The high speed of society has jammed our internal clock | Hacker News Reader

The high speed of society has jammed our internal clock

nautil.us

103 pointsdnetesn75 comments

I have sidewalk rage. But it's not really about having people walk slower. What gets me is when people have no situational awareness (on their phones, mostly), and are walking very slowly because of that. Then they tend to clump in groups and take the whole sidewalk and won't move over to let you pass, even if you're walking in the opposite direction. I think it's inconsiderate. Same for deciding to gather your whole family right in front of the airport bathroom, just to make it harder for everyone else entering and exiting. I'm always amazed how people tend to aggregate and stop in the worst places (intersections, tight spaces, in the middle rather than out of the way). Traffic patterns are really quite amazing and I think a great source of understanding human nature.

It's probably because you only consciously notice people aggregate when they do so in a place that causes you an inconvenience.

Like the op, I also tend to have this “situational awareness guilt”. I get anxious to stop in places where I can see myself blocking someone else. I think it comes from the fact that generally I like to keep space around me and generally observe my surroundings, which I guess not everyone shares.

I get the same thing very often, what annoys me the most is when I'm walking with someone and there are oncoming people, and the person I'm with isn't walking in a straight line, they're slowly veering me into the path of other people.

I've just got to stop and walk around the other side of the person I'm with when they start doing that.

Its incredibly tiring being hyper-aware of your surroundings like this, always trying to avoid any awkwardness.

This. Man I thought I was the only one. Is there a group for people like us? A subreddit maybe?

I'm like many of the others here. It's not just noticed when it inconveniences me. It also when I notice it does, or would, inconvenience other people too.

Preach it my friend! This drives me insane! The situation you left out that raises my hackles is people congregating in a group in a hallway. Lots of people are trying to get by and they have to squeeze through small openings. It's insanely rude to block a thoroughfare!

Or... stopping at the end of an escalator to figure out where they want to go! This happens way too often at malls, sporting stadiums, airports.

It also seems correlated with a certain kind of affluence. It's often much easier to get down a crowded street in a poor neighborhood than a rich one.

I've experienced that too. I lived many years in a so-called developing country, and when coming back to my native, so-called developed, country I was struck by the difference in crowd behavior between the two. In the former people were way more efficient.

Since then, I practice relaxation techniques when walking in the streets, and I'm not bothered anymore.

Then they tend to clump in groups and take the whole sidewalk and won't move over to let you pass, even if you're walking in the opposite direction.

I think there should be a painted line, like they do have in some high-traffic areas in Asia, to show where the "opposite lane" is.

Of course, the other thing that really irritates me is when I'm moving in one direction along with everyone else who is also keeping to the right (replace with left if you're reading this from a "keep left" country), and encounter someone head-on, going the completely wrong way counter to the flow. I usually gesture to such people by pointing left, and refuse to let them pass on my right.

Fortunately people are mostly a bit more organised when they're driving...

The low speeds involved in walking mean we can allocate resources way more efficiently that using lanes.

If more people are walking in one direction than the other, more space is naturally allocated to them.

If you're "merging" from the left, you can pass on that side until you can get to the right instead of waiting to do a left turn, often without slowing anyone down.

Rigid rules are good at stopping catastrophic collisions, they aren't so good at optimizing use of a complex resource like a sidewalk. Consider how things like telephone polls make some areas of the sidewalk 'less valuable' and natural passing/turning/collector lanes.

Even though Japan has raised tiles to indicate traffic sides and painted lines to indicate bike lanes, I've (surprisingly) found that they're not obeyed as frequently as it would seem. Walking on your left or right side seems to change depending on the location too, along with which side of the escalator is for standing and which is for walking.

Another thing that I've noticed recently is people waiting for their Lyft/Uber pickup right at the corner. It looks like they are about to cross the street, so cars stop for them and wait, but then they keep just standing there, not crossing. It's just thoughtlessly cruel.

Or a group of 3-4 people occupying the whole sidewalk coming towards(infront) of you, they see you coming, and still won't give space to let you pass. Most times, I just stand and stare at them. This even happens at work, when I am walking up the stairs.

