The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

Comer offers a historical retrospective on the events that led to our culture’s current preoccupation with a hurried pace of life, going all the way back to the invention of the sundial in the ancient world. The ability to measure time led to continued progress in mechanizing that measurement and making use of those measurements, from the development of accurate clock technology in the Middle Ages to the creation of rigorous daily schedules in the Christian monastic tradition. Even by the time the early modern era came about, however, humans largely continued to keep a natural and moderate pace of life, to the point of regularly sleeping up to 11 hours a night. This began to change with the industrialization of society, and the changes accelerated through the 20th century. Whereas the expectation of most people in the mid-20th century was that increasing technological advancements would lead to more leisure time, the truth is that leisure time has consistently gone down across recent decades.

With the advent of the 21st century and the nearly simultaneous emergence of social media and smartphones, all of these changes moved into an even higher gear: “All of this reached a climax in 2007. When the history books are written, they will point to ’07 as an inflection point on par with [the invention of the printing press in] 1440” (35). After 2007, people not only found their schedules jammed with more tasks, but began to discover that whatever leisure time they might have was almost entirely consumed by the new media technologies in their pockets. “To summarize,” Comer writes, “after millennia of slow, gradual acceleration, in recent decades the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch” (43).

Chapter 2 focuses on two of the book’s three major themes: The Dangers of a Hurried Lifestyle and The Importance of Living in the Present Moment. It does not provide a deep articulation of either theme, but the chapter’s argument is meant to buttress the presentation of each. While Comer does not provide an in-depth exposition of the dangers of hurry here (more of that will come in Chapter 3), he assumes hurry to be dangerous for the reasons he laid out in Chapter 1, and he provides his analysis here as an explanation for how we got into such a spiritually perilous situation.

Similarly, his treatment of the theme of living in the present moment is understated in this chapter, but its contours are already clearly visible, particularly in his treatment of the attention-corroding aspects of smartphone technology and social media. Comer notes that the average human attention span has dropped to eight seconds since the year 2000, less than the estimated attention span of a goldfish. Such a situation, he implies, is simply not conducive to being aware of our surroundings and invested in the relationships around us.