Passage 8

Not so long ago, for most people, listening to radio was a single task activity. Now it is rare for a person to listen to the radio and do nothing else.

Even TV has lost its command of our foreground. In so many households the TV just stays on, like a noisy light bulb, while the life of the family passes back and forth in its shimmering glow.

A sense of well-being comes with this saturation of parallel pathways in the brain. We choose mania over boredom every time. “Humans have never, ever opted for slower,” points out the historian Stephen Kent.

We catch the fever―and the fever feels good. We live in the buzz. “It has gotten to the point where my days, crammed with all sorts of activities, feel like an Olympic endurance event: the everyday athon,” confesses Jay Walljasper in the Utne Reader.

All humanity has not succumbed equally, of course. If you make haste, you probably make it in the technology-driven world. Sociologists have also found that increasing wealth and increasing education bring a sense of tension about time. We believe that we possess too little of it. No wonder Ivan Seidenberg, an American telecommunications executive, jokes about the mythical DayDoubler program his customers seem to want: “Using sophisticated time-mapping and compression techniques, DayDoubler gives you access to 48 hours each and every day. At the higher numbers DayDoubler becomes less stable, and you run the risk of a temporal crash in which everything from the beginning of time to the present could crash down around you, sucking you into a suspended time zone.”

Our culture views time as a thing to hoard and protect. Timesaving is the subject to scores of books with titles like Streamlining Your Life; Take Your Time; More Hours in My Day. Marketers anticipate our desire to save time, and respond with fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing and fast credit.

We have all these ways to “save time,” but what does that concept really mean? Does timesaving mean getting more done? If so, does talking on a cellular phone at the beach save time or waste it? If you can choose between a 30-minute train ride, during which you can read, and a 20-minute drive, during which you cannot, does the drive save ten minutes? Does it make sense to say that driving saves ten minutes from your travel budget while removing ten minutes from your reading budget?”

These questions have no answer. They depend on a concept that is ill-formed: the very idea of timesaving. Some of us say we want to save time when really we just want to do more and faster. It might be simplest to recognize that there is time and we make choices about how to spend it, how to spare it, how to use it and how to fill it.

Time is not a thing we have lost. It is not a thing we ever had. It is what we live in.”

What’s the main idea of the first two paragraphs?

What’s the purpose of the DayDoubler program?

According to the author, what’s the real meaning of timesaving?