The power of time

The Royal Society for the Arts posts some fantastic talks on their website, including this one, by professor Phillip Zimbardo on the power of time. Dr. Zimbardo talk about different peoples’ (and different cultures’) perception and attitude towards time. He argues that northern european societies tend to think ‘in the future’ – meaning that they focus on activities that will pay off in their due time… studying hard to earn good grades, working hard to afford vacation. More southern societies, meanwhile, live in the present and are all about hedonism and immediate reward – focusing on food, sex, and music. He goes on to say that our current school system is modeled after the values of the northern cultures, whereas the video-games that children spend so much of their time playing encourage instant gratification, thus creating a disparity between their home and school lifestyles.

Obviously we have certain parts of our personalities that are more hedonistic and others that focus on the future. Yet I’ve definitely noticed signs of what Zimbardo is talking about. In Bulgaria, for example, dinner was an everyday event lasting between 3 and 6 hours, especially in summer. We would sit down around 7 with a variety of salads and drink rakia for a couple hours. We’d then move on to the actual appetizers – cheese and a lukanka (a salami-type meat). Around 10, the main meal would be served with wine, the consumption of which would last another 2 or 3 hours Finally the meal would be topped off with dessert and we’d sit around the table talking and drinking until late into the night. I was surprised when I found out that most of my Canadian friends rarely even sat down for an hour to have a meal.I look back on those drawn out meals with a certain nostalgia because I know they’re becoming increasingly rare in southern europe as well. Future-centered societies tend to be more “successful”, and have higher GDPs – something the southern cultures aspire to. I always found it interesting just how much Bulgarians looked up to ‘the westerners’ – their hard work ethic, their orderly disciplined lives, their fast-food restaurants, their standardized houses. It is an extreme grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side phenomenon. Everything we had was automatically bad, and everything they had was great. An this in the face of the data showing that a higher GDP is not at all linked with quality of life. We look back wistfully at those long meals with friends and family and the lazy work-days, but at the same time we continue to work ever harder and spend ever-less time with our loved ones in the search of the wester ideal.

Here’s the link to the full talk (40 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJybVxUiy2U&feature=channel

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~ by niinik on June 17, 2010.