I have "pavement rage" and you probably do too
I live in London. Which means if you're not careening towards your destination with a sense of life-or-death-urgency you shouldn't have bothered getting dressed this morning.
Turns out there is such a thing as "pavement rage", and I have taken a test to prove it. At the University of Hawaii, psychologist Leon James has developed a tool called the "Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrom Scale". The scale attempts to ascertain how impatient you are, not just when you're walking, but in other parts of life.
Are you finished? 🙋
Slow internet, slow people, slow supermarket lines, they make us mad. Why? Because society has warped our sense of timing, says Leon. Things our grandparents would have marveled out for their speed and efficiency, now make our eyes bleed with impatience.
“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.
But now that life has its finger firmly pressed on the fast-forward button, we're all running around with expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer not only concludes, "this is taking too long," it goes so far as to stretch out that time so you really feel it.
Ok so we're all insane impatient lunatics, now what? 🤷
Well, the good news is, everyone is feeling it. In his book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, author Hartmut Rosa says that the speed of human movement from pre-modern times to now has increased by a factor of 100. The speed of communications has ballooned by a factor of 10 million in the 20th century, and data transmission has gone beserk by a factor of around 10 billion.
So the next time you find yourself losing your mind in the queue for a coffee, remember, "things aren't as slow as they used to be." Thank God.