I received two messages which arrived almost simultaneously, fairly early in the morning, about a fortnight ago: the first, written on a postcard, had been posted from Addis Ababa by a globetrotting friend on November 18, 2018, which I fished out of our letterbox; the second, sent by a senior academic from another university, was a frantic WhatsApp text which asked, inter alia, if anything was wrong with my health and/or family, why I had failed to heed the senior academic’s emailed queries, whether I was upset with said senior academic for any reason, and so on and so forth. The WhatsApp message had been sent at 6:53 in the morning. Wondering if I had overlooked an urgent missive in my Gmail inbox, I fired up my laptop to discover that the senior academic’s queries had been emailed at 2:48 pm the previous day, that is, just 16 hours earlier than the WhatsApp message. After having read and responded to the emailed queries, which were not of any particular urgency, when I took to WhatsApp to ask the reasons for the urgent queries about my health, state of mind, and so on, the senior academic responded that the “inordinate delay” in my reply had prompted these speculations.

Like many others, including — I suspect — you, dear reader, I often receive questions via electronic media that demand an immediate response; failure to reply instantaneously leads inevitably to follow-up questions that range from the solicitous (“I hope there’s nothing wrong that’s keeping you from answering me”) to the sarcastic (“I know I’m not important enough to warrant a response, but it would be nice if you replied sometimes”) to the frankly rude (“If you can’t be bothered to answer such a simple question, just f**k off”). Even worse are the messages that seem to need no answer — for example, photographs sent by vacationing friends — but not to respond is apparently indicative of abysmal rudeness and terminal bad manners. Have you ever been collared by someone at a social event who demanded to know why you had not responded to their cat GIFs and forwarded jokes, and whether such lack of response indicated that you no longer cared for that person? You have? Join the club.

In his brilliant essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, published over half-a-century ago in the journal Past and Present, and reprinted as the sixth chapter of Customs in Common (1991), the great English historian, E.P. Thompson, had alerted his readers to how “timed labour” and “time-discipline” became indispensable to “industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines”, things that were intimately bound up with precise clock-making and accurate timekeeping. But more than his fascinating historical account, what has returned to haunt me anew, some twenty years after I first read Thompson’s essay, are the questions he posed there: “But what of the internalization of this [time] discipline? How far was it imposed, how far assumed?” Thompson was prescient enough to ask if the increased leisure made possible by the time and labour saving devices of the Industrial Revolution would be boon or bane. “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity of experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’... it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their day with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.”

It seems to me that we have abandoned the possibilities of enriched leisurely social interaction in favour of an ever more purposive notation of time-use, to the extent where some analysts are talking of a ‘time famine’, one that makes it imperative for us to ‘manage’ time in the most efficient of ways in order to maximize productivity and efficiency. If experience is anything to go by, all these ‘life hacks’ to streamline time-management end up making us feel even more harried and harassed than before, to the point that I often think the one true mascot of our over-rushed times ought to be Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen; the ruler who famously summed up her country in the words, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

This sense of life unspooling ever faster with every passing moment brings with it the near-disappearance of thoughtful, reflective, responses to the manifold crises of our time — be they social, political, ecological, or a combination thereof. When was the last time you actually spent time thinking about a problem, examining it from different angles, weighing possible solutions, and only then offered an opinion? Pressed for time, and with the demand for immediate answers increasing in shrillness and intensity, our natural response is to seek unthinking solace in the company of like-minded individuals, to find comfort in those whose ideas echo our own. When essentially irrelevant and insignificant individuals, such as this writer, do this, it may not be of much import, but when our leaders begin to do the same thing — to declare policy positions via Twitter, or suggest quick-fixes to pressing problems via the television sound-bite — there is cause for serious worry. Such rapid-fire reactions not only make it near-impossible to construct dialogue, to engage meaningfully with those whose views may not match our own, but also pre-empt the possibility of democratic decision-making.

Which is not to say that we ought to abandon the many advantages brought to us by the marvels of instantaneous communication, but merely to reassert that we still retain the option of jumping off the rapidly-accelerating treadmills of our existence for lives where eight-month-old postcards from Ethiopia are just as important as urgent digital summons transmitted electronically.

The author is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years