselves.

WERMAN: Now, it was my understanding that concepts of time change when people are introduced to the idea of a wage economy, when you have to be at a job at a certain time instead of heading to the fields when the sun comes up, whenever that is.  Is the wage variable still the thing that determines how we view time around the world?

HOFFMAN: Well, it’s certainly one of the variables, and it’s one of the great leaps in our experience of time, the shift from event time to work time to clock time.  On event time, and let’s say rural economies and agricultural societies, people do their tasks for as long as it takes, and they also, of course, adjust their work rhythms to sun up and sun down.  On clock time, we are regimented in a very different way.

WERMAN: Yeah, but your view is even more profound than this in your essays.  I mean, you were saying that there are within certain cultures just hardwired concepts of time that philosophically are vastly different from our western ideas of time.  Explain that.

HOFFMAN: Well, certainly.  I think different cultures do have very different conceptions of time, and sometimes you know the difference is so great that these other conceptions can be very baffling to an outsider.  There’s South American tribes, who for example, conceive that the past is in front of them, and the future behind them.  This is you know exactly the reverse of our conception that the past is something we have left behind.

WERMAN: And they actually point forward like in front of them to indicate the past, right?

HOFFMAN: They point forward to indicate the past, and I suppose, you know, perhaps one can try to imagine why that is by thinking that they can see the past whereas they cannot see the future.  So the future has to catch up to them, so that is very different from our future oriented societies in which we know were always crashing towards the future.

WERMAN: And I guess it’s hard to generalize about a lot of this.  I mean, you mention people waiting three days for a long distance phone connection in Nepal, and then in neighboring India, you interviewed people at call centers, who complained of stress, but they all agreed that their job gave them great opportunities that they wouldn’t wanna give up.

HOFFMAN: Well, absolutely.  I mean, I think the shift in the nature of time is particularly evident in fast developing societies.  And you know there are tradeoffs between entering maturity and remaining comfortable ensconced in an earlier, but much less competitive sense of time.  So yes, the people at the call centers were often baffled by the hours they had to work, the pressures they had to contend with.  And yet of course, they didn’t want to go back to what they had.

WERMAN: Is it clear which cultures are happier, slow cultures or fast cultures?

HOFFMAN: Well, it appears that there isn’t a kind of universal criterion, but I do think that what is happening right now is a kind of another shift of gears into kind of hyper speeds that I do think are making us very uncomfortable and sometimes even sick because digital time works in these incredibly brief units.  And more and more, we expect instant response from everything, and we are accustomed to very short units of thought and activity.

WERMAN: Eva, you’ve written a couple of hundred compelling pages here about time.  Hopefully, you weren’t writing on deadline, but I’m wondering if you have a personal notion with your Eastern European point of view, you’re from Poland; about what you think would be the right speed for the flow of time.

HOFFMAN: Well, you know, I think there is such a thing as right speed.  There is certainly a right speed for our bodies.  We are inevitably adjusted to the 24-hour cycle, and we try to pride our selves out of that too much.  We suffer, we get ill, and I do think that we might have to retrench; we might have to remember that sometimes less is more and slower is better.

WERMAN: Eva Hoffman thanks very much for fitting us into your nicely measured schedule.  Your latest book is Time.  Greatly appreciate it.

HOFFMAN: Thank you very much indeed.  It was a pleasure.

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