The speeding up of everything: are 1,440 minutes in a day enough?
No Easy Answers
Back in dark ages 1985, comedian Steven Wright quipped that he has ‘a microwave fireplace. I can lay down in front of the fire for the evening in eight minutes.’ It’s a typically surreal one liner from a man who’s made a career out of bending the minutiae of everyday life into weird and unexpected shapes. But the gag’s essential tension - speeding up a relaxing evening of doing very little - sits rather differently in a world where the pace of life seems to have accelerated enormously. Has patiently waiting for life’s smaller pleasures - or simply doing nothing at all - become an almost alien concept in darker ages 2026?
The world certainly seems to be in a bit of a hurry: city centres are gridlocked with gig economy cycle couriers ferrying fast food at breakneck speed, risking the life and limb of every pedestrian they race past. Global corporations are hellbent on dropping consumer goods into our wheelie bins within nanoseconds of us clicking Purchase. Rolling news sprints across our screens with an urgency that makes a lower league football club’s signing of a reserve goalkeeper and the latest catastrophic weather incident seem like equivalent events. If your time tolerance stretches any further than the average TikTok and you’re able endure more than a few minutes of media entertainment, the fast-forward button is no longer just a way to skip through the pest of advertising: it’s a hatchet to hack through the jungle of material that doesn’t offer immediate gratification. And when paying for anything in the shops, time is far too tight to sign a piece of paper, or enter a PIN on a terminal, so we simply tap our card or phone and go, with no regard for receipts, contracts, accountability, possible buyer’s remorse.
As we left the last century, James Gleick suspected something funny - something fast - was happening, leading him to ask: ‘are we living at high speed with athleticism and vigour, or are we stricken by hurry sickness?’ Whichever way you lean, the new opportunities opened up by a digitally connected society are underpinned by a determination to remove all perceived ‘friction’ from everyday life. The smartphone seems to figure prominently in all of this. As well as giving us all kinds of fantastic opportunities to communicate, create and consume, it also signals new pressures, new ways of being, new expectations of how we structure and experience time. But it doesn’t appear to be consistent with one of the great technological myths of the last century. In her Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, Judy Wajcman notes:
Weren’t modern machines supposed to save, and thereby free up, more time? Not long ago, commentaries about postindustrial society predicted a ‘leisure revolution’ driven by automation in industry and the home. Economic progress and increased prosperity would free people from having to focus on providing for subsistence needs, delivering more leisure time. Sociologists talked of the ‘end of work’ and wondered with some apprehension how the vacant hours would be occupied. Instead, the image that abounds is that of the frenetic, technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted citizen.
Given everything we take for granted in the 21st century, it seems absurd that intellectuals seriously worried about people anxiously trying to fill empty hours. We certainly aren't banking the time we save, at least not in any sense that yields more leisure or the freedom to simply sit back and do bugger all.
Wajcman poses another important question: ‘Why do we turn to digital devices to alleviate time pressure and yet blame them for driving it?’ When it comes to the speeding up of everything, digital tech is often wheeled out as the prime suspect and blamed for our inability to step back from a life lived at a frenetic pace. But Wajcman also points out that technology is not an alien force and that blaming it for our time poverty is to overlook some pretty important considerations:
If we’ve been too quick to accept the temporal logic built into our new technologies, then we need to remember that the social determination of time is built into those technologies. Temporal demands are not inherent to technology. They are built into our devices by all-too human schemes and desires.
So perhaps the question shifts from whether technology itself is speeding up the pace of life to why we continue to design, buy and submit ourselves to systems built on speed. Speed is not some accidental by-product of modern tech but a central principle of modern economic life. As we navigate a savage cost of living crisis, speed becomes less a lifestyle choice - or something we can digitally detox our way out of - than a condition for merely getting by. The gig economy, zero hours contracts, piecemeal freelancing and employment poverty have transformed time into something charged and volatile. We aren't tethered to our screens merely out of habit or entertainment. We are plugged in because the modern labour market demands immediate availability, understanding that every minute must be monetised, every hour optimised. And who has the time for any of that?
No Easy Answers will be exploring these issues on Weds 18th Nov at 6pm. It usually takes an hour, but who knows - maybe we can hit the fast-forward button and do it in half the time.
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