Fast life and slow world
Salute, carders, today we have quite an interesting article about fast life and the slow world.
Social acceleration, "aggressive pedestrian syndrome" and the inner sense of time: we understand how the pace of modern life knocks down our natural timers, why time sometimes flies like a bird, and sometimes crawls like a worm, and whether it is possible to solve the problem of patience with meditation.
Have you ever been diagnosed with a "sidewalk rage" condition?
It usually appears when it comes to our friends and acquaintances, in whom everything is, of course, perfect, except that they walk too slowly.
And any walk together eventually turns into hell.
You walk and think, " Oh, my God, are we ever going to get where we were going, or do we have to accept that today there will be nothing but this long, meaningless street?"
Or something like that.
Never happened?
This means that you are either close to Zen or hopelessly behind the times (which, as you will see below, is not bad at all, but quite the opposite).
In fact, the problem has reached such proportions in the world that scientists are already creating tests to test contemporaries for" aggressive pedestrian syndrome "(the most popular one was developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James; according to his scale, if you suddenly" act hostile "in a crowd and" enjoy thoughts of violence", then the syndrome is already acquired).
But the problem is not so much the sidewalks, but the fact that anger and rage are caused by any situation that requires patience: braking drivers, slow Internet, an immovable queue at the store-they all drive us crazy.
Even reading a long article can be excruciating for a modern person, so I need to hurry up.
So why do slow things drive us crazy?
The answer is simple: because the fast pace of life has skewed our inner sense of time.
What our great-great-grandparents would have found a miracle of efficiency and speed, today irritates us with its slowness.
Patience is a virtue that was defeated by the Twitter era.
As cognitive scientists have pointed out, the problem of patience was very important for our species: patience and impatience had an evolutionary purpose; they were a balance of yin and yang, a finely tuned internal timer that told our ancestors when to wait longer or when to take action.
If this timer started to give internal signs, it means that it was time for sowing or time to abandon a hopeless hunt.
"Why are we intolerant? This is the legacy of our evolution, " says Mark Wittman, a psychologist at the Institute for Borderline Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Intolerance kept us from wasting too much time on one pointless task.
At one time, this gave us an impulse to work.
But this good thing has come to an end.
The fast pace of life has thrown our internal timer off balance.
Now we have started to have expectations that cannot be met quickly enough or even met at all.
It's gotten to the point where when something moves slower than we expect, our internal timer starts playing violent games with us, stretching out the waiting time, causing anger out of proportion to the delay.
James Moore, a neurologist at Goldsmiths College, University of London, comments:
The relationship between time and emotions is very complex.
A lot depends on expectations: if we expect something that takes time, we are able to accept it. Frustration is often the result of broken expectations.
"Time drags on. We're losing our temper, " Wittman says.
Stay alert: The pace of life continues to pick up as a racer at Bonneville Speedway.
In his book "Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity", Hartmut Rosa tells us that the speed of human movement from ancient times to the present day has increased 100 times, the speed of communication has jumped by 10,000,000 units of time in the 20th century, and data transmission has increased by a factor equal to 10 billion.
This situation is well illustrated by an experiment conducted by Robert Levin in the early 1990s. The psychologist compared the rhythm of life in thirty-one cities in the world by several indicators.
He and his team found out the average walking speed of people in different cities, the speed of performing routine tasks, and the accuracy of bank watches.
The results showed that the most stressful rhythm of life in the United States, northern European countries and Southeast Asian countries.
And in the 2000s, psychologist Richard Wiseman found that the world's walking speed increased by 10 percent.
This could not but affect our way of life and our psyche.
Studies have shown that the increasing pace of life contributes to the destruction of our patience. In tests in which psychologists and economists asked subjects whether they would prefer something now or a little later, respondents preferred $10 today versus $100 a year, two bites of food now, than six bites in 10 seconds (when studying procrastination, scientists made a similar observation, but this was due to the fact that we do not identify the present with our future; this is worth thinking about).
Perhaps this is the reason for the popularity of fast food, tasteless, but fast food.
Our hatred of slowness is especially evident when it comes to technology.
"Everything is so efficient now. We are less and less able to wait patiently, " says Mark Wittman.
We practically require web pages to load within a quarter of a second, although there was no problem with two seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006.
Since 2012, a video that didn't work in two seconds has almost no hope of becoming popular.
Of course, we won't die if the site doesn't load right away. But we will probably feel the same way that primates did when they didn't get food for a long time — that's our evolutionary heritage. Anthropologist Alexandra Rosati explains:
People expect that the prize will come to them in some form, and when it does not come, there is irritation.
The result is a vicious circle. The accelerating pace of society resets our internal timers, which begin to perceive everything as too slow and lead us to a state of impulsive anger. Of course, your perception may change, but in general, society is becoming more and more impulsive.
