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

It's All Relative (June 28)
Speed depends on the view of the person that tried to define it. More important than the speed in which you do your stuff is how organized you are in doing the stuff. If you do them too fast, you might do them wrong. Therefore, you might have to do them again, and it will take you longer than if you would have done it right the first time. Organization allows you to do them right in the most efficient way.

I rely heavily on organization. My weekly schedule includes working full-time, studying full-time (sometimes full-time and a half), spending time with my mother, spending time with my girlfriend, doing homework, and listening to PBS. Therefore, I depend heavily on my organization and the efficiency in which I do most of my stuff. I do not work during regular working hours because I do not have the time, or the patience to deal with traffic. I have a fast cable Internet connection because (again) I do not have the time or the patience to deal with the waste of time waiting or a page to load or a file to download.

Is my life stressful? Yes, of course. Do I lose doing some stuff because of the fast pace that I manage my life by? Yes, I do but I chose to lose them. For example, although sometimes I feel sad because I do not date or party as a college student is stereotyped to do, education is more important for me. Do I whish to change it and take longer in doing what I need to do for myself? No, I do not.

We all live to the speed that we want to live. We do so because we want to do or have things. In my case, I want my degree, therefore I study. I hate debt, therefore I work to pay for my school, and everything is a choice. We get a choice of the speed that we want to move in life. Most of us make the choice of speeding it up to get the most out of what we want.

Nicholas Chacon
La Mesa, CA

We're Being Sold Speed (June 28)
Having just returned from a week at the beach, I was intrigued by your series, Speed, because I had so successfully stepped off the runaway train of daily life for those few blissful days of . . . nothing. Watchless, far from phones, email, or electronic devices of any kind, I felt as if something precious about life had been returned to me. I lingered in vast spaces of open time to dawdle, goof off, while away. It felt like life used to be before multitasking and time management became part of most Americans' everyday vocabulary.

The escalation of our cultural tempo has bothered me for a while. Until I heard your series, I was beginning to think that I was one of the stodgy few who think that talking on the phone, driving, and eating a meal at the same time is definitely not an indication of progress. My friends hardly lift their heads from rapid entries into their Palm Pilots to register my concern. It is a relief to know that someone at Marketplace thinks we might be going a bit fast—or has slowed down just long enough to notice life's landscape flashing by.

Having heard several of the stories on Speed, however, I've come to the somewhat cynical conclusion that if it's a phenomenon on which Marketplace is reporting, it's going to be the very phenomenon that is packaged and sold to us. And, in fact, it already is. Spas and "get away from it all" weekends are how we are exhorted to retreat from this frenetic pace. Body products, pop psychology books and tapes, and exercise regimes promise us rejuvenation. What's next? A trip to the moon to get away from it all? (Wait, that's been done.)

I'm astonished that in our fervor for more, faster, bigger, louder, we've forgotten that time is something we control. It's not something we have to buy. If only people would stop to take a moratorium on "doing" for a day, most would find they miss things that have now become luxuries. Time to think. Reflect. Meditate. Consider. What's lost, in this rush to fill the hours of the day, is the state of being that allows us to enjoy, observe, ponder, and be curious. Sadly, these are states of being that not many people seem to value enough to step off the train for more than a week or two a year. It's a loss that reaches beyond their individual lives.

Back to the races,

Ingrid Walker Fields
Associate Professor of English
Lexington, KY

Speed Means Missing Out (June 28)
Speed means to me that you are living an insane life and you are missing so much. The old saying that life is too short and you have to do so much is true, but life is too short to miss the simple pleasures of life, like watching an army worm spin its cocoon, to sit and actually listen to a bird sing, etc.

When I am able to sit and listen to nature or just sit in my apartment listening to the radio instead of the TV, it's relaxing.

Speed just means getting to where you want to go or end up faster, but missing the little side trips or joys of life until it's too late.

Mary Simon
Duluth, MN

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