Slow News

The “Ugly American” is a stereotype. But according to the US government it is an accurate picture of Americans abroad. Amazingly something is being done about it. Next month, industry and government join forces to give American employees abroad a “World Citizen Guide.” The guide is designed to help them behave appropriately. There is even talk of issuing the guide as with every new passport.

The typical Ugly American is loud, arrogant, and boastful. The guide helpfully suggests that Americans abroad should slow down. Here we talk, move, live, and eat fast. Of course, not everyone does: but slowing down is sound advice.

Talking loud is an invasion of other people’s privacy. Paying attention to how others are behaving will give clues. Religion is a matter of privacy, too. When we are secure, we don’t need to impress others with what we believe or what we have.

Our foreign policy has not enamored us to many countries that we recently had cordial relations with. If you talk politics, then do most of the listening. Listening with interest to different points of view or learning about different cultural practices is always a winning strategy.

It is so important that we act as ambassadors when we go abroad. America is full of generous, considerate, and well-mannered people. Slow down, listen, ask questions, be polite, and win friends. Politeness is patriotic.

Americans have plenty of leisure time because academics tell us so.

The Economist ran a story (The land of leisure, February 4th) suggesting we, in America, have plenty of time off. The article is based on the findings of Mr. Aguiar, an economist, and Mr. Hurst from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. It is no surprise that the discussion around leisure becomes quantitative. I’m sure both gentlemen are very good at counting.

The basis of the studies came from time-use diaries. This method does inform us - but only to a point.

The learned gents argue that Americans have more leisure time than previously thought. They have collected data to prove it. I mentioned the study to my stepdaughter in New York. She works full-time, is in her thirties, married with a young child. Her indignant response was, “ I’m sure no woman ever wrote for the Economist!”

It’s not easy to understand the difference between work and leisure. We don’t have an adequate definition of either. Of course, studies are only correct until something else disproves them. Employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics don’t tell the whole story. Those numbers don’t account for people who have given up looking for work, are otherwise unable to work, or the long-term desperate. We know about what we measure, but not much else.

From anecdotal evidence, there are many of us who spend vast amounts of time, preparing for work, traveling to work, and actually working. My wife can spend a huge amount of time in the bathroom getting ready for work. I know this because I have conducted my own long-term study. But we must be careful not to denigrate work. Any culture that does not honor work is doomed – but we do have a tendency to overdo it.

We live in a culture of quantity. Josef Pieper’s seminal book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture warned us against the “Total World of Work.”

A vacation can be a respite from work. But if all a vacation gives us is enough renewal to go back to work, its function is limited. We vacate on a vacation: We go somewhere else. The notion is of retreat. Two weeks of activity, even in an exotic location, is unlikely to change the way we see the world.

Our culture is based on action. But action without the time to consider is dangerous. How many of us simply are working or being entertained? Let’s not confuse entertainment and leisure.

If we don’t experience a positive and beneficial state of doing nothing, we won’t value it. Slowing down has its dangers. There is a reason some of us need the constant companionship of the TV; the radio playing in the car; the avoidance of silence. There is a terror of being alone. What might we find out?

According to one source, leisure time is that for which you would not choose to pay someone else to spend for you. For example, you wouldn’t pay someone to go on vacation for you. Or would you? I am not so sure that paying someone to go on vacation for you is all that absurd. Some vacations are used to fulfill familial obligations. Some vacations can be devoid of all enjoyment. There is a reason for those mother-in-law jokes. There is the phenomenon of “vacation stress.” Many people experience discomfort around holidays. Some escape into the world of work: It can be less emotionally demanding.

Workaholism is socially acceptable even if potentially damaging. It’s tough to have an interesting conversation with a one–dimensional workaholic. Fortunately, the art of conversation is not quite dead in America.

If Americans, under the retirement age, really have more leisure, where are they? How many people do you know who have the time and engage in non-commercial hobbies? It is as if a large part of our culture is against private enjoyment. Our identities are based on work. The term “professional” is seen as having more social value than “amateur.” But a professional works for money. The amateur (from the French word to love) engages in an activity purely out of interest, out of curiosity: for pleasure.

Rather than talk about how much leisure, maybe we should talk about how it enriches our quality of life.

I was horrified when I read the headlines, “For many in Spain, siesta ends.” How could such a civilized thing end? Have the Spanish gone mad? Do they no longer recognize the extravagant boon their history has bequeathed them? Going home in the middle of the day for a nap, or at least putting your feet up is the supreme feat of advanced mankind.

Oh! But I was wrong. I read more of the article. Far from my idealized view of the culture that brought us Don Quixote, flamenco, and Spanish omelets, they actually spend a long time at work; at least they did until today. The siesta may last two or three hours which is a wonderful thing. The bad news is that they were working until 9 or 9:30 at night.

According to the International Herald Tribune, they sleep an average of 40 minutes less than the so-called average European. Under the new rules they will work from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Working shorter hours is a good thing.

Spaniards, don’t rush into things. I’m all for the 9-5 routine but why give up the mid-day nap?

Here is an article about multitasking from the Health Sciences Infomation Service, Alaska’s Medical Library. They take a dim view of it up there. And quite rightly so.

Listen to “Against the Clock” from the Big Ideas program from Australian National Radio here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigidea/stories/s1455696.htm

Here is the summary from their site:

Summary
For those who feel the pace of life is getting faster by the minute, for those who are overwhelmed by their workload and fear it’s only going to get worse - squeeze this program into your tight schedules! Thinkers and time dissidents talk about our obsession with the clock - what’s behind it, how do we compare to other cultures and how do we slow down.

