The problem with ‘using time well’ is that it risks transforming every moment into nothing but a means to future ends
In the mid-1970s, when the American psychologist Robert Levine took a job at a university in Brazil, he knew he should expect a different pace of life. But he had no idea exactly how different. It was “a dose of culture shock I wouldn’t wish on a hijacker,” he later wrote. On the morning of his first 10am lecture, students were still showing up at 11am; the next day, his head of department arrived for an 11am meeting at 11.45, offered him a coffee, then left again, explaining that it was her practice to schedule multiple meetings for the same time of day. The Brazilians were baffled by Levine’s punctuality, and more baffled by his distress at their lack of it. “I heard no more frequent words from my laid-back hosts than their pleading advice: ‘Calma, Bobby, calma.’” However slow he tried to go, it wasn’t slow enough.
Levine, who died in June, took an infectious delight in the sheer cacophonous variety of human behaviour, and time was one of his obsessions. In 1999, measuring the pace of walking in cities around the world, he found that Dubliners were more hurried than Londoners, who in turn went faster than New Yorkers – a surprising result, but one which echoes other work suggesting that economic growth might be a factor in walking speeds, since Ireland was booming at the time. Brazilians walked the slowest.
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