The Power of Slow: Part 2

The distant past is shrinking.

A friend of mine told me a story about something that occurred a few weeks back and he referred to it as being a super long time ago.  Does a few weeks in the past constitute a long time?  Well, let’s see.  Would money earn much interest or land appreciate significantly in that timespan?  Mm, not so much.  Let’s just take a look at time itself.

Early American settlors spent months crossing the Atlantic.  It took just as long if not longer to send and receive letters.  A completed correspondence (“how are you?” and “I am well, thanks.”) might take nearly a year.  Generally, long courtships occured before people got intimate.  Now, its a second date.  Or a late-night text.  My theory is that a long time ago, a long time ago was much, much longer.

So what’s the problem?  Well, this perception of time may be limiting our emotional and financial well-being.  I’m too lazy and too right to go looking for hard scientific data right now, so please confirm with your own reflections.  Cake tasted good this instant, but being ten pounds lighter, which took way more time and effort, tastes even better (perhaps), but significantly, the positive feeling lasted longer.  Saving money also takes time and discipline, and rather than buying beers at the bar, you buy a plane ticket.

What both examples have in common is that they require you, at an earlier point in time, to acknowledge that that point in time will become a much more distant point in time, and that to achieve a desirable outcome in a future point in time, requires action in that earlier, soon-to-be distant point in time.  You can’t just sit down a press a button for sustained happiness.  You’ve got to plan for it.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.  The second best time is today.  This is surely common sense.  But with a sense of time that makes two years feel like twenty, you may be screwing yourself twenty years from now.

Read The Power of Slow Part 1

The Power of Slow: Part 1

The bright side, quite literally, of having sleep kept at bay by your sparring match with various thoughts is that you get to welcome a new day.  Thanks to the low lying clouds on the horizon, this one’s a particularly slow rise.  And as the backlighting of the sun delicately traces the clouds’ outer edges with glowing brilliance, a conclusion rises from the darkness: A slower world is a happier world.

My world moves too damn fast and I’m guessing yours might too.  If you own a cell phone, email, text, browse social media feeds, play video games, watch movies and pretty much do anything with or on the Internt, your life is happening instantaneously.

It’s all relative, right?

Since I can do things quicker, like communicate in writing with someone in a distant place, taking a longer time to do it seems like a waste of time.  What once took days or weeks, now happens the moment I hit send.  Before cell phones, as a kid, I had to call people and often leave messages, then play a game phone tag to set up and time and place to hangout.  Now I shoot a text and we’re on our way to the beach.  And if you take longer than an hour to respond you are most certainly rude.

Seems innocent enough.  But I got a sneaking suspicion, confirmed by hard evidence, that this instant communication and constant availability is conditioning me and messing up my sense of time.  Working on long term school projects for a long period of time felt unbearable so I procrastinated then jammed it out in a short span.  I’ve also started several projects outside school that fizzle out the moment I hit some friction that requires an investment of serious time to overcome.

Delayed gratification is on a steep decline and deep, sustainable happiness is going down with it.

It looks a lot like lazy, but my theory is that I’m conditioned for instant gratification.  I haven’t experienced delayed gratification (that satisfaction that comes from effort over a long period of time) enough to motivate myself through the delay part.  I haven’t tasted the victory when months of hard work finally pays off.  It’s the feeling you have when you read that last page of the book.  I barely read now because I’ve got movies for stories.  So if it takes me longer than an afternoon to enjoy it, I’m out.

But I’m beginning corrective action.  Since I’m bored of school papers, I’ve taken up the endeavor of making things.  And I’ve started with a bench.  The bench is a replica of a favorite of mine.  It took me and two friends an entire day to get tools, buy supplies, build a mold, and pour one concrete slab.  Now we’re waiting 48 – 76 hours for the concrete to cure before we can pour the second slab.  And then we’ve got some more work before can sit on this thing.

A bench may seem silly, but we’re trying to prove a point.

We hit several snags throughout the day, which ordinarily would have caused me to relent, tell myself it was a stupid idea, and call it a day.  But by recognizing our tendencies, we were able to battle them back.  We took deep breaths, reminded ourselves this was a couple day process that couldn’t be rushed, consulted the internet for concrete pouring advice, made two more trips to the store to get the right stuff, and high-fived at the end of it all.  We’re not even halfway finished, but I already feel  happier than I do after watching SportsCenter all afternoon.

Older than 20? You’re the Internet’s Elder

Twenty years ago today, the Internet turned one week old.   She was 25 servers large at birth; the gestation period was well over 9 months.  She was young, idealistic, free and given to the Public to raise.

Two Questions:

1) How mature is the Internet?  

Is the Internet too commerce-centric?  Our main portal to enter the Internet, search engines, are increasingly benefitting commercial interests of old players.  We had a brand new space and we let commercial interest move in and make it business as usual.  In my opinion this makes the web immature but maturing.

There’s an undercurrent of resistance.  Its called collaboration and its a bit foreign to the capitalistic spirit of the most significant western economy.  The scale of the Internet and the huge tribe of humans connecting daily enables collaboration on the global and neighborhood stage.  This ability is historically unprecedented.  If we raise it right, a mature Internet can beautify our world.

2) How do we raise the Internet to reach her potential?

To reach its greatest potential, a being must find the most productive uses of its capacity and time.  Collaborating with other humans, instead of consuming shit, may be the most productive use of the Internet.  Perhaps this could flatten out wealth distribution.  And maximizing usage while minimizing waste of this planet’s human and non-human resources .

Here are some good parents of the Internet:

http://www.wikipedia.org/

www.craigslist.org

https://www.airbnb.com/about

http://www.etsy.com/about?ref=ft_about 

http://www.zipcar.com/

http://www.sharesomesugar.com/