With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by.
Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but The Secret Pulse of Time read like a Malcolm Gladwell book, with a few differences.
Klein covers his topic more broadly and often deeper than Gladwell’s investigations. That’s not always positive — Klein’s book lacks Gladwell’s sense of narrative and purpose. Where Gladwell’s books at times feel like the extended, but focused, magazine articles they often are, Klein forces a bundle of research on his reader. Fortunately, I embraced this topic, so the tidbits and esoterica rewarded my perseverance. I looked forward to this book (a Christmas gift), but I didn’t fly through it. It’s a reference book, not a story. It may reward skimming in the future.
Below are some tidbits I marked along the way.
Increasing the volume of a uniformly ticking sound makes the listeners think the beat is accelerating, too. Klein calls this the Bolero affect. (p. 39)
Goethe complained about the undue focus on speed, and the increasing pace of communication…in 1825. (pp. 151-152)
“When Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, the movie’s boldly rapid cuts pushed the viewing habits of moviegoers to their limits. Today, we tend to lose patience with those same shots of spaceships gliding slowly through the universe to classical music, which move far too slowly for our current pace.” (pp. 152-153)
“Multitasking is a trap.” (p. 183)
“A lack of control distresses people far more than having a great deal demanded of them, as countless studies have shown. … ” (p. 204)
“Having small children in the house means living with endearing egocentrics who are not willing to delay their needs for a single moment, thus fragmenting their parents’ routine to an extreme. This also explains why many mothers and fathers feel rushed, although they theoretically have plenty of time to get things done.” (p. 205)
“Feeling rushed is decidedly unpleasant. You are obliged to do something, such as to take care of the children, but you don’t feel like doing it. This lack of motivation constitutes the third member of a trio of debilitating time wasters, along with the inability to concentrate and the feeling of being overwhelmed by stress.” (p. 219)
“Our everyday language is revealing: In describing time, we use words from the world of finance. We have and save and invest and waste it.” (p. 264)