I love visiting Japan, where everyone is super aware and would never do this. It’s amazing the difference in cultures.

No no no no, people are absolutely _not_ super aware here. Sure they might mostly stay on one side on the escalator, but that's where it ends.

I was about to say this too, as I've found that phone-gazing while walking is super prevalent compared to anywhere else I've been to. There's even research into using robots to try to get people to stop doing it [1]. At least they're more likely to apologize when they bump into you compared to other places.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8673017

You're not really supposed to stand on one side on an escalator. In certain places it became the social norm, but when long escalators are loaded up it leads to a majority of the weight being on one side which in turn leads to more critical breakdowns where all the passengers are dumped to the bottom.

Ideally everyone should just stand in the middle.

Unfortunately you just can't do that in Japan, it is pretty universal (though Kansai stands on the right, and Kanto stands on the left).

In extremely congested areas people will stand on both sides, but the convention is to stand on one side and have a "fast lane" on the other side. I realize it has less throughput, and puts more strain on the escalators, but that's not changing any time soon.

The point is, escalators and perhaps train boarding are the only two times where people will be mostly self aware of their position. Walking on the sidewalks is not one of those times, everyone is staring at their phones, or walking in groups of 2-3 across.

This annoys me so much, particularly when I'm running, that I don't even bother to move out of the way and play chicken with whoever's in my way.

Just keep walking and ignore them. Claim your space. For some reason they find out in the last fucking second you are walking there after all and they should make space. This is just dominance, they knew you were coming and decided to ignore you.

I sometimes work around the Friday of being such behind someone by taking it as a opportunity to "drop into a lower gear" and take things at a more casual pace.

I think this explanation can be simplified greatly.

It's an obstacle, literally in my way to fulfill my goal. Why wouldn't I be upset at least slightly about that?

To elaborate a bit more: I was minding my own business, in thoughts and happily walking at my own pace. Now I'm ripped out of this rather meditative state. My thoughts are interrupted, there as something challenging my goal of getting somewhere and I need to handle a sudden social or at least spacial situation.

Only now what one might want to call "zen" comes in to play. Now the question is if I can resort to ratio and figure a few seconds won't change a thing and I can quickly get back to my thoughts while they are still fresh.

I don't mind someone walking slow that much, most people walk slower than me even when I'm not energized about something, what I hate is if they take up so much space that I can't get past them and generally they don't take up that much space because they're big but because they are normal size but need to take the middle of a narrow path.

"We now insist that Web pages load in a quarter of a second, when we had no problem with two seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006."

Not true at all. The "scientific" benchmark of "instant" page loads is 250ms. This is the goal. Pages should load instantly because they can load instantly, poor connection or large content notwithstanding. Four second page loads were absolutely not "okay" in 2006. They weren't even the norm.

Always aim for those 250ms, everywhere. For example, if your programming workflow takes more than a second to do a build iteration cycle, it's bad. Slow tools are bad. The status quo may be bad, but that's no excuse not to aim higher.

The parent comment is downvoted (pretty heavily, since an upvote still didn't un-grey it) as I reply, but it's absolutely correct.

I was doing latency optimization for Google in 2009. There was a strong negative correlation between latency and click-through rate - enough that the additional latency of adding JQuery (~140ms IIRC) would've cost us about $150M, and just moving the ads above the results in document order was estimated at $50M (the latter figure turned out to be wrong when I ran the experiments in 2010 - broadband penetration had made the latency difference in document order negligible - but that was the figure Marissa Mayer got in 2002 when most users were on dialup, extrapolated out to Google's 2010 revenues). 2 seconds was absolutely too long; our target was 250ms for the whole search to come back, including all backend calls.

If anything webpages have gotten slower today, with the rise of SPAs with lots of Javascript. Some of that is compensated for by faster Internet (though not a lot; in most of the U.S, speeds haven't budged much since 2009), but a lot is just that people have given up on the sort of marginal use-cases like amusing themselves that they used the web for in the 00s, and now tend to use it only for important things where they're willing to put up with slowness.

