"The results are bound up with the pace"
Written when I was working as the only hire at a VC fund.
Almost everything I do on the computer has nearly zero latency, and I’ve noticed that on days I don’t have many meetings I feel super impatient with the much greater than zero latency of doing anything in the real world, long after I’ve closed my laptop. Ugh, why does it take so long for the burner to heat this pot of water? Ugh, why does it take so long for my arm to move the cleaning rag across the counters? Ugh, why does it take my boyfriend, immersed in his book on that end of the couch, so long to hear, process, and respond to the thing I’ve just said, sitting on the other end? The only thing that can keep up with me is more computer. Poor Anthony.
A lot of this just means I need to do some internal work, but I also think the modern world pushes us towards an ever faster pace that we can and should step out of. I’m reading The Sea of Cortez, a book by John Steinbeck about a 1940 marine biology expedition he took with his friend down the Gulf of California, a.k.a. the Sea of Cortez, a.k.a. where we vacationed in Cabo. Comparing their own six-week expedition to those of Darwin’s, Steinbeck writes:
“We came to envy this Darwin on his sailing ship. He had so much room and so much time…
Often we envied the inadequate transportation of his time—the Beagle couldn’t get about rapidly. She moved slowly along under sail. And we can imagine that young Darwin, probably in a bos’n’s chair hung over the side, with a dip-net in his hands, scooping up jellyfish. When he went inland, he rode a horse or walked. This is the proper pace for a naturalist. Faced with all things he cannot hurry. We must have time to think and to look and to consider…
It was the pace that made the difference. And in the writing of Darwin, as in his thinking, there is the slow heave of a sailing ship, and the patience of waiting for a tide. The results are bound up with the pace. We could not do this even if we could. We have thought in this connection that the speed and tempo and tone of modern writing might be built on the nervous clacking of a typewriter; that the brittle jerky thinking of the present might rest on the brittle jerky curricula of our schools with their urge to “turn them out.”...
This is neither a good nor a bad method; it is simply the one of our time. We can look with longing back to Charles Darwin, staring into the water over the side of the sailing ship, but for us to attempt to imitate that procedure would be romantic and silly. To take a sailing boat, to fight tide and wind, to move four hundred miles on a horse when we could take a plane, would be not only ridiculous but ineffective. For we first, before our work, are products of our time. We might produce a philosophical costume piece, but it would be completely artificial. However, we can and do look on the measured, slow-paced accumulation of sight and thought of the Darwins with a nostalgic longing.”
Wow! If Steinbeck in the 1940s envied the pace Darwin lived in the 1830s, then how much more do I in the 2020s envy the pace they both lived?
Short term, I know what I can do to live slower: spend more time working with my hands, spend more time with people, spend less time pressing/tapping/scrolling/clicking. But 40 hours a week of that pressing/tapping/scrolling/clicking is just par for my job, and I did study computer, so long term I’m still trying to figure out how I can live slower while doing the job I want to do.