The Digital Aged Promised Us More Time And Less Stress. They Lied.

And you don’t want to rely on productivity gurus and self-help books to save you. DIY.

Hello out there - in a rushed world,

Here comes your weekly permission slip to Un-rush and Slow Down.

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The Digital Aged Promised Us More Time And Less Stress. They Lied.

And you don’t want to rely on productivity gurus and self-help industry to save you. DIY.

We are sold that we gain time with all the technology that is helping us daily. Having more time means we can finally slow down a bit, catch our breath and think things through.

Well, doesn’t look like it. Rather the opposite, we are all busier than ever, rushing, stressing, being under pressure.

Turns out that the time-saving nature of technical progress had led to a time shortage rather than a gain of time.

The absurdity of more tech but less time

With all the progress and technological advancement, we also gained more possibilities of what we can do, how and when we do it. The sheer amount of information we created contributes to eating up our time. More people in the world have access to more stuff and more locations. That enhances the pressure and options on both ends, those who are consuming and traveling and those who are selling and hosting.

The multitude of possibilities leads to the fact that a person can no longer exhaust the possibilities given to them in the course of their life. Instead of feeling less stressed because we are so advanced, we end up losing our minds trying to do it all.

Friends just told us the story that the little, picturesque, traditional village Varenna at lake Como where they used to spend a lot of time has turned into a busy tourist hot spot. They watched in awe how many tourists arrive by boat, walk some hundred meters to find the right position for making a selfie with the oh-so-picturesque village for their selfie-background. That’s it. They turn around, get back on the boat and off to the next I-have-been-here spot. They are not interested in really seeing and exploring this place because there are so many other travel destinations that need to get checked off the list. Life is short. You gotta cramp it all in.

Instagram and online travel descriptions tell us that Varenna is an “essential stop” for anyone wishing to visit one of the “most typical and peaceful” towns of lake Como. A village, where you can still “breathe in the traditions of yesteryear.” We promote places for their peaceful atmosphere, just so we see their peaceful atmosphere getting destroyed.

Can we help people to slow down by going to slow places, which then become not so slow anymore because they get consumed quickly?

Tech is part of the new problem, not the solution

You might want to rethink our rapidly-expanding technology, which is exponentially increasing and that is supposed to improve our lives by making things easier. It does, of course, in many respects. But it doesn’t, as we wished for, really provide us with much-needed time to relax.

In fact, relaxation and alone time might even be the first “unnecessary” activities you scrap when you feel busy. There are also enough people who push the envelope even further by starting to ignore things like hydration, balanced meals, physical activity or sleep.

Smartphones, social media platforms and Emails have blessed us with effortless ways to communicate instantly and globally. The internet answers our questions in a split second and nurtures our growing demands. There is no limit, no restriction, no boundary when we are surfing in the waves of the digital world and when we try to figure out our relationship to the Internet. When it comes to work with so many tools to help us get things done, we have plenty of time to take on additional tasks. And the beauty of being always just one phone call, text message or email away is that we can respond and react anytime. No, wait, wasn’t the idea to have extra time to finally slow down?

The result of all this is that we adapted our lives and values to match the speed of technology.

The speed trap we got into

Instead of giving us breathing time, our technologies continually urge us to speed up. They are in control, and they are the ones pushing our buttons. Do you realize that your mind and your behavior follow their demands? You follow their orders. You answer that phone call, that email, that chat and the back and forth on the team communication platform. And as all those commands and demands come in constantly, quickly, overlapping and with the expectation to be attended to right away, your thoughts start racing, your attention span diminishes, you become tense.

We have adapted our lives and values to match the speed of technology and the hurry culture surrounding us. We have turned into a society ruled by the power of now. Because we want instant results and gratification, even at the cost of instantaneous obedience.

What happened is that we lack now a rhythm that helps us to provide some sort of structure and a framework. There are no limits and finish lines in our daily 24-hours ongoing circus of endless possibilities and access to everything and everyone. This means our experience of duration gets lost. Time and activities are getting chopped up into the smallest units and as such our life experiences are cut down into smaller pieces.

And this is the problem that comes with it: The accelerated pace of our societies is eroding the essence of our most fundamental values. That makes it harder to identify, define and create your identity and to know your values. We experience a chronic warping of morals and ethics caused by our addiction to speed. Value is placed on constant, non-stop activity and active life. Which doesn’t allow the space for contemplation and reflection.

Ancient philosophers talked about the active life, “vita active” and the contemplative life, “vita contemplative”. They saw the vita contemplative as superior to the active life. The active life only served the more valuable contemplative life. The influential German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt, picked up on these terms and describes the active part as ‘doing’ and ‘active engagement’ with the world, and the contemplative part is concerned with ‘understanding’ the world. Our hurry culture today deprives us of contemplating and takes away our capacity to linger or pause.

In doing so, we pay a high price in spirit and mind. We cut ourselves off from the wisdom of the past, from the understanding of a complex world, and we lose track of our individual values. We are too rushed to consider the consequences of our actions.

Obviously, we need a drastic slow down to reassert control over ourselves.  

How do we do that? With taking breaks, going for a walk, getting enough sleep and saying the mantra “No!”? Sure, all the usual stuff we get recommended makes, of course, sense. We know all that. But these are band-aids. You need to dig a bit deeper.

Here is your simple and cheap DIY solution

Self-awareness and your values are your keys for slowing down.

You want to put on your vita contemplative hat and start digging into yourself to discover your values and principles. Equipped with those, you have a framework and guidance that help you respond to the endless multitude of possibilities and the imposed speed. Because when life keeps you busy and rushing, you easily lose touch with who you are, what your principles are, or what you stand for.

If you are running around, stressed and in a constant hurry but don’t have some parameters or coordinates that tell you why you would not want to rush and run, then the act of changing your habit will be difficult. It has to come from inside of you. Why is it important to you?

You want to dig deeper into the values and choices that have shaped your life.

Slow down and take some time to remember or re-define your values. Reconnect with them. It will save you time, nerves and trouble in the long run. You create your own set of directions you can use as orientation, instead of feeling like a ping pong ball in somebody else’s hurry culture game.

Let’s say that health is not high on your list of values, and you prefer working above everything else, even if that means sacrificing some of your health. In that case, when the mindfulness sector tells you that you should slow down because you will avoid health problems and burnout, this advice won’t resonate much with you because you don’t care about your health or self-care.  

High on my list of values, for example, is friendships. So, I am open to slowing down a bit to not lose or jeopardize my friendships. I don’t want my constant busyness and rushing behavior to prevent me from being able to care for my friends.

Reconnecting with your values is the first step. Take the time to strengthen you values in this hectic, rushing world around you. They anchor you, and they enable you to slow down. Because then you know why you want to slow down. The reasons are different for everyone. You want to define your why and your reasons, so you can find the best tools to slow down that fit to your personality.

A cause of today’s acceleration is the inability to end and to conclude. Your self-awareness about your values in your life help you to set your own coordinates and your direction, so you can counteract the non-stop command and demand on your time.