Faster and faster, more and more? Slow down. For your family.

Communication, mobility, consumption - everything is getting faster and faster. As a result, we are becoming alienated from our jobs and our fellow human beings - a development that affects our children as much as ourselves. The good news is that we are not helplessly at its mercy.

In the Juvenir study by the Jacobs Foundation, the majority of young people who feel stressed stated that it is not their parents or teachers who put them under pressure, but primarily themselves. 46 per cent of young people who frequently experience stress put this down to the fact that they always want to do everything very well. The young people stated that there was never enough time for everything, that they were afraid of the future and that they were not prepared to lower their own standards even under pressure. They feel the same way as many of us adults.

Most of the innovations of the
of the last three centuries
have meant that we
to do something faster.

But where does this pressure come from? As a psychologist, the first thing that comes to mind is of course a whole host of psychological reasons: Learning from the model, unfavourable thought patterns, etc.
But when a phenomenon affects an entire society, it is worth looking at more than just the individual people. I find the thoughts of sociologist Hartmut Rosa particularly interesting in this context.

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Rosa is a professor in Jena and has been studying the phenomenon of acceleration for years. As he explains, most of the innovations of the past three centuries have enabled us to do something faster. Almost every invention, from the hoover to the microwave to the assembly line, is designed to increase our efficiency and save time. Every new means of transport gets us to our destination easier and faster than the previous one. And every new means of communication, from the telegraph and telephone to e-mail and WhatsApp, allows us to reach other people more quickly and cost-effectively. After all, the Internet makes the whole world available to us: Whether we want to read up on something, listen to a certain piece of music or watch a film - everything is just a click away.
In a world where - at least for us in Switzerland - everything is so easily available, where machines and computers do most of our work and we use so many inventions every day that save us time, we should be very comfortable.

The logic of increase

What is currently preventing many of us from enjoying the fruits of labour is the compulsion to accelerate further. It is a kind of logic of increase that pervades our society. No matter how much we learn, produce and innovate - it's always about improving, creating more than last year, more than the others.

The danger of acceleration for the family

To some extent, we are subject to external pressure: If a company wants to remain competitive, it must continue to develop from year to year, increase sales and profits, continuously innovate and adapt to new circumstances. This compulsion to constantly change and improve performance must ultimately be implemented by people.
However, we also partly fuel this dynamic ourselves. Hartmut Rosa says that we are designed to learn more and more about the world. If we can communicate more quickly, we will write 150 messages a day instead of three. If we can travel more comfortably and quickly, we will do it more often. A tourist from Korea proudly told me on the train the other day that he and his partner were travelling through Europe and had visited the capitals of ten different countries in twelve days. The reason we met on the train was because they wanted to visit Bern as well as Zurich in Switzerland, although «Bern was easy to see».

Processes such as developing interest
develop or something
can be grasped emotionally,
do not accelerate.

After all, we usually measure success by whether we have improved - only an increase feels good. Even a billionaire only feels really rich if he has earned more this year than last year. The acceleration can therefore also be seen in the pace of our lives: We are trying to do more and more things in less and less time.
All of the developments described have many positive aspects: they give us more freedom and opportunities than any previous generation. However, Rosa also points out a major danger of acceleration: it leads to the world and other people becoming alien to us.
Students who are only interested in gaining the necessary ECTS points and forcing exam-relevant content into their heads as efficiently as possible are unable to build a relationship with their subject. Teachers who are bogged down in bureaucracy and have to get through the increasingly dense curriculum lack the time to engage with their students. Employees who feel that they are never enough and that it is only a matter of delivering better figures and completing larger mountains of tasks every year become cynical and lose interest in their work and their colleagues.

Resonance takes time

Developing an interest, grasping something emotionally, being moved by a book or piece of music or immersing yourself in a specialised field - none of this can be accelerated. We have to be allowed to spend time on this without looking at the clock. In this context, Rosa speaks of resonance experiences.
It hurts when we lose the opportunity and ability to have these experiences. I feel the same way about reading. During my studies, I read several hundred books. I immersed myself in them and could focus on the content for hours. I rarely manage that today. After a few minutes, I think about whether reading this book makes sense, whether it will be useful for the next seminar and whether I shouldn't work through part of my e-mail mountain before my son comes home from nursery.

We can do something

We cannot solve social challenges alone. However, we are not helplessly at their mercy either. We can ask ourselves and our children questions and look for answers together. For example:

  • Wo geniesse ich das Tempo der heutigen Welt und wo würde ich es gerne ruhiger angehen?
  • Wenn die Zeit sowieso nie für alles reicht: Was ist für mich, uns als Familie oder als Schule, als Firma das Wesentliche? Und wie können wir uns wieder vermehrt darauf fokussieren? Worauf wollen wir verzichten?
  • Wo fühle ich mich «in Resonanz» mit der Welt und wie kann ich diese Zeiträume ausdehnen? Was braucht es dazu?
  • In welchen Bereichen meines Lebens fühle ich eine zunehmende Entfremdung? Und wie kann ich darauf reagieren?

To the author:

Fabian Grolimund is a psychologist and author («Learning with children»). In the «Parent coaching» section, he answers questions about everyday family life. The 37-year-old is married and father to a son, 5, and a daughter, 2. He lives with his family in Freiburg. www.mit-kindern-lernen.ch, www.biber-blog.com

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Read more:

  • Deceleration: Now is now
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