Recent studies indicate that the situation is only getting worse. We constantly think that we are late for something, and at this point we not only speed up, but also start to get angry at those who, as we think, delay us. However, most often it turns out that we were not late for anything, but only feared it and were unnecessarily angry (remember the eternal fees to the airport, which almost always follow this scenario).
But why is this happening? It's not just the growing pace of society, but also the rage that can knock down our internal timer. Our experience of time is subjective. Do you remember Turgenev?
"Time (a well-known fact) sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm."
And this is the absolute truth. As Claudia Hammond explains in her 2012 book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, our sense of time is primarily influenced by strong emotions:
Just as Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that there is no such thing as absolute time, there is no mechanism in our brain to accurately measure time.
Time drags on when we're scared or anxious, Hammond explains. For example, arachnophobes overestimate the time spent in a room with spiders; the time for a novice skydiving for the first time is impossibly long. People who have experienced road accidents say that the events seemed to unfold in slow motion. But this is not because our brains speed up in such situations. Time is distorted because our experiences are too intense. Every moment when something threatens us, it seems new and bright.
In addition, our brain, in particular the insular area associated with motor skills and perception, can measure the passage of time by analyzing and integrating many signals from our bodies, such as the heartbeat, the glide of a breeze on our skin, and the state of burning anger. The brain judges time by counting the number and quality of signals it receives from the body. Thus, if signals arrive faster within a certain interval, the brain will analyze these signals and assume that the interval took much longer than it actually did. Wittman, quoted more than once, explains::
There is no clock that ticks in our brain, but we have a constant and continuous sensation of our body that is updated every second, and we use information about these sensations if we wonder how much time has passed.
When we are scared (or anxious, or unhappy), our organs send more signals to the brain, which in turn counts more seconds than actually passed. Ten seconds feels like fifteen, one hour feels like three, and so on.
But there is another aspect of the relationship between the speed of society, emotions and perception of time. Neuroscientist James Moore was able to show that time passes faster when we have a direct connection with the subsequent event, when we feel that we are achieving a specific result. Scientists call this experience "temporary bonding."
And vice versa. Moore notes:
"When we don't have control over events or don't feel it, the opposite happens: the internal clock slows down, meaning we feel that the time gaps are longer."
Can we change something?
Don't get angry at any kind of procrastination and learn to be patient?
Scientists are convinced that this is within our power.
However, we need to find a way to reset our internal timers and adjust the time differently.
We can, of course, try to control our feelings with willpower, but this is only a temporary measure that does not eliminate the problem, but only hides it.
Look at chimpanzees in the lab.
"When waiting for late rewards, they start to show negative vocalization, scratch, which is a sign of stress in primates, sometimes they knock on the wall, something like hysteria happens to them," writes Alexandra Rosati.
These chimpanzees respond in the same way that our brains respond to waiting.
There is another drawback in the strong-willed approach.
According to David Destenko, a psychologist at Northeastern University, strong-willed efforts make us more resistant to subsequent temptations.
He cites the example of a guy standing in line at a Starbucks: if he uses all his self-control to silently wait in line, he's more likely to let himself have a double chocolate when he was planning on taking a regular portion.
Can nothing and no one help us?
No one but ourselves.
There are a number of studies that have shown that meditation and mindfulness practices (practices in which you try to focus on the present moment without thinking about anything else) save us from impatience, although scientists can not yet find an explanation for this.
Perhaps the reason is that meditators can better deal with impatience, because they are used to being patient and restraining themselves.
Ethan Nicktern, a master practitioner from New York, a follower of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and author of The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path, believes that people who constantly meditate can" make friends with uncomfortable spaces."
According to him, meditation gives us "a method of simply enjoying the present moment as it is, without trying to change the situation."
However, as Dr. Desteno points out, meditation is not always something that impatient people can master.
And I, in general, agree with him:we get freaked out and irritated in a fraction of a second, and the practice of meditation requires hours of work-this is hardly a pill that will suit people who are unable to tolerate something for more than a few minutes.
But Desteno also has his own advice: he suggests fighting emotions with emotions.
During his work, the scientist discovered that gratitude is the shortest psychological path to patience.
One of his experiments showed that people who wrote a short written paper about someone they were grateful to for something were more willing to give up small rewards at the moment and agree to wait longer for what they were promised.
In a series of similar studies, he came to the following conclusion:
Thinking about the gratitude you felt, even if it had nothing to do with the annoying delay, can remind us of the value of being human and the importance of " not being a hooch."
Yes, unlike meditation, this method can be tried by each of us.
Are you angry at a friend who is late?
Think of her charming sense of humor, pleasant meetings, and the support she gave you in times of need.
Are you annoyed by the long queue at the checkout?
Maybe it happened that someone let you go ahead, even though he was in a hurry, and you were grateful to him?
And if there was a case when someone you didn't know just wanted to do something for you, but didn't dare?
Thank you and calm down.
Remember Gogol: "A Russian person should be thanked at least for his intentions."
This is how we live in this country.
