How Different Cultures Understand Time
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Now that I read the article, it put the words in my mouth. I value encounters, discussions, meeting someone and time has not much to say in there. If someone has to leave because of his/her schedules, it does leave me with the feeling of business unfinished.
I don't have a calendar and I try to avoid meetings, just because something more important usually turns up at the same time and also because the meeting will typically run short and discussion is left unfinished, which makes me think of it as time wasted. I'd rather skip the next meeting if I can connect with the people in the first meeting, and drive things to a closure or properly finish the discussion.
I als o don't mind if someone's late because I consider it more much valuable if s/he turns up anyway and is ready for an in-depth discussion. Conversely, if I didn't really pay attention, I'd be late to everything, thinking that no matter what time, let's discuss the things once we're here now.
Then you get to explain just how far apart everything is here :)
Of course, I'm making a bit of a caricature here, but I really have had friends and family say this before.
I have always assumed this is why distances in the US (reasonably far away from the coasts) are "not that far".
(I've regularly done a 5 hour drive for family visits and dislike that experience)
That's a whole working day.
They had a difficult time comprehending that, until I explained it was like driving to Munich and back ... five times in a row. Then they got it. And were stunned that I would and could do something like that.
Walk away after 15 ( or 10) minutes because you should have something better to do with your time than wait around hours for someone, right? There needs to be a negative consequence of the bad behaviour and it should be communicated through your actions rather than your words. Words will always fall on deaf ears.
I remember a friend who had a problem with a very tardy friend from one of the warmer EU countries and started to leave habitually after 10 minutes of tardiness. After a couple of times he got the idea and even started arriving early to the meetings.
You don't lose anything by doing this. It's a good strategy since it reveals the nature of your relationship with that person. If you don't like the revelation, fix it in a socially intelligent manner or exit the relationship. ...
Important, critical things depend on a rational approach to time.
I was irritated by the author's romantic view of the non-western concept of time.
Being punctual is stressful, requires planning, forethought, and saying no to unforeseen circumstances. I can't imagine living being punctual in my non-business life. I would feel like a slave. I once lost a girlfriend because she was extremely uptight about punctuality and I wasn't. While that attitude might seem completely normal to an American, to me it was a glimpse into insanity.
Also, I've found that the idea of "circling around a problem" for several days until coming to a decision is standard practice in the US, at least if you're involved in any kind of development or creative task.
So there is the "start time", but it's just delayed? For example: scheduling a 7pm dinner means everyone will know to arrive at 8pm?
You go: "What time is dinner?". "8 PM". "OK" (shows up 8:30-9)
You go: "What time is dinner?". "8 PM. Please try to be punctual I have stuff to do in the morning". "OK" (shows up 8:15-8:30)
More or less the same thing happens at universities (at least that I know). Lectures are at full hours, but start at 15 past and last 45 minutes. That means that you have time to move from building to building and/or take a break.
Sometimes you'll see graduate seminars with the mention (sharp!!) next to the time, it means that since PhD students don't have many lectures, the seminar can start at full hours, because they probably have nothing to do just before that.
Obviously punctuality depends on the context, ranging from 15 minutes late for university, to 30-60 for concerts or dinners, to some crazy stuff for clubbing (free entry before midnight to try to get someone in early, even though the DJ is supposed to start at 10PM).
Hilariously, when classes were right after one another this sometimes meant down the hall or the building across the street and plenty of leisure time, or it could mean corner to corner on a huge campus and having to leave early, arrive late, or run. In this sense the buffer times didn't solve the problem either.
Once area the article doesn't discuss at all is how middle east and Indian cultures understand time. Can anyone offer any commentary on this?
Personally, I like it that people are not angry with you when you're really late (again, traffic jam). I experience this as relieving.
Indian cultures: As far as my understanding goes, it's a mixture of compartmentalized time and cyclic time. The ritual or traditions or religions kind of show a cyclic view of time, specially with the karma viewpoint, but the offices and businesses are laid by british, hence more compartmentalized way of thinking is done there. Basically with Indians you can expect sudden no communication, or the office things might take huge amount of time too.
I'm Bangladeshi and both are my view point, and I've indian and Middle eastern friends, but I've not exactly visited the countries.
