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As the pace of life in today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go. With so much to do and so little time to do it in, how are we to cope? Richard Tomkins sets about untangling the problem and comes up with an answer.
隨著當今世界生活節奏日益加快，我們似乎一直在不停奔忙。事情那么多，時間卻那么少，我們該怎么辦？里查德·湯姆金斯著手解決這一問題，并提出了建議。
Old Father Time Becomes a Terror
時間老人成了可怕的老人
Richard Tomkins
理查德·湯姆金斯
Once upon a time, technology, we thought, would make our lives easier. Machines were expected to do our work for us, leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure.
從前，我們以為技術發展會使我們的生活變得更安逸。那時我們覺得機器會替代我們工作，我們則有越來越多的時間休閑娛樂。
But instead of liberating us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate: as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium. And as each invention arrives, it eats further into our time.
但技術發展沒有把我們解放出來，而是使我們成為奴隸。新技術紛至沓來，令人目不暇接：一年涌現的技術創新相當于以前一千年。而每一項新發明問世，就進一步吞噬我們的光陰。
The motorcar, for example, promised unimaginable levels of personal mobility. But now, traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams.
比如，汽車曾使我們希望個人出行會方便得讓人難以想象。可如今，城市車輛運行得比馬車時代還要慢，我們因交通堵塞而困在車內，徒然浪費生命。
The aircraft promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it delivered them. Its very existence created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking -- the transatlantic shopping expedition, for example, or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world.
飛機也曾有可能為我們拓展新天地。問題是，飛機提供了新的天地。其存在本身產生了對耗時的長途旅行的需求，這種旅行，如越洋購物，或遠道前往地球的另一半參加會議，以前我們是根本無法想象的。
In most cases, technology has not saved time, but enabled us to do more things. In the home, washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry. In reality, they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly, creating seven times as much washing and ironing. Similarly, the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming.
在大多數情況下，技術發展并未節省時間，而是使我們得以做更多的事。在家里，洗衣機可望使婦女擺脫繁重的洗衣勞作。但事實上，它們促使我們每天，而不是每星期換一次衣服，這就使熨洗衣物的工作量變成原來的7倍。同樣地，每周一次的沐浴為每日一次的淋浴所代替，使得用于個人穿著打扮的時間大大增加。
Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time -- the laptop-on-the-beach syndrome -- but added the new burden of dealing with faxes, e-mails and voicemails. It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet.
與此同時，技術發展不僅聽任工作侵入我們的閑暇時間――帶著便攜式電腦去海灘綜合癥――而且添加了收發傳真、電子郵件和語音郵件這些新的負擔。技術發展還向我們提供機會，在個人電腦上一連幾小時處理軟件故障，或把因特網上那些無用的信息塞進自己的大腦。
Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed: the information explosion.
除去技術發展，因特網指出了我們為何感到時間如此緊迫的第二個原因：信息爆炸。
A couple of centuries ago, nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers. Today, those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day.
幾個世紀以前，人類積累的幾乎所有知識都能裝在若干哲人的大腦之中。如今，這些大腦休想容納下一天中產生的新信息中的小小一部分。
News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world. The television set offers channels. There are millions of Internet sites. Magazines, books and CD-ROMs proliferate.
各種消息、事實和見解從世界各個角落大量涌入。電視機能收到個頻道。因特網網址多達千百萬。雜志、書籍和光盤只讀存儲器的數量也激增。
"In the whole world of scholarship, there were only a handful of scientific journals in the th century, and the publication of a book was an event," says Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entomology at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology. "Now, I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship."
“在18世紀，整個國際學術界總共只有屈指可數的幾家科學刊物，出版一本書是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大學比較動物學博物館昆蟲館名譽館長愛德華·威爾遜說。“如今，我本人就訂閱了60或70種期刊雜志，以便自己跟上不斷拓展的學術前沿中一個微小部分的發展動向。”
There is another reason for our increased time stress levels, too: rising prosperity. As ever-larger quantities of goods and services are produced, they have to be consumed. Driven on by advertising, we do our best to oblige: we buy more, travel more and play more, but we struggle to keep up. So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance -- the confusion of endless choice.
