The Nature of Hurrying in the 21st Century
An old friend of mine – in the first draft of this I called him a "bright young guy," although he's approaching 40 now – graduated from high school at the regular time, and decided not to go to college. He didn't know what he wanted to study, and it didn't feel right to get a degree just for the sake of getting one. So he decided to wait.
He hasn't gone yet.
There are down-sides to this, of course. He's given up so much potential earning power at this point that he'll probably never be all that wealthy. That doesn't really matter, though – his decision was in tune with his desires.
I recently came across an article that brought him to mind. This article is on a site called Tiny Buddha, which, as you might expect, has a lot to say about happiness from a particular perspective. (By the way, so do I...) Author Amaya Pryce makes a good point: there's a difference between making a decision based on a schedule, and making one based on your own personal sense that it's right.
She recommends waiting.
There are times when it isn't possible to wait. Deadlines loom and clocks tick. But Pryce makes a strong case for the idea that we should hang out and wait for inner certainty when we can.
Chronological Mismatch
Behind that argument is another more subtle one: in living our modern, busy lives, we often overlook the possibility that we could wait until we were sure.
Although she doesn't say it, Pryce's article hints at the fact that the way we structure our lives around time is very artificial, and that this system – relatively new, and definitely not invented to make us happy – can cause problems without our realizing it.
These days, most of the conventional wisdom about happiness share a basic assumption that didn't exist in the past. In the 19th century, for example, a lot of the talk about happiness involved either compromising with society, or out-and-out flouting expectations. (Think of Henry David Thoreau – or, at least, "Henry David Thoreau," the rather fictional character who had to leave society in order to "live deliberately" by Walden Pond, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, who found social niceties pointless.)
By the early twentieth century the desire to win friends and influence people became one of the main themes in American happiness. It was indicative of a larger trend:
Happiness comes from learning to be comfortable conforming.
These days, articles that recommend nonconformity, or even compromise, are relatively rare. Learning to accept complete surrender is more the mode. By recommending a course of action that specifically doesn't conform, Pryce's essay on Tiny Buddha is one of the minority that buck that trend.
The Big Assumption about Happiness
Like almost all the stuff written on happiness lately, Pryce's article begs a very basic question. When she says it's OK not to conform to the timetables dictated by society, she's giving people permission to avoid the norms. But by making it personal – about you and your relationship to time – she overlooks the fact that our cultures are built to make it hard to question those time-tables. They have shaped our personalities to accept them. Most of us don't really know how to question them. By focusing on the psychology of happiness, she overlooks the social and structural challenges that block it.
So by all means take her advice if it suits you – but after that, ask yourself a couple other questions. For example:
- Why is it so hard to wait? That is, how did we get so disconnected from our own pace? Why do we accept the idea of living by someone else's artificially-imposed sense of time?
- Who would we be if we didn't live by the clock?
My Answer (Or at Least Part of One)
In On the Clock: Trapped in Time? You're Not Alone, I explore these questions. What was life like before the clock was invented, before the tight schedule, being on time, and guilt over showing up late was invented? And just how did our society become so obsessed with time?
My friend, by the way, recently decided to go to college. After many years as a paralegal, he has ruled out the law as a career. He's decided to become an interpreter.
It took a while to get there, but he says it finally feels right.