Time and Scale RTO and RTMO

Everyone lives their lives according to a particular zone of comfort on Stuart Brand’s scale of the clock of now. (According to Brand, Fashion/Art constitute the fastest scale, then commerce, then infrastructure, then governance, then culture, and finally nature--as in the geologic timescale.) We must find a way systemically to respect the different paces.

The key to self governance, as well as to governance of the populace, is to discover a way not to make everything act at the faster paces. This bleed-over between different time scales is what I intuitively react against on a personal level. I thought academia offered a (mostly) non-competitive, slower paced venue for reflection and assimilation. I was wrong. Technology seems to drive the fast pace. If someone somewhere is thinking and writing and disseminating ideas at such a pace that the slower among us cannot keep up, then where does the reflection occur? Brand is correct that this places stress on our “ecosystem” and threatens to throw the world of humans out of balance.

Much of my frustration comes from my own psychological bleeding-over among different time scales. I want culture to take things slowly and to be deliberative, but when I see things like environmental devastation, change cannot happen fast enough. We need a way to distinguish the proper rate of change, and on which time scale a particular problem needs to be placed.

The real goal of human life is to achieve some sort of balance between the different scales as they occur in our lives. "Multi-tasking" usually refers to the immediate, personal level, in accordance with the fashion/art time scale--brushing your teeth while checking your email, for example. I submit that the broader multi-tasking occurs when we try to balance our life’s work with our afternoon plans, our deep values with our need to get the kids to soccer practice. This is a truly productive paradigm for ethical analysis.

Design, which is one small activity among the many that people do, embodies the need to arrange the various elements just so, according to different scales (of time, among others). Design entails problem-solving in the sense of the immediate need (how do this widget and this do-hickey go together?), as well as problem-solving in the sense of vision (what kind of thing does the world need for me to invent?).

On a personal level, I perceive a deficiency of “creativity,” which is really a problem of being too confined to the immediate, and not being able to stand back to apprehend the larger scale of the problem. I get seduced by one or the other, and fluid transition among them causes great stress on my psyche. I can solve a problem, or I can think in visionary ways, but asking me to multi-task those two activities causes a meltdown. What questions must I ask to fracture the world along different lines of cleavage? How to separate and yet integrate the different timelines is a persistent problem. I recognize when others do it brilliantly, but not having the ritual in place for myself, I have difficulty doing it. Perhaps the ritualistic management of time is the key to solving the problem.