The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 247 World by Christine Louise Hohlbaum

Author:Christine Louise Hohlbaum [Hohlbaum, Christine Louise]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780312570484
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

The quickened pace of our lives over the past decade can be seen in numbers. In 1997, Dr. Robert Levine at California State University combined three indicators to measure the pace of life in thirty-one countries: public clock accuracy, pedestrian speed, and post office speed. One was the fastest; thirty-one the slowest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Switzerland ranked first, with Ireland coming in second, and Germany third. Singapore ranked fifteenth.

Dr. Richard Wiseman, professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, led a follow-up study in 2007 that singularly clocked urban dwellers’ pace by measuring how long, on average, it took them to walk sixty feet. The fastest pedestrians were in Singapore; the slowest in the thirty-two countries studied were in Blantyre, Malawi. As figure 1 reveals, a fast pace of life is not reserved only for Western nations. The Bernese in Switzerland, for instance, ranked number thirty in Dr. Wiseman’s research, dethroning Switzerland from its first-place ranking just a decade ago. Dr. Levine’s original study, as reported in his book A Geography of Time in 1997, showed the average pace to be slower overall among the top-ranked city dwellers as compared to 2007. Based on these indicators, the general pace of life worldwide has indeed gotten faster. As an example, Singaporeans move 30 percent quicker than they did just ten years ago. Dr. Wiseman points to the more frequent use of high-speed technology as the main culprit for our urgency.

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