SUNDAY WITH PHILOSOPHY JANE | We Keep Inventing New Ways To Be In A Hurry

By ten o'clock on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning, America had already saved itself an astonishing amount of time.

Coffee had been ordered before anyone even reached the coffee shop. Groceries had been purchased without pushing a shopping cart. Bills had been paid automatically while their owners were still asleep. A meeting had started without anyone leaving home. Dinner had already been planned even though lunch remained an unresolved question. Somewhere, a package scheduled for tomorrow had somehow arrived today, and somewhere else, another customer was already looking for a faster shipping option.

And somehow, by lunchtime, nearly everyone still felt behind.

Philosophy Jane has begun to suspect that modern Americans no longer measure their days by the clock. They measure them by the sentence, “I am running a little late.” Nobody seems entirely certain what they are late for; only that they probably are.

The line for the line

Every few months, another invention arrives promising to save us a few precious minutes. Another application. Another shortcut. Another membership. Another premium service. Another button that claims to eliminate unnecessary waiting from ordinary life. And yet, somehow, nearly everyone still ends the day saying exactly the same thing: “I don't know where the time went.”

Jane noticed this while standing inside a neighborhood coffee shop behind a gentleman who had very wisely ordered ahead. He had downloaded the app. He had selected his drink. He had paid electronically. He had skipped the register. Unfortunately, so had everyone else.

There they all stood together in a neat little cluster, waiting for beverages they had ordered specifically to avoid waiting. Nobody appeared frustrated. Nobody even looked surprised. Apparently, we have reached the point where people willingly stand in a faster line for the privilege of waiting more efficiently.

This may explain why modern Americans rarely say they have free time anymore. They say they found a few minutes, as though time were something small and physical, misplaced beneath the sofa cushions.

The grocery store tells a remarkably similar story. There are traditional checkout lanes, express lanes, self-checkout stations, curbside pickup, and home delivery. Enough options exist to make a mathematician happy. Yet every shopper eventually reaches exactly the same conclusion: “I picked the wrong line.”

It happens every single time. Hope survives for the first thirty seconds, but then the cashier ahead begins searching for a manager. Someone's coupons require approval. A watermelon refuses to scan. The gentleman in front suddenly remembers he also needs cigarettes. Meanwhile, the line you almost selected begins moving with astonishing confidence. People in that lane appear to be purchasing identical cans of soup that scan perfectly every single time. Jane has never understood how this happens. She simply accepts it as one of the great mysteries of modern life, somewhere between missing socks and television remote controls.

The cilantro problem

Then comes the self-checkout. Its advertisements suggest a graceful partnership between humanity and technology. Reality usually begins with bananas. A loaf of bread presents no difficulty, neither does a gallon of milk, but eventually someone attempts to purchase cilantro. The machine freezes. Someone buys cough drops, and the machine freezes. Someone purchases a birthday card, and the machine decides this situation requires immediate adult supervision.

A calm electronic voice announces, “Please wait for assistance.” Everyone waits, and nobody looks surprised. Modern technology has become wonderfully skilled at asking human beings for help immediately after promising they would no longer be necessary.

Jane has started noticing that people no longer dislike waiting; they dislike discovering they are waiting. Waiting at a doctor's office somehow feels normal, but waiting six extra seconds for a webpage to load feels vaguely offensive. We expected the page to load before we finished thinking about it.

The drive-through deserves its own chapter. It began as one of humanity's simplest ideas: stay in the car, receive food, and continue with life. Instead, two lanes of automobiles now wrap around the building like a small parade celebrating cheeseburgers. Someone changes their order halfway through. Someone else reaches the payment window before remembering their wallet is in yesterday's jacket. The family van ahead appears to be purchasing enough chicken sandwiches to supply a respectable youth soccer tournament. Nobody becomes impatient because lunch requires time; they become impatient because lunch interrupted the schedule they had already planned for the next thirty-seven minutes.

Recovering two seconds

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to arrive five minutes earlier so we can immediately become busy doing something else. Even elevators have become part of the experiment. A person presses the button, nothing happens, so they press it again. Sometimes they press it three times. Apparently the first button was merely a polite suggestion, the second one demonstrates commitment, and the third means business. Traffic lights receive identical treatment. Cars slowly creep forward six inches at a time, as though determination alone might convince the red light to reconsider. The signal remains red, the automobile remains stationary, yet hope refuses to surrender.

Then there is the microwave, the greatest test of modern character ever installed on a kitchen counter. Somewhere this afternoon, someone will place a bowl of soup inside. Thirty seconds, that is all. They will stand there watching the numbers count downward with astonishing seriousness: twenty-three, nineteen, fourteen, nine. By the time the display reaches three, a hand has already moved toward the handle. At two, the door opens.

Jane wishes to confess that she performed this exact operation yesterday. She rescued a bowl of soup with two full seconds remaining, congratulated herself briefly, and then leaned against the kitchen counter wondering what remarkable achievement those rescued seconds had made possible. She did not solve world peace. She did not finish a novel. She did not finally organize the drawer containing fourteen takeout menus from restaurants that no longer exist. She simply stood there holding slightly warmer soup two seconds earlier than originally scheduled. It was, she concluded, not her strongest performance.

The dandelion study

Children continue approaching time somewhat differently. Give two brothers a stick, a dandelion, and forty-five unexpected minutes outside a baseball field, and they will conduct research that no university has ever considered funding. They will laugh, disagree, try again, and invent new rules halfway through. They will spend ten minutes attempting to drop the dandelion from a concrete ledge to see if it lands on a specific crack in the sidewalk. Then they look genuinely surprised when someone announces it is time to go home.

Across the parking lot, adults stand quietly refreshing email, checking package deliveries, looking at weather forecasts that have not changed since six minutes ago, and reading messages they already answered once. The children are not wasting time nearly as often as the adults believe; the adults have simply become very successful at filling every empty corner of it.

Perhaps that is the strangest invention of all. The remarkable thing is our ability to eliminate nearly every minor inconvenience from daily life while somehow remaining completely convinced there is never enough time.

By Tuesday evening, millions of Americans will once again wonder where the day disappeared. Tomorrow morning they will order ahead, pay ahead, plan ahead, rush ahead, and somewhere around lunchtime they will quietly announce they are running a little behind. They probably will be.

Philosophy Jane simply hopes that every now and then, somebody allows the microwave to reach zero. Not because the soup needs another two seconds, but because maybe they do.

Yesterday, she actually tried it. She stood in front of the counter and watched the countdown finish. Three. Two. One. Zero. The machine gave its familiar, mechanical beep. The soup was still hot. The world kept spinning. Jane laughed, opened the door, and took her lunch to the table.

MinneapoliMedia | Community. Culture. Civic Life.