A Matter of Time: You Can't Get a "Well Done" Steak in Two Minutes!

"Busy..."

Seems like we are always "busy," even when we are not accomplishing very much.

And I am not trying to except myself from that equation; I find myself eternally stuck in a loop of feeling like I am always running, as an exercise in merely staying in place.

Peaceful bird in the tree top....

Things Take as Long as They Take!

As part of one of the workshops I took at the recent retreat we went to, I came face-to-face with one of my "demons" and the workshop facilitator invited me to "sit with" the feeling that goes with it.

For as long as I can remember — from tests in school to my brief stint in Korporate Amerika — I have been plagued by a singular issue:

"You're doing a really nice job, but you need to work much FASTER, because the allotted time is already up!"

It may sound like a relatively insignificant piece of life commentary, but it's interesting how often these "little things" can end up affecting our entire lives.

As I examined this particular too slow demon in my life, I realized that I have this strange issue of totally screwing up if I feel rushed and like I am in a hurry. When I have plenty of time, I can create a stellar outcome. When I have even slightly less than adequate time to do something, I tend to get flustered and make so many mistakes that the result I produce is all but unusable.

Purple flower in close-up

According to the workshop facilitator, that's not as weird or uncommon an issue as one might think... and it is one that is becoming more and more common in our time-driven and increasingly automated world.

As people become less concerned with losing their job to a competitor who works faster, and more concerned with losing their job to a piece of automation that works faster than any human can hope to... we end up entering this spiral of "speed at all costs."

And it's often a demand for work and living at a pace we are simply not physiologically designed to work at!

So much for the whole idea that automation is actually going to help us have more time, rather than less time.

Tiny forest flower...

The "Well Done Steak" Problem...

As I said before many things take about as long to do as they take to do.

If you want someone to cook your steak to "well done," it doesn't make a lot of sense to impatiently start tapping our feet at three minutes... because it takes twelve minutes to cook such a steak.

The march of technology, of course, wants to create a reality that were otherwise. We now have "instant delivery" from Amazon and grocery stores... and I expect that — perhaps within another 20 years — we will have even more "instant" delivery than that... ordering "things" online and have them immediately appear through some future generation of 3D printer.

I do fond myself wondering whether this is really a positive development for us, as a species...

Orange variegated flowers

In Support of Delayed Gratification...

One of the things I was raised with — even as a quite young child — was the ability to delay gratification.

Whether it was writing a letter and having to wait a week to get a reply, or "having to wait till dinner" for something to eat... I can look back and see it as a positive to be able to "look forward to something" without having a fit of impatience.

Are we losing this ability, thanks (or "no thanks?") to this focus on everything being now, now, NOW?

I watch even our own kids — in their 20's and early 30's — openly struggle with "having to wait" for anything. The whole idea of "anticipation" whittled down from possible days or even weeks to a matter of minutes.

Could, of course, be a sign that I am simply getting old and am being left behind by our times.

Meanwhile, I am still going to take a little longer than most to eat my lunch... and if I get fired because of that, I suppose I'll have to look around for a new plane of existence to inhabit!

Thanks for reading!

(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post)

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Created at 191023 11:58 PDT
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