It's technically correct but irrelevant to the point the article is trying to make, which is more about tolerance of users for sub-par performance than about where the goal should be set. Granted, you don't have to be relevant. There's plenty of room for making side points as long as you don't try to present them as a takedown of the OP.

Yep, early web user here - I always had an issue with slow load times. After the WWW became a thing, I was on a 14k modem, and load times drove me up the wall. In 2006, load times still drove me up the wall - pages don't have to load in nanoseconds, but I want them to at least have the perception of loading instantaneously.

> Always aim for those 250ms, everywhere

Erm no. that number varies depending on the context. For instance, the rule of thumb for UI lag on embedded devices is around 10ms to feel "instant". Which is why the current crop of surveillance devices feel like cheap junk, because their developers shrugged off that rule in favor of using latency-inducing technology stacks meant for servers.

But not everything can be immediate either. For example, I'll take issue with build time. Sure if you're working with something that can get it down to near instantaneous that's great. But there's also a virtue in needing to plan the change you're making and what you expect it to do.

> For example, I'll take issue with build time. Sure if you're working with something that can get it down to near instantaneous that's great. But there's also a virtue in needing to plan the change you're making and what you expect it to do.

And I'll take issue with this too - my current work project takes about 4 minutes to _link_. That's the absolute quickest I can get. There is definitely a ride ground, and in my experience that middle ground is somewhere around the point of "do I check email/slack/hn when I hit build"

This line caught my attention too. It's hard to understand how anyone could argue that slower web pages are better. I typically have 50 to 100 open browser tabs at any given time and am constantly referencing material in them. Anything slower than a small fraction of a second is a material productivity hit.

It's not an argument that slower is better, but that the same duration was more acceptable to more people in the past.

I do think they got the years wrong though; by memory 4 seconds load time was acceptable around 2000, not 2006.

Cool story time. I actually was the target of a bit of 'sidewalk rage' not all that long ago.

Not really a sidewalk, but effectively one. Walking down the main hallway in our office (not terribly long, maybe a hundred feet), one of the guys who works not too far from me was behind me, and I wasn't walking too fast (funny, I'd say I wasn't exactly slow either, probably ambling a bit at perhaps 2.0 mph, I've never really felt like speedwalking to my desk to sit for a couple hours). There's a point near the area we both work in where it jogs to the right and you can go around either side of a table, and the guy behind me actually sped up a bunch and cut me off on the other side of the table. Close enough in front of me to be rude about it, but he really needed to be in front of me. At that point we were maybe 25 feet from the area where we work. I almost laughed aloud.

It did make me wonder what it's like to be him. He always seems outwardly angry, never says 'hi' to anyone he doesn't know well, hardly ever smiles, etc. Now I wonder if he lives out his days getting pissed at everyone that walks too slow for his liking, kinda like how I sometimes feel when I'm driving and can't find a clear lane that wants to go the same speed as me. The anger I feel in that situation has had a profound impact on my approach to driving as I've grown older; I try much harder now to remember that I'm not actually in a big hurry and it rarely matters one bit how long it takes to drive somewhere. I changed my definition of 'winning' the driving game as getting to my destination without my blood pressure rising.

Primate dominance rituals everywhere.

Added bonus: Driving slower means less fuel usage. Important in countries like Sweden where fuel is expensive. Try driving 70 km/h instead of 90 km/h, the difference is significant with a modern car.

Uhh, idk but when I can get my car into overdrive it is about twice as fuel efficient. At 70km I would have to be in fourth or fifth, which isn't nearly as close.

Actually I think this is true about most ICE cars.

I think there's a noticeable fundamental difference, in that humans have a natural walking pace. It's physically uncomfortable to slow your pace too much. They do both have the mental discomfort of being forced by a stranger to wait behind them, breathing down their neck.

On the other side, a slow walker often is walking slow because they naturally walk slowly. A slow driver often is driving slow because they decided they wanted to drive slow. (Or in either case, they're slow because they are distracted.)

