Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.

James Gleick. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

As we enter the new millennium, we have become a quick-reflexed, multi-tasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. So says James Gleick in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.

Gleick, the author of Genius. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Chaos: Making a New Science, provides dozens of examples, in 37 short chapters, which demonstrate human beings suffer from "hurry-sickness" (a term coined by Meyer Friedman, one of two California cardiologists who came up with the idea of the "Type-A personality"). For example, we wait impatiently for the elevator door to close or the traffic light to change. Instead we push the "close the door" and the "change to go" button even though they both have probably been purposely disabled by those in charge of these systems. We want fast food, fast internet connections, fast news, and fast drugs (caffeine is available in Coca Cola, coffee, tea, and new lines of soft drinks like Jolt and Surge). And we don't want to become bored.

Gleick contends it is not enough just to go out for a drive. That's too boring so we turn on the radio. That's boring too so we make a call on the cellular phone. Now we're driving, listening to the radio, and talking on the phone and we're still bored. That's when the thought occurs: wouldn't it be great if we could just do nothing. But that thought is fleeting because there's not enough time to indulge it. With only 1440 minutes in a day there's not much time to indulge in anything.

That includes sex, America's favorite activity according to poll takers. In a chapter titled "Sex and Paperwork" Gleick reports that a survey conducted in 1994 by a team from the University of Chicago indicates that the average time per day devoted to sex is four minutes and a few seconds. That's about half an hour per week, hardly a lot of time, although it excludes minutes spent on flirting, dancing, ogling, toning up in gyms, getting makeovers in beauty parlors, and looking at erotic magazines.

Gleick believes we have chosen speed as a way of life because we enjoy the excitement and rush of doing things quickly and that instantaneity rules -- instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant replay, and instant gratification. Pollsters use electronic devices during political speeches to measure opinions on the fly, before they have been fully formed. Fast-food restaurants add express lanes. David Letterman tells his Late Show audience, "I'll try to be brief -- we've done a lot of focus groups and people complain that I'm talking too much. They say it delays the show."

This is a frenetic age that venerates speed with our computers, movies, sex lives, and lifestyles, all running faster than ever before. What effect all this acceleration will have on us remains to be seen but I hope it doesn't come to the situation described in a 1996 New Yorker cartoon in which a man gets into a cab and says, "Step on it. The restaurant may be over any minute."