What Speed Means to Marketplace Listeners

		Read More Speed Commentaries • Straight Up • Define Our Goals • At What Cost? • Time and Fruit • Workaholism • Faster and Faster • Overcoming Limitations • Length of Time • A State of Mind • Theory of Relativity • What About Honolulu? • A New Career From Speed • Speed Is Nothing New • It's All Relative • We're Being Sold Speed • Speed Means Missing Out • Time is Priceless • The Ride Keeps Getting Faster • Family First • Slowing Down for Frugality • Speed Serves Me • A Fortunate Layoff • Interruptions • Our Country's Material Obsession • A Personal Slowdown • Using Speed to My Advantage • I Don't Miss Much • Not Enough Hours In the Day • Peaceful • Speed, Oh Speed • Out of Control • I Live By Speed • Happy to Be Relaxed • Speed Is Choice Index of Comments

Define Our Goals (June 30)
Our society is competely dominated by the need to introduce speed into everything we do. The most evident example is the way in which most of us drive on our highways. If the speed limit is 65 most drivers will go 70 or 75. Trash (commercial) TV ads run so fast that people in my generation can't follow them. Politicians no longer give talks, they do sound bites.

What does the speeding of life do for the quality of our lives? What are the essentials of the "good life"? Maybe we should all take some time to define our goals. Does materialism provide what we want? If we give up materialism will our economic system go flat? Perhaps some of the deep thinkers can give us answers. There has never been a society like this one, so we are running without lights.

John B. Baird
Oak Park Hights, MN

At What Cost? (June 30)
One of the bitter ironies of modern life is the way all the technologies that promised to make our lives easier have had the opposite effect. The fax machine and email, to take two examples, might seem to be innovations that make it easier to communicate. But there is no control on the number of communications each of us must make. So rather than making anything easier, these faster ways of communicating mean that we are obliged to respond faster and more often.

When my father was the CEO of his little business, he probably had to make a critical decision about once a week. My ex-wife, now the CEO of her business, must make critical decisions several times a day. Each of these decisions is so serious that using poor judgment just once could threaten her career. She didn't choose to live her professional life this way as opposed to the sleepier, more relaxed pace my father enjoyed. She is just swimming in the fiercer current of modern business life.

One of the saddest news articles I have ever encountered was one from a day or two ago. A woman who has some position of high responsibility in a community hospital drove to work last week. There were some crises in the hospital that she needed to face, so she was fighting in her mind before she even got to work, trying to resolve the best way to handle these problems. She had been working for several hours before it occurred to her that she had failed to drop her infant daughter off at day care. By the time she got to her van, the child was dead, having been exposed to terrible heat for several hours in the van.

I think the pressures for us to perform more work at a faster pace are doing great damage to us. The hospital officer and her daughter paid a spectacular price for that, but even those of us who don't suffer such a great loss are injured by the ratcheting up of the pace of life.

Steve Grooms
St Paul , MN

Time and Fruit (June 29)
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

Buenos dias. I would like to see the rankings for Miami, Florida. I lived there for 5 years, and it was incredibly slow. Except when someone wants to steal your car. Those theives move pretty fast—I had three cars stolen down there.

Megan Conklin
Cary, NC

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