...yet the article concludes with a remark that "we are confident (in North America and Northern Europe) that we have approached the optimum management of time". This amounts to a good deal of circular reasoning - this is can only be considered "efficient" if, as explained at the beginning, your goal is to fulfill as many tasks as possible.
But that view dismisses the cost that such detailed planning brings with it: it doesn't consider the increased wear from stress, and doesn't account for those achievements gained by following opportunities at happenstances that couldn't be planned for. It also misses the inherent efficiency of going with the flow by following tradition and customs, where you know what will happen without the need to build a detailed analysis for each step.
You can think of those costs as "externalities", goods that were lost because no one had them in mind when building the plan.
Maybe in the south they fulfil more tasks, but they were not planned in advance.
They're really talking about culture - mutual rules for deciding when a thing will occur, and when it has ended. Or dominant metaphors for time. A lot of these are dependent on material conditions; what is locally scarce?
In a place where gasoline and vehicles are scarce and people operate on thin margins, people expect long voyages to be infrequent, and the bus is not going to leave unless there are enough passengers. Otherwise the bus driver can't buy dinner that evening.
In a place where human labor is cheap, materials are expensive, and enforcement of contracts is sketchy, keeping people waiting while you assess their character may be preferable to making a hasty commitment.
Maybe not every difference is explainable this way but I think a lot of them are.
If alien anthropologists arrived, they might look at our space programs and conclude that we had a different conception of time. There's a strange obsession with the exact moment of launch, and time is measured as starting from a negative number up to that point. Time can be, and often is, started and stopped relative to that moment. Launches may have a published, scheduled time, but everyone expects it to be deferred until consensus is achieved that conditions are right. We are also careful that each launch be carefully timed to use an auspicious window, dependent on the planets around us and other cyclical conditions.
The alien anthropologist, ignorant of how his powerful ship even works, notes that he takes off whenever he wants to and just goes in a straight line to wherever he likes. He attributes the humans' odd practices to their different conception of time.
Me too. This is why it's so mind blowing to hear that other people perceive the world differently.
The dominant time perception in North-America / EU is linear: the work day is segmented and tasks and appointments are scheduled. Calendar apps and project management tools help us with this. But what if I wanted to take, say, the circular time persepctive? I'm not aware of any tools or apps that would support such a perspective.
Maybe one should think of ways to open our management culture to other time perspectives, maybe even enabling us to shift between the perpectives and unify them. Something like a 'multi-cultural project management tool.' I can imagine that this could have quite some impact in globalized economy, and maybe even could be the basis for a new management philosophy
When I started contracting and working from home, I found that I could not shake the association of the hours and what they mean. No matter how hard I tried.
If I started later than 9 or 10, I was 'lazy'. If I took the whole morning off and was working until 11pm it was 'a disaster of a day', even if I worked less hours. For some reason if I was working later than 6pm it seemed like something was wrong.
I have no idea how to reliably change the perception of time once it's ingrained. It's certainly a strange phenomenon.
Most of these things are the result of religious ritual and early 20th socialism efforts.
They are truly damaging to the human psyche and each individual should work to eradicate these fictional ideas from their being.
If you were a primitive agrarian, sometimes the cattle need to be tended to at midnight on Tuesday - sometimes fruits should be picked on Sunday morning - etc.
Beyond that is the notion that your "work" and you are somehow distinct and different. After 20+ years of being self-employed, I see this artificial distinction almost as a form of mental illness. You are you. There is no difference between 2pm Tuesday you and Saturday you.
To be slightly more precise and elaborate, historically the fixed work week and working hours became widespread with capitalism (monasteries and militaries had routine as well, but they never caused it to become so pervasive in society).
In capitalism, exact management of working time started because of a combination of two things: First, the owners of expensive machines wanted to have reliable schedules of when their human operators were present, so as to maximize the owners' profits. Second, the power relationship of capitalism made it possible for these owners to severely punish an employee who didn't show up on time, and the owners pushed this possibility to the breaking point (hence the backlash of socialism).
