A while ago, I had to make an appointment with the local notary office. “If you can’t make it on a weekday, Saturday morning is possible,” the secretary informed me from the other end of the line. For a moment, I was surprised at this luxury; someone was making themselves available to work around my busy schedule. Saturday morning is usually sacrosanct for me, but making the appointment then would indeed keep my weekdays free for workrelated tasks. Recently, my neighborhood supermarket also started making life easier for me and my busy life, with extended opening hours and the addition of seven cash registers. Excellent, I thought. I won’t be wasting precious time while doing my grocery shopping, and I’ll have more time for other things. So there I was one Monday afternoon, mulling over the notary appointment as I waited in line at the supermarket. Impatiently waiting, in fact, for my basket to finally, finally have its turn at the register. My daughter’s dance lesson was about to end, and if the guy in front of me could please just not be too slow when packing his purchases, I could still get there to pick her up on time. But this gentleman showed no signs of speeding up as he chatted and joked away with the cashier. It wouldn’t have been hard for anyone to see the impatience and irritation on my face. Once outside, dinner safely in my bag, I jumped on my bicycle and checked the time again: my shopping trip had taken me all of five minutes. Here I was, so harried that I had been acting like a spoilt princess on a miniscule pea. Feeling slightly abashed, I stood, two minutes later, in front of the dance school, precisely on time. It
was a good thing my daughter hadn’t witnessed my behavior at the grocery store. FAST SERVICE
It’s safe to say that my life has become easier in terms of flexible hours and technology. So why am I still in a hurry all the time? And most of all, why am I so impatient? According to Dutch philosopher and researcher Marli Huijer, flexible hours don’t necessarily make us more relaxed. In her book Ritme, Op zoek naar een terugkerende tijd (Rythm, in search of a recurring time), she explores the impact of being on-call all the time and working more flexible hours, with no fixed recharge day, like a set weekend day. “Let us be aware of the risks of the 24-7 society, and what it does to our public sphere if we skip all those social rhythms,” she warns. That is why, for example, a full waiting room at the doctor’s office is experienced as a problem: because we’re expecting to have the appointment immediately, while in the old days it was a given for people to travel days to visit a doctor, or at least to have to wait an hour or so in the doctor’s waiting room. Ever since the 1960s, Huijer explains, fixed and communal rhythms have slowly been replaced by flexible and individual timetables, so that everyone can personally decide what to do and when to do it. But this lovely flexible timekeeping shatters the traditional rhythms of people sleeping, working and spending time together. Because of the lack of a communal rhythm of rest and activity, we just expect each other to be available all the time and anywhere. Saying “no” doesn’t seem to be an option anymore—
“HURRYING TO SAVE TIME HAS HAD THE EXACT OPPOSITE EFFECT”
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