Time crunch and why I think time is going too fast
A few days ago, I asked my friend if she plays movies or YouTube videos at a 1.5x speed. She replied, Yes, especially, if it’s video lectures before adding a laughing emoji. Her response became a confirmation of what has become increasingly suspicious to me. It’s a habit that I continuously reflect on. What once was a pleasurable viewing experience to me becomes sullied by how much time is left for the day.
Time crunch and why I think time is going too fast
Keeping up with the deluge of everything
Perhaps one of the leading theories of this perpetual quest for a time becomes ascribed to the speeding up of life. With technology, social media, and content domination, there’s a seeming competition to keep up with the deluge of everything.
Robinson and Godbey in their book, Time for Life (1997) sought to understand the way Americans use their time. They mentioned that this perception commonly refers to a psychological response to the general speeding up of modern life.
That is to say, the heightened sense of time pressure is not necessarily grounded in an actual lack of free time, but rather it is a psychological response to the general ‘speeding up’ of modern life. They suggest that we have become victims of our exceedingly high aspirations and that the problem of ‘time famine’ is, in most instances, ‘a perceptual problem.’
Time crunch and not enough time
Time crunch, according to Free Dictionary, remains an idiom defined as, a limited amount or period of time in which to do or complete something that would normally require more time. Now the last phrase is something to think about. Something that would normally require more time.
I think about the phenomenon I invoked above. Manipulating time, and consuming content in rapid succession. Once, in one of our classes, we tackled how as journalists we need to contour our writing to the demands of platforms. These most often these days are on social media.
There’s an invocation to inhabit an influencer mindset, a battle to keep an audience engaged in an attention economy. I sometimes think that to continue to affirm the standards set by this kind of engagement will be a detriment to the process of building the context necessary to engage with issues more meaningfully.
It, then, becomes a question of time when these practices become standards of the industry. Battles are done through soundbites potentially erasing the attention (and thereby, time) one needs when trying to understand a particular issue.
In Jiri Zuzanek’s article, Work, leisure, time-pressure, and stress, he mentioned that the number of people who feel like they “never have enough time” rose from 40% to 60% from 1977 to 1997. Meanwhile, 45% of the population aged 20 years or over felt more rushed than they did ‘five years ago,’ according to the Canadian General Social Survey in 1992.
Structural problems
In this situation, it presents an interesting inquiry into how as a society we ought to think about time and the detriment of having the consciousness that as the years go by we have less and less time to do other things. Zuzanek’s study concludes by asserting how most pressures that we face in modern society stem from structural problems.
They are embedded in the competitive demands of globalised economies, changing workplace environments, value orientations emphasising rapid material gains and conformity with standardised and fast forms of expression prevalent in popular culture.
In this part, he mentioned a counterpoint to the concept of yoga as a symptom rather than a remedy for stress. When I talk about this a quote from Pink Floyd pops up in my head:
The time is gone
the song is over,
thought I had something more to say.