Nowadays, a similar dynamic also applies to most service jobs. The people running retail stores or call centres want their employees to reliably follow a schedule, so that the profit of the owners can be maximized. Power relationships are still such that most people working these kinds of jobs have little de facto choice but to comply.
So much for what happened historically. Now, an interesting question is whether this is inherent only of capitalism, or whether it may be inherent of economic systems more generally.
For example, if we envision a form of market socialism where firms compete in a market but are entirely controlled by workers through some democratic means, would we still adhere so strongly to fixed schedules?
In part, the self-interest of the employee suggests that our relationship with work schedules would relax.
On the other hand, it is now actually in the workers' self-interest to ensure that their machines are utilized as well as possible, and that retail stores are taken care of efficiently, and so on. So I would actually expect that work schedules would remain relatively rigid, at least in service oriented firms and physical industry.
Being able to rely on somebody else's schedule means you can be more efficient, and that's a powerful force of the market.
Even if the attitude to work schedules were relaxed somewhat under socialism, path dependence is a strong factor as well: now that most people are kind of used to 9 to 5 or similar, chances are that any change away from the status quo would be rather slow.
One of two things would happen: Those wishing to maximize profits would push the less dedicated out of the company, or there would be a gradual trend towards putting in minimal effort because everyone else is outputting less than you for the same pay (or you're making those with more seniority than you look bad).
In fact, we've already witnessed the second phenomena in socialist countries and in many unionized jobs.
At least as far as I know, there hasn't been a country-wide experiment with a setup like that, where employees actually have a self-motivated incentive to work harder. (Now that I think about it, that's really quite a terrible indictment of both socialism and capitalism as it's been tried so far!)
In a sense, early-phase startups are like that, and those seem to work quite well ;-)
The law-firm model is a bit like this as well, I suppose, and small boutique shops in creative fields.
Another example may be existing coops like Mondragon and many other smaller ones. Those are not in the headlines much, but they also seem to be doing well despite competition from firms that are run along more capitalist lines.
If you get, say, stationed on a submarine doing night missions, the group you'll mostly be socializing with suddenly gets off work around 7AM. The urge to keep to a 9-5 fades quickly.
I found that I did slowly gravitate to normal hours because of precisely this reason. My friends started having regular jobs and so I ended up having to adjust my working hours to that.
In fact, I was worse off because I didn't really realize I was conforming to normal work hours, but clients realized that they could approach me whenever they wanted, which was usually in the evening or the weekend.
It took me a while to learn how to not answer every email or phone call at odd times, and re-condition my clients.
Having non-work time simultaneously with the people you want to share your life with is a huge factor in working at the same time.
This obedience-training is the main point of school, certainly not developing creativity and initiative.
There are school-like places where children are free to do what they like. Free to play, free to fail. Check out Sudbury Valley School. It's an international movement. See the new book "Free to Learn".
For some of us (like me a few other subjects that I remember) the conforming game was never fun. To force someone to wake up and then to sync to an activity program, and then to sleep some programmed hours, and so on... it was necessary maybe, but I never recall it to be felt as "fun".
It presents individuals as being either past, present or future oriented. Apparently, the closer we are to the equator the more present-oriented we tend to be (because there are less seasonal changes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language#Idiosyncrasies
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.a...
Among the South Koreans I know some characteristics jump out
- The 빨리빨리 culture (quickly! quickly!). Do every labor activity, no matter how trivial, at the maximum possible tempo. Koreans coming to the U.S. frequently complain about how slow their interactions are with Americans (particularly cashiers). The idea of pacing yourself, running a marathon and not a sprint is a foreign idea.
- Everything stops for food. Fast food of course exists in Korea. But no matter what's going on, how critical it is, or how behind everybody is, my experience is that Koreans will drop everything during meal time and take a remarkably relaxed view of meal-time. This may have something to do with how many soups Koreans eat, but my American sensibility, of just powering through a garbage lunch as quickly as possible because it's getting in the way of my work day, had a hard time adjusting to this for years.
- Koreans tend to be perpetually tardy. On the waiting end, I've noticed that universally Koreans seem to be mildly irritated by the tardiness of their peers. On the tardy-party end the reasons for being tardy are complex, with about as many reasons why it's unavoidable as reasons why it could have been avoided.
