Welcome to the Grab and Go Culture
by Maggie Jackson, Guest Columnist for FlexPaths
Fri, 07/18/2008 - 2:29 — Maggie Jackson
The star of the new movie Wall-e is an amiable, trash-collecting robot, living alone on a garbage-clogged earth. But the supporting cast of humans is riveting, not least because they are in perpetual motion.

Living on a space station because earth is uninhabitable, the rotund human race glides around on jet-propelled chairs, subsisting on ever-present, big-gulp liquid meals. They flit, and whir and hover, never pausing. And like all good science fiction, there’s more than a kernel of truth to this astute portrait of our restless species.

We, too, live in a grab and go world. We have one of the lowest rates of residential mobility in the post-war era; just 14 percent of Americans move annually. But the average number of miles that Americans drive annually has risen 80 percent in the past 20 years. We prefer handheld, bite-size and drip-less food, not just because we snack all day but because we eat so often on the run. A quarter of restaurant meals are ordered from the car, up from 15 percent in 1988.

Grazing, browsing, surfing, hoteling, hot-desking, travel soccer and dashboard dining – the very vocabulary of our lives illustrates an adoration of motion. We scorn the idea of stopping, equating the local and the immobile with “social deprivation,” observes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Certainly, we’re refraining a bit on driving and business travel as fuel prices soar. But will such reluctant cutbacks ground our restless souls?

This love of movement is deep-rooted. Our short history as a nation, immigrant roots and pioneering spirit have long fed our love of novelty and freedom. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans have a “restless temper.” Add to this, generations of distance-shattering machinery, from the telephone and railroad to the jet and Internet. Cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls place a “realm of pause” and space a “canvas for movement.” By this definition, we have truly chosen to inhabit space.

Undoubtedly, our ultra-mobile culture is energizing, giving us the twin gifts of freedom and mobility. We have an ability to navigate the globe that our forebears could not have imagined. As I write, my daughter is living in Germany, experiencing her third weeks-long international homestay in as many years. And she’s only 16. The planet literally looks different to her; she fully appreciates the magnitude of her experiences while accepting a “global village” as the norm.

Still, restless, push-button living demands compromises. Our relations to the world around us, to community and even to problem-solving change when we race breathlessly through life. Consider:

• When we rely on a portable, solo gastronomy, we lose opportunities for both enjoying the deep sensuality of food and for gathering around a table in an age-old act of communion. “Food is functional,” one fast-food executive told me. “It’s a bar you eat and you’ve got your meal.”
• When we become what Pico Iyer calls “global souls,” we shed attachment to place and to others. The world is our canvas, yet do we know our neighbors? A quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, double the number that reported such isolation twenty years ago.
• Critical thinking, creativity, deep research – these twenty-first century skills require time, effort, and a willingness to confront doubt. “Knowledge work can’t be done in sound bites,” says executive Stan Smith of Deloitte & Touche. Yet nearly a third of workers say they are so overloaded that they often do not have time to reflect on or process the work that they do.

Ultimately, speed has its limits. And increasingly, I see signs that we are reaching the boundaries of high-speed living. “Everybody I talk to expresses this feeling of being in a race with themselves,” says Noel Schroeder, a Boston elementary school teacher turned yoga instructor. Her students show up literally breathless. “It’s the first time all day they’ve taken a deep breath,” Schroeder told me. “There’s this sudden awareness of how they’ve been racing all day.”

A rising interest in meditation, yoga, the walking of reflection labyrinths, and mindful awareness techniques in schools all indicate a hunger for finding the “pause button” once in a while. Just lately, I’ve been trying to eat lunch away from my home office computer – even just a few feet away. I now allow my mind to wander or my senses to fully take in the experience of eating. After just a few minutes, I feel better nourished, in both body and thought.

I won’t give away the ending, but the good-news climax of the movie Wall-e partly hinges on a plant. In this tiny but resilient potted bit of greenery lies the hope for mankind’s future back on earth. It’s fitting. Few things demand more of an embrace of slowness and patience than gardening. Thankfully, speed doesn’t get the last word in this thoughtful depiction of our future. And in our own lives, we can recapture the art of stillness, bit by bit.