我們產生日益加重的時間緊迫感還有一個原因：日漸繁榮富足。由于生產的物品與提供的服務越來越多，我們必須去消費。在廣告的推動下，我們努力照辦：我們多多購買多多旅游多多玩兒，但得盡力堅持下去。于是我們就深受威爾遜所謂的對極大富足不滿之苦――即無休止的選擇所造成的困惑。
Of course, not everyone is overstressed. "It's a convenient shorthand to say we're all time-starved, but we have to remember that it only applies to, say, half the population," says Michael Willmott, director of the Future Foundation, a London research company.
當然，并非人人感到時間過度緊迫。“說我們都缺少時間只是隨意講講，我們應該記住，這種說法大約只適用于一半人，”未來基金公司――一家倫敦研究公司――的經理邁克爾·威爾莫特說。
"You've got people retiring early, you've got the unemployed, you've got other people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all. If you're unemployed, your problem is that you've got too much time, not too little."
“有些人早早退休了，有些人失業了，有些人或許只與經濟活動沾點邊，根本不會有這種情況。如果失業了，那你的問題就是時間太多，而不是太少。”
Paul Edwards, chairman of the London-based Henley Centre forecasting group, points out that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated, or self-imposed. "Everyone talks about it so much that about percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done," he says. "It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy. If you're not stressed, you're not succeeding. Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person."
總部設在倫敦的亨利中心預測小組組長保羅·愛德華茲指出，壓力感也可能被夸大，或者被強加于自身。“人人都大談壓力，以至于多達半數的失業者或退休人員都會跟你說，他們根本來不及把事情做完，”他說。“這幾乎是到了羨慕壓力的程度。沒有感到有壓力，就不是成功者。人人都想表現幾分時間緊迫感，以顯示自己的重要。”
There is another aspect to all of this too. Hour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that, in the U.K. , working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years, and in the U.S., they have actually fallen -- even for those in professional and executive jobs, where the perceptions of stress are highest.
這一切還有另外一個方面。幾十年來由數千名志愿者所作的鐘點日志表明，英國在最近十年中工作時間只略微增加，而在美國，即使對工作壓力最大的專業人士和管理人員而言，工作時間實際上減少了。
In the U.S., John Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that, since the mid-1960s, the average American had gained five hours a week in free time -- that is, time left after working, sleeping, commuting, caring for children and doing the chores.
在美國，馬里蘭大學社會學教授約翰·魯賓遜和賓夕法尼亞州立大學研究閑暇問題的教授杰弗里·戈德比發現，自20世紀60年代中期以來，普通美國人每周增加了5小時空余時間，即工作、睡眠、乘車上下班、照料孩子和家務勞動之余的時間。
The gains, however, were unevenly distributed. The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters. Those who gained the least -- less than an hour -- were working couples with pre-school children, perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their offspring.
但增加的時間分配得并不均勻。受惠最多的是未婚者和子女不在身邊的人。得益最少的――增加了不足1個小時――是有學前子女的雙職工夫婦，這或許反映了父母在撫養子女方面花費更多時間這一傾向。
There is, of course, a gender issue here, too. Advances in household appliances may have encouraged women to take paying jobs: but as we have already noted, technology did not end household chores. As a result, we see appalling inequalities in the distribution of free time between the sexes. According to the Henley Centre, working fathers in the U. K. average 48 hours of free time a week. Working mothers get 14.
這里當然也存在著性別問題。家用器具的更新換代或許鼓勵婦女去做有報酬的工作，但正如我們已經注意到的，技術發展并沒有掃除家務雜活。其結果是，我們發現男女空余時間的分配驚人地不平等。據亨利中心的調查，在英國，有工作的父親平均每周有48小時的空余時間。有工作的母親只有14小時。
Inequalities apart, the perception of the time famine is widespread, and has provoked a variety of reactions. One is an attempt to gain the largest possible amount of satisfaction from the smallest possible investment of time. People today want fast food, sound bytes and instant gratification. And they become upset when time is wasted.