- Planning group activities seems to be a group event rather than a leader-focused organizer's role. This means if a bunch of people get together to go do an activity, it means lots of waiting around until group consensus, and lots of questions from everybody if this or that scenario is agreeable to you ("sure", "I don't care", "I don't know", etc. are not acceptable answers, the consensus building requires your input). Then, much later than is necessary, and probably after a few internal rounds of "voting", a plan will suddenly crystallize and everybody will suddenly move into motion and execute. And the downside it seems like there's a lack of organization and planning for your day, on the up side, there's lots of variety.
With Americans it seems like a group will get together, everybody will ask for ideas, most people will say "whatever" or "I don't know", and eventually a leader will emerge who everybody follows for that day's activities. The consensus oriented activity planning Koreans do is a little maddening to me, even many many years later.
Some of this is rather recent. The 빨리빨리 culture in particular. Before the war, Koreans were generally regarded like Southerners in the U.S. are. Leisurely, taking their time, no reason to rush [1]. It seems that some of the characteristics above are from this older cultural attitude, but the quickly! quickly! culture seems to be the result of the reconstruction and industrialization boom.
1 - http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2012/06/koreas-bbali-bb...
This is actually a very healthy attitude. The best of both worlds would be to take your time with meals - there's really nothing wrong with having lunch and discussions with friends even for two hours - but plan accordingly. Don't schedule anything for two hours after lunch starts, and so on.
This is what a meeting looks like many times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYu_bGbZiiQ
Being on time does not mean being productive.
[EDIT: Comment to video]
When you schedule a meeting and one person takes pains to arrive on time and another person does not care whether they're late and shows up an hour later, that leaves the conscientious person sitting there twiddling their thumbs for an hour, whether they're in the U.S. or Italy or China.
I suppose it's more understandable in areas where transportation is unreliable, in which case it's hard for anybody to be consistently on time, but I have a hard time seeing how a culture in which no one is concerned with punctuality can be said to be merely laid-back, as opposed to plain lazy. It's possible to be both laid-back and punctual, after all.
Unfortunately, it is...
But what happens if one person arrived at 12:30 and the other at 12:40? Eventhough the meeting was at 12?? Are both jerks??
Minute accurate precision is a Western phenomena derived from the industrial revolution... where humans had to adapt to the machine...
in other cultures where the industrial revolution started later.... time is perceived more like a continuum... or a band.. so 12.. means anything beteween 12 - 12:30 Evening means around 6 or 7... and next week means never
But what happens if the same couple meets again and now the one that arrives later is the Other person?
I'm sure it is, but I have ever met anyone who I would describe using both of those words.
The attitude of "leaves the room in the middle, before the business is finished" may certainly be a problem. Being a Spaniard, I see the inherent value in Figure 4.5 "Spanish schedules: In theory, in reality". A day schedule would be seen as poor and aseptic without the "meets in bar" at the end. For us, those differences between what's scheduled and the actual sequence of events is where life happens. It's no wonder that the novel "Momo"'s setting was placed in Italy. [1]
Also, in the multi-active culture, the other person shouldn't be there waiting, idle, twiddling their thumbs; they're surely have plenty of other things that can take care of in the meantime. (In the modern world they could be conducting other businesses by phone or with their laptops, but those are still Western-thinking tools; other options could be to socialize with the people at the building, reading a book or merely enjoying the scenery or getting lost in their thoughts. When was the last time you planned for that?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_%28novel%29
edit: grammar
You are really being very disdainful of the (hypothetical) late person. I find that is a typical American attitude. Even in this completely theoretical discussion, you are assuming the person is late for a reason you find frivolous instead of being a receptive, empathetic human who knows that things don't always happen as planned.
I understand business meeting times. I understand showing up to class on time. I don't understand times for meeting up for pleasure (drinks, dinner, dates). I just don't.
First situation was someone was supposed to come in for an interview but didn't show and then emailed 15 minutes after the scheduled start time saying she had a family emergency and got flustered on the way to the office and decided she needed to take care of other things instead of come to the interview. We have no idea what happened, but the other members of my team immediately concluded that she had blown her chance and we wouldn't be asking her back in because she wasn't "professional".