Guests on the program:

Bob Levine - Social Psychologist, California State University
Corinne Maier - Author, Hello Laziness
Cristian Lackner - Society for the Deceleration of Time
Graeme Davison - Historian, Monash University
John Zerzan - Neo-primitivist thinker
Kahn Linh (speaking through an interpreter, Boi Tran Huynh) - Vietnamese Miniature Landscape gardener
Monica Morgan - Indigenous Australian from the Yorta Yorta community

Rational Simplicity by Tim Covell

Covell, Tim. Rational Simplicity: Setting Course to a Simpler Life. iUniverse , 2005 Lincoln, NE.

Tim Covell isn’t one of those individuals referred to by Thoreau as one of the “mass of men [who] live lives of quiet desperation.” Never earning more than $25 an hour, Tim Covell managed to retire at age 42. Rational Simplicity, based on his own experience, is full of wise suggestions to combat time poverty.

His insights are about choice - choices we may not even know we have. This short book has practical exercises that reflect how we spend our time and money. For example, real time spent working includes preparation for work, commuting, actual hours working, more commuting, and recovery time. Only by calculating all of these hours can you know your real wage. Then, when you decide to purchase something you can see how much of your time you are trading for something you need, or may only want.

Tim Covell offers nine major suggestions, three of which are: Think of money as time. He turns the industrialists motto, “time is money” on it’s head. Separate wants from needs, and to avoid consumer debt.

Ultimately, Rational Simplicity is about values. Only by being aware of the price of time poverty: rudeness, dangerous driving, divorce, depression, poor health, addiction to T.V., credit-card debt and so forth, can we start to look at what sort of civic and personal climate we want to live in. There is an old saying that patience is a virtue. It is a virtue of a slower and more considered world. This considerate world is attainable. A good start is by getting Rational Simplicity.

Christopher Richards July 2005

Must we suffer for art? I did this evening. The Missus and I went to the Pacific Film Archive to watch “Cats, Bugs, and Perverts: The Films of Martha Colburn.”

I should have been warned when the Missus read out the bombastic write up. “Her visual spew of punk rock poetry and corrupt collage, rendered in scabrous animation…” It also mentioned the word, “dizzying.” Why on earth do I want to go out on a Tuesday evening in Berkeley to be dizzied?

The films were art-school experimental stuff. Some of these can be interesting. When I was in art school, we showed Stan Brakhage’s film Seeing With Your Own Eyes.

I say we showed, rather than, I saw. I made a run for it much sooner than I did tonight. The Brakhage film is an intimate look at an autopsy. I’m sensitive. I have to lie down to have blood taken. I bolted after they got the knife out.

But the problem with Martha Colburn’s films is that they are all too fast. The rapid succession of images leaves one with not enough time to process each image before the next one is presented. It’s very disconcerting. Even if you watch a lot of TV you may not be able to tolerate this sort of rapidity.

Jerry Mander, in his book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, uses the term “adrift in mental space.” Martha Colburn’s films are ultra-television: rapid imagery, and banal content that leaves the viewer listless and numb. Could this be the state of punk nirvana?

Particularly onerous in Mander’s view, is that a person watching TV enters a hypnotic and suggestible state. The darkened environment and lack of awareness of one’s own body creates a state in which the content of TV, the images and sounds, bypass critical our thinking functions. We imbibe what we are shown and then we subconsciously act in ways that are not in our best interest.

Martha Colburn is an animator and works in super 8 and 16mm film. There are twenty-four frames each second, and each frame is painted by hand. The effort to do all this is laudable. It fits right in with our cultural bias for praising hard work as an end in itself. But, even so, trying to watch such rapid images is painful. How many of those images presented to the unconscious will stick in the mind? I don’t know if subliminal advertising is illegal in the USA, but I imagine it goes on. Much of the viewer’s experience of The Films of Martha Colburn must work on that level. If I am to be disconcerted, I want to know why.

There were no signs in the theater saying, “Not Suitable for those of a Slow Lifestyle Persuasion.” I wonder how Martha would do sitting down to watch Andy Warhol’s film Empire? It is a slow film if ever there was one, eight hours of looking at the Empire State Building. That is one film that is even too slow for me. My advice is to take your time and read carefully before making a daring choice of cultural enrichment.

I thought it was the artist that was supposed to suffer, not the audience.

According to The Washington Post and China View, the United States leads the world in mental illness. I wasn’t aware that we were in a global competition for the “Most Bonkers Nation.” Apparently we are the winners. We love to be number one.

How did we manage this victory? Could it be the pace of life we live? Or do we rush about because we are crazy?

A one-and-a-half year study at the University of Michigan deemed 46 percent of us to be suffering from mental disorders. I am glad to see that the three hundred interviewers who visited 9,282 households in 34 states were “trained”. Presumably about half of the interviewers were insane.

Thomas Szasz, in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness argues that mental illness is a political term. An individual who is at ease with himself, and “functioning” well in society is considered normal. If this definition were true the Type A workaholic is what we all should be striving for.

Of course, there are many detractors to Szasz’s position. There are organic diseases. All of us suffer at times, but some much more than others. Suffering is part of the human condition. Although unpleasant, suffering is normal and an appropriate response to an untenable situation, a hostile, frightening, or toxic environment. I don’t think we should label unhappiness as mental illness.

If we were to defend our tile of Most Bonkers Nation, would it be unpatriotic to slow down?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/06/AR2005060601651.html

Thanks to Frank Nettleton for sending me this link to slowning down tips by Eknath Eswaran.

Some time ago I took a taxi cab. Inside the driver had posted a sign these wise words, “Lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency on mine.”

Video from New Zealand TV about life work balance. You’ll need Microsoft Media Player and a broadband connection for this one. This is from http://www.xtra.co.nz.