Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

A New York Times piece on the toll that frenetic texting is having on teens’ sleep patterns, family lives and times for quiet, connected thinking.

A Wall Street Journal blog by a commuter who stopped in a busy train station to help an unconscious woman whose plight was ignored by hurried passersby.

A Boston Globe column that I’m researching on companies cracking down on texting/cell phoning drivers who madly multitask their way down our highways.

What do these articles and issues have in common? Hurry Sickness, as I’ve written before, corrodes time for daydreaming, for serendipitous togetherness, for undivided attention. If members of our society can’t pause to help a (literally) fallen woman, or make it a priority to look one another in the eye rather nurture a preference for trading Tweets, then we risk far more than stress-related health disorders. We risk a crumbling in the fabric of our society.

In my upcoming May 30 Balancing Acts column on distracting driving, I will recount how a big global engineering firm – populated by on-call, blackberry-addicted employees – banned all phoning and texting while driving, yet found a year later that almost all of its workforce reported no drop in productivity.

Stunning. And yet logical. With a little time management, calls didn’t require instant responses most of the time. (In fact, many hurried calls made while multitasking result in mistakes that take another call to rectify.) As well, the firm’s employees regained something precious – time to mediate on work (and life) problems, rather than simply knee-jerk reacting. Perhaps companies are tightening such policies to avoid litigation in the event of accidents, but whatever their motivation, the outcome may be a helpful nudge to employees to stop and think about the costs of constant lives of hurry. 

Isn’t it amazing that we need a near-death threat before we rethink the quality of our lives?

 In “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration,” John Tierney asks  “is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction” and quotes author Winifred Gallagher as advising ear plugs, as one protection from distractions.

   But that’s the wrong question to be asking – and ultimately a counterproductive response – as we search for ways to protect our focus in the digital age.

    By arming ourselves with ear plugs, iPods and noise-cancelling headphones (yes, people wear these at work now), we’re essentially creating an arms race of self-defense systems against the noise and interruptions of others. With our gadgets, we’re erecting fiefdoms of quiet that we scramble to make impenetrable against the incursions of others.

     There are two chilling implications of this trend. First, by doing so, we are effectively giving up on notions of mutual respect for shared public spaces. The onus is now on you to create your own bubble of focus, rather than on another to respect your right to quiet.  I sense that this is why, in the libraries where I write and research, so many people increasingly chat on their cell phones, and are angry when a librarian or fellow patron asks them to disconnect. There is no sense of mutual responsibility for maintaining a collective space.

    Second, when we barricade ourselves so eagerly against distractions, we’re losing opportunities for the serendipitous encounters that are at the heart of public life, especially in cities. In order to relate to others, we need to have a “disposition to be vulnerable to others,” says UCLA linguistic anthropologist and MacArthur fellow Elinor Ochs. When we are eternally plugged in and connected elsewhere – even at home, we lose our willingness to take a chance on interacting with others.

     There are times to tune out the world, of course, but a much better way to pushback on our climate of distraction is to find ways to respect one another’s right to focus, as well as to strengthen our own skills of attention. No ear plugs can do that.

Slow is on my mind, as you’ll see from my last post.

I am writing the foreword to Christine Louise Hohlbaum’s new book, The Power of Slow, due out in November. And as part of my recent Boston Globe column on slow living, I talked to the wiseman of slow: Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slowness and more recently, Under Pressure, a book on the costs of hyper-parenting. Honoré writes about a complex, emotional subject with great clarity and vision; I especially like the way he dips back into history for perspective on our own trying times. He walks a fine line well – calling for change without waxing nostalgic. Honoré spoke from his home in London. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Q – How is the economic climate changing the climate for parenting?

   A – The economic crunch changes the landscape in lots of different ways. In recent years, we wound ourselves up in a kind of hysteria over children. Parenting had become a cross between a competition sport and a consumerist production. … Every human relationship became a transaction. One of the consequences was that we created a culture of almost stultifying perfection. Perfect teeth, perfect vacations, and you want a perfect child to round out the moment. …

    Now we’ve had this economic wake up call. … We’re at one of those rare times when the things that were untouchable and unquestionable are now up for grabs. One of the things that’s on the table is the culture of hyper-parenting. …  More and more people have realized that we’ve lost our bearings when it comes to children. Rising obesity, serious sports injuries at young ages, substance abuse, depression. Millions of kids get up to take a pill just to get through the day. If a society has to medicate children just to survive their childhood, I don’t think it’s the children’s fault.

      Q – Surely, this change isn’t easy. It’s not easy to cut back on busyness, to question what we believe in.

      A – There is a lot of pain out there. It can make people less willing to try to new things. [But] I feel optimistic. [Slow parenting] involves less money and less energy, less running around. It’s a simplification of things. … Now is a time to retrench and reset our family metronome.

   Q – Is there a downside to slow parenting?  

   A – When people talk about anything slow, slow food or whatever, what they mean is not doing everything at a snail’s pace. What ‘slow ‘means is doing everything at the right speed. There are times to be busy, rushing around, and there are times to change gears. If you can get close to your family’s natural tempo, what works best for you as a family, if a family can get to that rhythm – an enriching array of activities, but time and space for boredom, doing nothing – I find it hard to see disadvantages. Finding that correct tempo is not an easy thing to do. My family is sometime a bit too busy. What we’re talking bout here is relinquishing this addiction to perfection. That contributes to making the drumbeat of modern parenting one of anxiety.

     Q – Is this truly a lasting correction, or just a short-term backlash?

     A – The jury is still out. … But the pieces are there for it to be a real change. I could be wrong. I’m not an oracle.

Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow art and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.

Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.

It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. And according to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a collective wish to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex  systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market. Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification – that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.

Note: This post first appeared on Boston College’s Work-Family Network, where I occasionally blog.