除去不平等，缺乏時間的感覺也普遍存在，并引起了各種反應。反應之一是試圖投入最少的時間以獲取最大的滿足。如今人們需要快餐，需要電臺、電視臺播放簡短片斷，還要即刻得到滿足。時間一旦被浪費，人們就會很不高興。
"People talk about quality time. They want perfect moments," says the Henley Centre's Edwards. "If you take your kids to a movie and McDonald's and it's not perfect, you've wasted an afternoon, and it's a sense that you've lost something precious. If you lose some money you can earn some more, but if you waste time you can never get it back."
“人們談論著質量時間。他們需要最佳時光，”亨利中心的愛德華茲說。“如果你帶孩子去看電影或去麥當勞，但度過的時光并不甜美，你浪費了一個下午，感覺就像是你丟失了寶貴物品。錢丟失了還能掙回來，但時間浪費了就再也無法追回。”
People are also trying to buy time. Anything that helps streamline our lives is a growth market. One example is what Americans call concierge services -- domestic help, childcare, gardening and decorating. And on-line retailers are seeing big increases in sales -- though not, as yet, profits.
人們還試圖購買時間。任何能幫助我們提高生活效率的事物都有越做越大的市場。美國人所謂的家政服務――做家務，帶孩子，修剪花木，居家裝飾――即為一例。網上零售商在看著銷售額大幅增長――雖然利潤尚未同樣大幅增長。
A third reaction to time famine has been the growth of the work-life debate. You hear more about people taking early retirement or giving up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations with shorter working hours. And bodies such as Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up, urging employers to end the long-hours culture among managers and to adopt family-friendly working policies.
對時間匱乏的第三個反應是有關人的一生應該工作多少年的爭論增多。你比過去更常聽到人們談論早早退休，談論放棄壓力大的工作去從事工作時間短的工作。諸如英國全國工作年限論壇這樣的機構像雨后春筍般出現了，敦促雇主終止讓管理人員長時間加班的做法，而采取能適應家庭生活的工作方式。
The trouble with all these reactions is that liberating time -- whether by making better use of it, buying it from others or reducing the amount spent at work -- is futile if the hours gained are immediately diverted to other purposes.
所有這些反應的問題在于，把時間解放出來――無論是靠更充分地利用時間，靠購買他人的時間，還是靠縮短工作時間――是沒有意義的，如果贏得的時間又即刻被用于其他目的。
As Godbey points out, the stress we feel arises not from a shortage of time, but from the surfeit of things we try to cram into it. "It's the kid in the candy store," he says. "There's just so many good things to do. The array of choices is stunning. Our free time is increasing, but not as fast as our sense of the necessary."
正如戈德比所指出的，我們的緊張感并非源于時間短缺，而是因為我們試圖在一個個時段中塞入過多的內容。“就像糖果店里的孩子，”他說，“有那么多美好的事情要做。選擇之多，令人眼花繚亂。我們的空余時間在增加，但其速度跟不上我們心中日益增多的必須做的事。”
A more successful remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather than evading it.
更有效的解決方式或許在于去理解這一問題，而不是回避這一問題。
Before the industrial revolution, people lived in small communities with limited communications. Within the confines of their village, they could reasonably expect to know everything that was to be known, see everything that was to be seen, and do everything that was to be done.
工業革命前，人們居住在交通聯系不方便的小社區里。在本村范圍內，人們自然而然地期望了解該了解的一切，見到該見的一切，做該做的一切。
Today, being curious by nature, we are still trying to do the same. But the global village is a world of limitless possibilities, and we can never achieve our aim.
如今，生性好奇的我們仍試圖這么做。然而，地球村是一個有著無限可能的世界，我們永遠無法實現自己的目標。
It is not more time we need: it is fewer desires. We need to switch off the cell-phone and leave the children to play by themselves. We need to buy less, read less and travel less. We need to set boundaries for ourselves, or be doomed to mounting despair.
我們需要的不是更多的時間：是更少的欲望。我們定要關掉手機，讓孩子們自己玩耍。我們定要少購物，少閱讀，少出游。我們定要在有所為、有所不為方面給自己設定界限，不然則注定會越來越感到絕望。
