Faster is better? Not for this guy! (Male House Sparrow)
A pervasive TV and radio ad promotes “smart” phones in a phony focus group setting where an adult feeds corporate slogans to a group of kids. The kids respond slavishly to the messages foisted upon them with a little spontaneity around the edges. These ads reinforce two cultural mantras: 1) That faster is better than slower; and 2) that doing two things at once is better than just doing one. They are made worse because they literally put words and flawed values into the mouths of children.
Speed and multi-tasking are self-serving messages promoted by corporations; not words to live by.
I realize that the ad sponsors are just trying to sell “smart” phones, but they are also reinforcing misguided and dangerous cultural myths. Faster is better, I suppose, for a phone or an athlete. Some might recall another, wiser adage about speed: “haste makes waste.” Doing things quickly can mean doing them impulsively, shoddily, and without sufficient forethought. Examples of this kind of behavior abound in our culture where tactless, insensitive and often counter-productive “dialogue” or actions occur every day. This is especially true in politics, cyberspace, and all too often in our daily encounters with people. It does not make us better people; It makes us free-floating egos and jerks – or worse, road ragers and murderers.
Wouldn’t it be better instead to think before acting or speaking? Or how about doing things deliberately and well?
Is faster is always better in nature? Consider birds. The House Sparrow is one of the most widespread, prolific bird species on earth. I have seen them in six different countries in two different hemispheres. Are they fast? NO! Actually, they are the slowest flying bird in the world. That’s right; the House Sparrow can only fly 15-18 miles per hour, a speed that can be exceeded by human runners. In contrast, the Peregrine Falcon is the fastest bird in North America, capable of flying up to 175 miles per hour when stooping or descending upon its prey of other bird species in flight. Peregrines were previously listed as Endangered Species in the U.S. and have since thankfully recovered to the point where they were removed from the Endangered Species list in 1999.
What about doing two things at once? Is this somehow better than doing one thing as the ads suggest? Yes, it is better if your goal is to win a Darwin Award by being removed from the human gene pool. Or, if you want to be a rude, impulsive, shallow, distracted individual – oblivious to the people and the environment around you. Darwin would suggest that these are not good survival strategies. What happened to the notions that concentrating, focusing, thinking, or as the Zen Buddhists used to say “being here now” were desirable traits? Instead, our culture urges people to be somewhere else now, even when they are physically next to friends or loved ones, or worse yet, when a car or train approaches, sometimes removing them from the gene pool.
Here’s what most people are afraid to say: Multi-tasking has been a dismal failure. As Susan Cain writes in her brilliant book Quiet: “Another study, of 38,000 workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Even multi-tasking, that prized feat of modern-day office workers, turns out to be a myth.” It’s true that we can do more than one thing at a time, but poorly. And while we are multi-tasking, we sometimes endanger others and ourselves, like when people text while driving.
Instead of blindly worshiping the false gods of speed and multi-tasking, let’s try instead to be more thoughtful, deliberate, and focused. We will be more likely to survive and flourish this way, and the quality of our lives and our relationships will improve too.
