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So, what have we discovered in thirty years of research? There's six main
time zones that people live in. Two focus on the past, two on the present, and two on
the future.
The people who focus on the past
either remember all the good old times, successes, happy birthdays, nostalgia…
These are the people who keep the family record, the family books, who have
family rituals.
There are other people who focus only on regret, only on failure, only on all the things
that went wrong.
So we call those folks past positive or past negative.
There are two ways to be present-oriented. The most obvious is to be hedonistic. You live for pleasure and
you avoid pain.
You seek novelty, you seek sensation.
There are other people who are present-oriented, because they say it doesn't pay to plan.
My life is faded. Faded by my religion, faded by my poverty, faded by the conditions
that I'm living under.
Most of us are here because we are future-oriented
that we have learned to work rather than play,
to resist temptation,
but there's another way to be future-oriented, depending on your religion,
life begins after the death of the mortal body. To be future-oriented
you have to trust
that when you make a decision about the future it's going to be carried out.
If you had uh... great inflation,
you don't put money in the bank,
but you can't trust the future.
uh... If you have uh... instability in your family,
adults can't keep their promises to you.
The closer you are to the equator uh...
the more present-oriented you are, the more you are in an environment where climate
doesn't change,
it gives you a set of imagining
sameness, rather than change.
Protestants everywhere have higher gross national product than catholic countries.
In part because of the Protestant ethics, because of
the notion that you work hard to succeed
to demonstrate that you were god's chosen people.
Uh… My family comes from Sicily
and in Italy there is a political movement called La Lega
to cut Italy in half
North Italy and South Italy… cut it just below Tuscany.
The people in the North say,
“We do all the work.
The people in the south are lazy like children. They want to have babies, have three
hour dinners.
uh... et cetera. People in the south say, They are not Italians, they are Germans or Austrian, you know
They eat yogurt instead of pasta.
They take their lunch in a paper bag
and in the recent election the Lega got fourteen percent of the
national vote.
It turns out…
It is accurate… We have done researches that say - People in the North tend to be, on a scale, much
more future-oriented. People in the South tend to be more past
oriented or present hedonistic.
And so uh… my family is Sicilian
and I come from Sicily. I go back every year. I started educational foundations. We sent
high school kids to college, and set up computer labs.
And I'm talking about some of this stuff And a man comes up and says, “I am a poet”
“I live with words”
“It wasn’t until I heard your talk that I realized there's no future tense verb in
Sicilian dialect.”
“What do you mean?” There was,
is, there is no will be. He said “That's why nothing gets done!”
“And I didn't realize it, because we never plan!”
So again, here's how when you have a number of people
who share a certain time perspective,
then, it does come to characterize a nation. The same way, if you have a Catholic
nation where people tend to be present or past oriented rather than a Protestant nation where
in general people tend to be more future-oriented, it effects you in very
profound ways.
So, there is a wonderful book called “The Geography of Time”
and it's written by a dear friend of mine Robert Levine who's
a uh
social psychologist,
and he actually literally went around the world
doing wonderful experiments. He looks at what he calls the pace of life.
See, time perspective is how people divide their own experience into partitions,
time zones.
Another kind of
time orientation is your sense of duration.
How much time has expired while you are sitting in a dentist's office before they start
drilling?
How much time has expired
uh... when you've been uh... waiting in line? How much time is expired when
uh... you're having fun or use?
So, time duration is totally a function of whether you’re bored whether you’re excited or
not
uh... and what he does is…
he shows that in different cultures
people have a different pace of ife.
and you do this very simply. And you do this very simply you sit in the cafe and you walk off a hundred
meters, as people pass you start your stop watch to see how fast people walk.
You go to a post office
and with a picee of paper you say "I'd like
three pounds of
this postage or ten Euros".
You see how long it takes.
So, he has a bunch of
of these measures and it turns out you can identify cultures as having a different pace
of life
and now cities.