It did make me wonder what it's like to be him.

One possibility is your coworker is in a constant state of panic due to social anxiety or work pressure or something and does anything possible to get back to their known space quickly.

For me it's not so much slow walkers that's the problem - everyone walks at a different speed, and I tend to walk quite quickly anyway (pretty close to a slow jog, I'm told).

The more annoying thing are the "street zombies" who - upon their phone beeping - stop dead in the middle of the street. Usually at a crowded bus stop on a narrow street where it's impossible to pass. By that point they're so oblivious to what's happening around them (or wearing noise-cancelling headphones and listening to music so loudly I can hear it too!) that it takes two "excuse me please"-s or a tap on the shoulder to snap them back into reality.

I don't know why I find it so annoying, but I do. It does, however, make me appreciate the people who are considerate. The phone goes beep, they move to the side and make a decent effort to leave room for people to get by.

I turned the beeper and vib motor off on my phone (well actually, the vib motor is broken and spares are NLA). I'll deal with it when it's convenient and safe to do so, thanks. And people are generally okay with this - so long as they know that if they need me, they're in for a bit of a wait.

My pet peeve isn’t slow walkers but people looking at their phones, bumping into you and telling you to “watch where you are going”. Similarly in driving, I don’t mind slow drivers (after all they could just be beginners), but drivers who feel they own the road and double park right across another double parked car in the opposite road.

People who drive a little slow don’t bother me, but the ones that drive 45mph on the freeway when there’s no good reason for it (traffic, etc.)? Those people piss me off. If you can’t go approximately the speed limit on the freeway when traffic conditions are good, you don’t belong on the freeway.

In Mexico, it's accepted for them to drive in the shoulder.

Why? If you're pulled over on the shoulder, it's for refuge from the traffic speeding past. How does it make sense to encourage slightly slower traffic to use a lane where at one time or another will be vulnerable people and stationary vehicles? Surely a safer solution is employing correct lane discipline.

True enough. But the fact remains that it is pretty common there.

“Left lane fast, right lane slow” is actually not the law in California.

It really should be though — traffic in CA flows ridiculously poorly compared to everywhere else I’ve driven.

(Left lane fast, right lane slow is the law in many parts of the US, even though passing on the right is generally legal too.)

Here, as like most of the usa, the left lane is a 'passing lane'. You keep right unless overtaking, or turning left.

Wrong. Skip to page 5 here:https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/KEEP-RIGH...

Not only do vehicles traveling "at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction" have to keep right (CVC § 21654), there are often signs indicating this on the freeway.

> Similarly in driving, I don’t mind slow drivers ...

I don't either. As long as they're not hogging the fast lane.

But I'm very mellow now. Many years ago, when I was stupidly talking SSRIs to treat bipolar depression, I was a total asshole. I didn't tailgate or whatever. I just drove like they were stationary obstacles.

And what's bizarre is that I didn't feel angry. More like amused. It was like a game. Albeit one with potentially fatal consequences.

Then I got off SSRIs, and stopped being such an asshole.

You weren't an asshole - you were hypomanic.

Yes, thanks :)

But to others, that would have been a subtle distinction.

And yet the people most glued to their device-dopamine loops are the ones most likely to be ambling along...

The problem isn't really slow walkers (etc), but rather the ones who are in the way due to not paying attention and seem to justify it by thinking everybody should just walk as slow as themselves. One can be slow and considerate, just like one can be fast and inconsiderate. The latter mainly just comes to a head with people walking opposite directions though, for obvious reasons.

I have to agree with you. Same issue with slow drivers, its really a matter of consideration not speed.

In Tokyo, people drive their bicycles on the sidewalk (ment only for pedestrians) while completely ignoring the bicycle lane with painted instructions for them. They can't drive fast and usually end up causing a mess by almost running into someone every 30-60 seconds.

What's even worse is they don't even ring their bells but try to sneak past you. Most of these cyclists are not alone, they have their kids in a basket.

