One Sunday over break, my father was planning our dinners for the week.
"Are you around on Thursday?"
"Thursday?" My reply was not a reiteration of the question. It was a failure to think 96 hours in advance. At school, plans for a seven o'clock dinner are usually made in casual conversation sometime around 6:45. For my father, Sunday and Thursday were not two isolated moments, but were part of the same basic unit of time - the week, his nine to five, Monday to Friday routine.
Whenever I am home from school, I find myself struggling with maintaining such a routine. My family mocks me for sleeping until noon, eating meals at odd hours and improvising my way through life rather than planning things out. My activities - eating, sleeping, watching TV, reading, seeing friends - have not changed. But since joining an enclosed community of Generation Y-ers, the pace at which I plan, execute and understand these activities has.
We are a generation on the fast track. We access information, make choices and friends all with minimal effort (the mere "click of a mouse") and maximum speed. Moreover, technology allows us to find results without a directed search - friends are made in random chats, new clothes or enticing Wikipedia articles are discovered in haphazard browsing.
Rather than thinking in weeks, like our working parents, we think in "instant" messages, single Web pages, the minutes of a single iTunes download or at the longest, the 22 minutes of a sitcom episode watched on DVD. Ever notice yourself anxiously looking at the clock halfway through a 50-minute lecture? Perhaps it's because 50 minutes is twice as long as you usually spend watching and listening.
Older generations worry that our attention span is too short and our demand for results too impatient. These critics see our hyper-speed as a flaw - if we live only in the moment, we might not succeed in the long term. We might be too apathetic for drawn-out political processes, too fickle for relationship commitment, too unstructured for lifelong careers.
For such critics, the question is whether we, upon leaving college, will be able to adjust to the external world. They advise us to slow down to meet the needs of monthly bills, yearly taxes and elections every two, four or six years. They assume that these institutions will go on functioning at their current speed.
I wonder instead if the gears of society will start turning faster with Generation Y at the wheel. I see us working in shorter intervals from our houses over the Internet, paying our taxes automatically, electing our leaders at more frequent intervals and demanding from them more immediate reforms.
As a columnist, I am drawn to the example of journalism. For our parents, news came in weekly bites - Time, Newsweek and the "Week in Review." Today it is niche markets, like Brown students, who turn to a group-specific daily paper like The Herald for local stories and columns like this one. For pure information, Generation Y seeks instant gratification on the Internet.
Print journalism, particularly weekly news magazines, has turned to analysis and opinion because information gets disseminated by quicker means. But the problem is not simply that by the time a weekly publication comes out we already know the week's news. Nowadays, even weekly analysis seems out of touch with our hyper-speed. The very idea of packaging and interpreting our world by-the-week feels foreign. We are more likely to respond to a publication that uses the hindsight of a week's distance from individual events to analyze them in a short, accessible form, rather than one that speaks broadly in terms of the week.
In 1911, Frederick Taylor advised factory owners to regulate minute actions to save milliseconds that would add up to profits. But the cumulative value of a moment was hard to understand when it took a week to mail a letter or visit a friend in a distant town. Taylor was criticized for superficially focusing on quantity over quality.
We came of age with the musical Rent; we measure our years in "cups of coffee," in 525,600 minutes. But our moments do not amount simply to energy saved - it is telling that they add up to "seasons of love." Generation Y can fill each moment with the quality that once took days, using the technology at hand and the idealism we pretend not to harbor to make change sooner, rather than cynically writing it off as impossible.
Witnessing the last great societal speed-up, the Industrial Revolution, Rudyard Kipling wrote, "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run/ Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it." The Earth, Generation Y, is ours for the taking, if only we'd drag ourselves out of bed to seize it.
Maha Atal '08 wrote this column in under a minute.