And he shows in America you could rank sixty cities according to
high pace of life, and low pace of life. In the ones with the highest
pace of life
men have the most coronary problems, that is this part becomes part of your
whole in a way of ife.
We all begin life as present hedonist.
All of us. I mean,
at the breast, at the bottle, we want pleasure, we want to avoid pain.
and one of the things that families do and especially school. My sense is…
The purpose of schooling is to take present-oriented little beasts and make them more
future-oriented, in some cultures make them more past-oriented.
In America a child drops out of school every nine seconds.
This is worse for kids from a minority background.
It's worse for boys than girls
There is actually
a disaster recipe developing among boys in America literally dropping out of
high school college.
It's not
simply poor performance.
One of the problem is - a recent study shows - that by the time a boy is
twenty-one, he has spent at least
ten thousand hours playing video games alone,
probably more watching *** alone.
And you put that together… it means A. They haven’t learned social skills, emotional,
social intelligence,
but also it means that
they live in a world that they create. They are playing WarCraft, they are playing other
games,
which is exciting. In fact, just, I just heard the other day
that these game companies are now going to
uh... develop 3D games,
so that the world will be all around you.
Their brains are being digitally rewired,
which means they will never fit in a traditional classroom, which is
analog.
Somebody talks at you, without even the nice pictures.
Meaning it’s boring. I mean you control nothing, you sit there passively,
and, if you want to change the curriculum, I understand,
the traditionalists here are saying, “We have got to go back to reading, writing and
arithmetic. Disaster!
These kids will never fit into that.
They have to be in a situation where they are controlling something
and school is set up you control nothing. They're passive.
School is all about learning delay of gratification, literally endlessly.
All addictions are addictions of Present hedonism.
Food, drugs, sex gambling etc.
All of our
propaganda, all of our educational message, all of our public relations messages are
designed for future-oriented kid who's not the problem.
They tell you, “Here is the negative consequence of doing what you're doing.”
Future-oriented kids know that and they don't do it. Present-oriented kids know the future
consequences.
If you're a teenage girl, you know that if you have unprotected sex,
you're likely to get pregnant or get sexually transmitted disease. You know it.
But that knowledge never feeds back to change your behavior.
So, that's the interesting thing about time perspective.
I think we are underestimating
the power of technology in rewiring young people's brains.
Kids don't wear wrist watches. They say, “It's a single function device.”
You don't… you don't waste time in a single function device. And they live in digital
things. What matters is the second
uh... You know! I didn’t mention one of things that gets people upset in
America is
how long it takes
to boot up your computer,
and how long it takes to download something. Less than a minute.
That makes people angry.
So it becomes an emotional thing. You get… you get angry waiting in line,
waiting for services.
Waiting is a waste of time, even if it's waiting for your computer to boot up.
So, I think there is a fundamental change going on in our culture,
that I think we adults are not realizing that kids a totally different than we
were.
And if it’s because it’s revolution in time.
There's a recent study we did with um...
USA Today,
asking Americans how busy they are.
The vast majority of Americans more than fifty percent said.
“I'm busier now than I was last year, busier last year than the previous year
and I sacrificed friends
family and sleep
for my success.
This is across the board not separating by future or an other types.
And then we say, “Suppose you had eight days per week. What would you do?”
They say, “Oh that would be great!”
They would spend that, most that time, working harder, achieving more, not with
friends, not with family
and, not even sleeping.
They did the study twenty years ago and I was upset again, from this Italian
background.
Only sixty percent of Americans said they had regular sit-down family dinners,
when we redid the study last year, only one in five American families have
sit-down dinners together.
And in America we talk about family values.
You can’t have family values, if you never have uh... family meals together!
I think many of life's puzzles can be solved by simply understanding our own
time perspective and that of others.
Lots of conflicts we have with people is really
a conflict in different time perspectives.
Once you are aware of that you stop making negative attributions like “You are dumb” or
“Your are childish” or
“You are pig-headed” or “Authoritarian”.
It's really the most simple idea in the world.