Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

The quietism and search for new ways to "opt out" or "cop out" that characterizes certain (though not all) hippies may be less motivated by their loudly expressed aversion for the values of a technological civilization than by an unconscious effort to escape from a pace of life that many find intolerable. It is no coincidence that they describe society as a "ratrace" – a term that refers quite specifically to pacing.

Older people are even more likely to react strongly against any further acceleration of change. There is a solid mathematical basis for the observation that age often correlates with conservatism: time passes more swiftly for the old.

When a fifty-year-old father tells his fifteen-year-old son that he will have to wait two years before he can have a car of his own, that interval of 730 days represents a mere 4 percent of the father's lifetime to date. It represents over 13 percent of the boy's lifetime. It is hardly strange that to the boy the delay seems three or four times longer than to the father. Similarly, two hours in the life of a four-year-old may be the felt equivalent of twelve hours in the life of her twenty-four-year-old mother. Asking the child to wait two hours for a piece of candy may be the equivalent of asking the mother to wait fourteen hours for a cup of coffee.

There may be a biological basis as well, for such differences in subjective response to time. "With advancing age," writes psychologist John Cohen of the University of Manchester, "the calendar years seem progressively to shrink. In restrospect every year seems shorter than the year just completed, possibly as a result of the gradual slowing down of metabolic processes." In relation to the slowdown of their own biological rhythms, the world would appear to be moving faster to older people, even if it were not.

Whatever the reasons, any acceleration of change that has the effect of crowding more situations into the experiential channel in a given interval is magnified in the perception of the older person. As the rate of change in society speeds up, more and more older people feel the difference keenly. They, too, become dropouts, withdrawing into a private environment, cutting off as many contacts as possible with the fast-moving outside world, and, finally, vegetating until death. We may never solve the psychological problems of the aged until we find the means – through biochemistry or re-education – to alter their time sense, or to provide structured enclaves for them in which the pace of life is controlled, and even, perhaps, regulated according to a "sliding scale" calendar that reflects their own subjective perception of time.

Much otherwise incomprehensible conflict – between generations, between parents and children, between husbands and wives – can be traced to differential responses to the acceleration of the pace of life. The same is true of clashes between cultures.

Each culture has its own characteristic pace. F. M. Esfandiary, the Iranian novelist and essayist, tells of a collision between two different pacing systems when German engineers in the pre-World War II period were helping to construct a railroad in his country. Iranians and Middle Easterners generally take a far more relaxed attitude toward time than Americans or Western Europeans. When Iranian work crews consistently showed up for work ten minutes late, the Germans, themselves super-punctual and always in a hurry, fired them in droves. Iranian engineers had a difficult time persuading them that by Middle Eastern standards the workers were being heroically punctual, and that if the firings continued there would soon be no one left to do the work but women and children.

This indifference to time can be maddening to those who are fast-paced and clockconscious. Thus Italians from Milan or Turin, the industrial cities of the North, look down upon the relatively slow-paced Sicilians, whose lives are still geared to the slower rhythms of agriculture. Swedes from Stockholm or Göteborg feel the same way about Laplanders. Americans speak with derision of Mexicans for whom mañana is soon enough. In the United States itself, Northerners regard Southerners as slow-moving, and middle-class Negroes condemn working-class Negroes just up from the South for operating on "C.P.T." – Colored People's Time. In contrast, by comparison with almost anyone else, white Americans and Canadians are regarded as hustling, fast-moving go-getters.

Populations sometimes actively resist a change of pace. This explains the pathological antagonism toward what many regard as the "Americanization" of Europe. The new technology on which super-industrialism is based, much of it blue-printed in American research laboratories, brings with it an inevitable acceleration of change in society and a concomitant speed-up of the pace of individual life as well. While anti-American orators single out computers or Coca-Cola for their barbs, their real objection may well be to the invasion of Europe by an alien time sense. America, as the spearhead of super-industrialism, represents a new, quicker, and very much unwanted tempo.

Precisely this issue is symbolized by the angry outcry that has greeted the recent introduction of American-style drugstores in Paris. To many Frenchmen, their existence is infuriating evidence of a sinister "cultural imperialism" on the part of the United States. It is hard for Americans to understand so passionate a response to a perfectly innocent soda fountain. What explains it is the fact that at Le Drugstore the thirsty Frenchman gulps a hasty milkshake instead of lingering for an hour or two over an aperitif at an outdoor bistro. It is worth noticing that, as the new technology has spread in recent years, some 30,000 bistros have padlocked their doors for good, victims, in the words of Time magazine, of a "shortorder culture." (Indeed, it may well be that the widespread European dislike for Time , itself, is not entirely political, but stems unconsciously from the connotation of its title. Time, with its brevity and breathless style, exports more than the American Way of Life. It embodies and exports the American Pace of Life.)

To understand why acceleration in the pace of life may prove disruptive and uncomfortable, it is important to grasp the idea of "durational expectancies."

Man's perception of time is closely linked with his internal rhythms. But his responses to time are culturally conditioned. Part of this conditioning consists of building up within the child a series of expectations about the duration of events, processes or relationships. Indeed, one of the most important forms of knowledge that we impart to a child is a knowledge of how long things last. This knowledge is taught, in subtle, informal and often unconscious ways. Yet without a rich set of socially appropriate durational expectancies, no individual could function successfully.

From infancy on the child learns, for example, that when Daddy leaves for work in the morning, it means that he will not return for many hours. (If he does, something is wrong; the schedule is askew. The child senses this. Even the family dog – having also learned a set of durational expectancies – is aware of the break in routine.) The child soon learns that "mealtime" is neither a one-minute nor a five-hour affair, but that it ordinarily lasts from fifteen minutes to an hour. He learns that going to a movie lasts two to four hours, but that a visit with the pediatrician seldom lasts more than one. He learns that the school day ordinarily lasts six hours. He learns that a relationship with a teacher ordinarily extends over a school year, but that his relationship with his grandparents is supposed to be of much longer duration. Indeed, some relationships are supposed to last a lifetime. In adult behavior, virtually all we do, from mailing an envelope to making love, is premised upon certain spoken or unspoken assumptions about duration.