Waiting

When I was in col­lege, I took an elec­tive on Web­Page Devel­op­ment. I remem­ber our pro­fes­sor telling the class that if you are mak­ing a web­page, you have to design it in such a way that the web­page comes out in the world wide web in seven sec­onds flat. Appar­ently, stud­ies have shown that seven sec­onds is how long an inter­net “surfer” will wait for a web­page to load before he exits to another site. So that if you want your site to be vis­ited at all, you have to beat the seven-second attention-span limit of the aver­age inter­net surfer. That was five years ago. I do not know if that stan­dard still stands today—it prob­a­bly is even lower than seven seconds.

This is some­thing I wrote sev­eral years ago as a final paper for a phi­los­o­phy class. I have edited it so it becomes more cur­rent. This is an Intro­duc­tion to a new series on Wait­ing here in AngPere­grino. Links will be pro­vided as soon as new arti­cles come out.

Some­one said that the wish-list of film pro­duc­ers nowa­days look like this: (1) an action-packed open­ing sequence last­ing three min­utes (even before the cred­its come on screen), (2) a sex-charged scene every thirty minutes—so that a two-hour film must have at least four sex scenes, and (3) the req­ui­site car-chase before the end of the film. Just notice the movies com­ing out of Hol­ly­wood today! As long as every movie has some­thing like this, the pro­duc­ers will finance the films. Appar­ently, this is the for­mula to make sure that view­ers are not bored and that they stay on until the end of the film.

We “surf” tele­vi­sion channels—clicking from one chan­nel to another and end up not watch­ing a sin­gle pro­gram for more than five min­utes. This is the prin­ci­ple behind MTV: a steady bar­rage of images com­ing one after the other so you never get bored.

We do get bored so eas­ily. Our attention-span is get­ting shorter and shorter. Teach­ers, for exam­ple, must be pomp and cir­cus to keep stu­dents lis­ten­ing. The world we have today is a world always on the go; a world eas­ily bored; a world that can­not wait.

On the one hand, this world that can­not wait has been brought about by our need for effi­ciency and orga­ni­za­tion. This means cut­ting down lines dur­ing reg­is­tra­tion, faster inter­net broad­bands to facil­i­tate quicker research, more pow­er­ful and faster cell­phones. A house can even be pre-fabricated so it rises up in a sin­gle day—something that used to take sev­eral peo­ple to do in sev­eral weeks! Effi­ciency does make life faster and easier.

We have a world that is increas­ingly sys­tem­atic and orga­nized, and so we are able to save a lot of time to do other things. We have microwave ovens, heat­ing devices, instant cof­fee, insta-meals, cup noo­dles. They make our lives more effi­cient, so we can do sev­eral things at the same time. In fact, multi-tasking is the value-added on a world that can­not wait—we can do sev­eral things at the same time—whether it is surf­ing through two or three web­sites while check­ing our e-mails and doing a paper on our lap­tops, cook­ing while watch­ing two or three pro­grams on the tele­vi­sion while iron­ing clothes, or tex­ting while lis­ten­ing to the teacher’s lec­ture or typ­ing on your lap­top and send­ing email while being in a meeting.

There was a time when it was a lux­ury to be able to do sev­eral things at the same time; now it is an addic­tion. We just have to have something—anything—to fill our time. And so we live like there is no tomor­row, fill­ing time, fill­ing days, fill­ing hours with appoint­ments upon appoint­ments in our inces­sant effort to be effec­tive and effi­cient. The appoint­ment book, the PDA, the iPhone, the orga­nizer, has become man’s best friend. So that you take away those (and the cell­phone), and it is like tak­ing away “life” itself. Iron­i­cally, we have become ver­i­ta­ble slaves of effi­ciency and organization—when these should have made life easier.

A point comes in your life–of just beat­ing dead­line after dead­line, and just fill­ing time—when you pause and think. Philoso­phers and psy­chol­o­gists have called this expe­ri­ence by dif­fer­ent names: angst, trau­ma­tism, soli­tude of being, lone­li­ness, mid-life cri­sis, etc.

In a world that can­not wait, this expe­ri­ence is real­iz­ing that there seems to be no sense in all this run­ning, all this speed and impa­tience. So you are effi­cient, active, never bored and fin­ish a lot of projects. But so what?! Where is this all head­ing? How will this end? Is there a deeper mean­ing to all this?

In a world that can­not wait, this expe­ri­ence of sens­ing that there must be more to life than what is seen and expe­ri­enced in the every­day, is jar­ring. You have prob­a­bly read about this in books but noth­ing really pre­pares you for this per­sonal expe­ri­ence. All of a sud­den, life becomes a ques­tion. You begin to reflect, to re-evaluate, to pause—things anath­ema in a world that can­not wait.

This expe­ri­ence of paus­ing, reflect­ing, re-evaluating is an open­ing to many things. On the one hand, it can be seen as a momen­tary respite before going back to more of the same run­ning around which led to this kind of expe­ri­ence in the first place. On the other hand, it can– as Emmanuel Lev­inas would say–traumatize you so that life becomes a ques­tion. And because life has become a ques­tion, you begin your search for answers. You begin your quest-ioning.

Move on to Part 2 of the arti­cle.