This causes me to rage. These days I just walk on the bicycles path since all the bicycles are in the pedestrian walkway.

Why don't they use the bike path? One country I've lived in is similar to how you describe, but there's hardly any bike paths there. Where I am now there's plenty, and everyone bikes on the bike paths.

Do you have any guess on why people are doing that?

They fear driving on the road and prefer personal safety or value personal safety (self preservation reasons)

I had a friend who did that and I proceeded to interview/profile her. I didn't ask her why she did that, I simple talked to her about the subject and noticed the primary reason was fear of driving on the road, secondary was laziness i.e. they'd have to cross the road and drive on the other side to reach their target or cross the road to drive on the correct side and cross the road again for the target which could be a little far off from the crossing.

I've been looking for opportunities to talk to more people who do this to get more insight into the problem.

I really wish people would at least try to see if economic pressure is an explanatory variable here. Intuitively, it seems to me that when I get angry at slow people it's usually because, eg, I'm trying to get to work. Or I worked late and am late for the next thing. As the pressures from the main thing that structures our time go up, wouldn't you think that our anger at lack of control over the other constraints on our time go up?

> Research has shown meditation and mindfulness—a practice of focusing on the present—helps with impatience, although it’s not entirely clear why.

Er...

Ever try to be impatient without tensing your muscles?

Ever try to mediate without relaxing your muscles?

I walk fast because I am trying to squeeze a liitle exercise in. Someone who saunters (in the middle of the sidewalk) can be frustrating.

Here are some scenarios that get me: multiple slow walkers taking up more than half the sidewalk, and people running into me when I’m walking so far to the right, I’m practically rubbing up against a building on my right side. Both of these happen to me on a regular basis in SF.

I somewhat agree but slowpoke on the sidewalk are also somewhat of a modern problem. Because of the priority cars are given over humans, walking in cities is essentially a 1 dimentional affair, so it's somewhat understandably infuriating when someone is holding up everything and has no awareness

I’m usually the one who rages at slow walkers, but going to Amsterdam was a humbling experience because I seemed to inadvertently walk into angry bikers on a bike path everywhere I went

The article posits that this is something new. Hardly. My whole life I've agitated behind slow drivers. Just yesterday I got stuck behind someone going 25 in a 35 for several miles. Behind me was a looooong tail of cars, probably all wondering wtf was going on.

This sort of thing has always been maddening to me, since long before the internet. Though in my younger days I'd take risks getting around them.

I hear ya man. To make things even worse, around where I live many of these drivers will turn onto the road I'm on (now in front of me) when they didn't have time. So I have to hit my brakes to avoid running in to them, and then have to drive 10 to 15 mph slower than I was going before. I'm getting a little irritated just writing about it lol

I laugh at all these responses. Im the one who purposely goes slow. AMA

Why are you laughing at all the responses?

people getting aggravated by what others do and say. always seemed funny/interesting to me.

I agree with regards to people getting aggravated with things that don't affect them. But what about people that are being blocked? Does that not seem rude?

Why purposely go slow? Sometimes I take my time because I don't want to start sweating, but I don't think I've ever actually walked slowly anywhere.

why go fast? I enjoy walking slowly.

I am not sure where you live but when I was living in London walking slow vs walking fast meant less time spent on a stressful commute and less time wasted just getting to places.

A slow stroll can be very pleasant if you're in the countryside but in a large city you rather get from A to B as quickly as possible when in crowded areas; especially if it is your daily routine. A large group walking in front of you and blocking your path are literally wasting your time. That wasted time adds up a lot on a daily basis. (5 minutes 'wasted' each way a day on your commute would equate to over 40 hours a year of time spent walking slowly behind a large group of people).

I live in a big city, and I still often enjoy walking slowly. Walking (and cycling, some days) is the best part of my commute, I want to savour it. It's being stuck in the metro or bus that I'd rather speed up.

People blocking your path is an orthogonal issue; I always take care not to do that, regardless of the speed I'm going at.

How else do you manifest this passive aggression?

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