The second time was arguing about that situation where if I had meetings and a family emergency came up the last thing on my mind would be canceling the meetings when the other people in the conversation said the first thing they would do is cancel the meetings.
It's an interesting juxtaposition to be sure.
Think at it this way: if you are at home expecting some friend to have dinner there in the evening, you'll be glad to have them arrive no matter when; any pre-scheduled time would be arbitrary, so letting them arrive whenever it's convenient is good for them and doesn't have any drawback for you. In that situation, it would be incredibly rude on your part to yell at them because you previously agreed that they'd be there at 7:30 but they arrived at 7:54 instead; I don't know about you, but that would be unthinkable here. (Of course if they arrived at 23:00 that would register as "not showing" during the evening, but that's beyond being late).
That kind of lax schedule shouldn't inconvenience you, because you're otherwise comfortable at home arranging all the details; and it can bring benefits for them that couldn't happen otherwise - they may want to stay fifteen more minutes having a coffee at a bistro, watching the sunset, for example; it would be a loss having to rush to your meeting merely because they know you're hardheaded about meeting timelines.
Of course that can be seen as "not efficient" in the "cram-as-much-things-to-do-as-you-can" sense of efficiency, but as explained in the article, that's not seen as a value on itself. And, if you find that having your friends enjoy the smell of a rose is less important than them arriving at an exact time, it speaks very poorly of you and your ability to find other things to do when unpredictable events happen.
IOW, non-responsive, and almost deliberately so.
Just because you have a long, coherent explanation doesn't mean it adds to the discussion.
It is. Northwestern even.
> a greater tolerance for jerks
Actually, one might very well argue that you are the jerk, in your own example. Come on, what's one hour? Just do something else while waiting for the person to arrive.
What are they doing for one hour that's so important that other people should wait on them - if I have a meeting at 10 and they aren't there, can I just leave to handle other work and show up at 12?
If they're late they probably have a reason for it (you might not think they have a good reason though, but who are you to judge that?) they're not doing it for the purpose of annoying you, even though you two might have a meeting you still aren't the centre of the world. So don't leave just to retaliate (because that is why you are talking about leaving and showing up even later) because that will accomplish nothing at all.
Once they arrive you can even tell them they're late, and they will apologize. Anger on the other hand will just leave you both miserable.
I don't know, it's slightly annoying when people are late, but I find even more annoying when people rant to no end about late people.
Also, one thing I'd observe is that there's a difference between social occasions and business. Even as an American, when my family says they're going to show up at 2pm, I don't sit there at 1:59 at the door tapping my foot. However, business is different; if you've mutually agreed on 2pm and you come in at 2:40 pm without having checked or communicated, there is a problem there in many cases. There may have been further scheduled events for 2:30 (odds are good you're meeting with someone who has lots of meetings, statistically), or whoknows what. The casual approach to time risks having three unrelated meetings that were scheduled to be separate trying to happen all at once.
Whether firm or casual time is abstractly "best" is a hard problem, but when it comes to business effectiveness I don't have a problem saying punctuality is a benefit to getting more stuff done. "What if I don't want more stuff done because even that is an American thing to say?" Well, surely we'd all rather then get our things done so we can hit the bar freely later? And it isn't an American truth that businesses really need to accomplish things to survive and thrive, it's the nature of the Universe we live in, where we must work for our sustenance, however distasteful you may find that.
On the face of it, I agree. However, I think this whole thread is neglecting an important dimension by only mentioning "the" time of the meeting. No one ever expects a person to arrive at the exact instant of the scheduled event. There's an interval implied by "the" time, and it's quite possible that the difference here is in cultural expectations regarding the size of the interval or its placement relative to the stated time (US Military culture, for example, seems to have an implied tolerance of -5 min / +0 min).
It may even be the case that your hypothetical second party thinks the first is a bit quirky for insistently describing the meeting as occurring at a particular time, when it is "obvious" to them that what is meant is "we'll meet this afternoon".
Edit: moving scare quotes ("the time" -> "the" time)
"Michigan Time — The tradition of starting every class, meeting or event 10 minutes late."
The way around this is for people to tell me to show up "around" 8pm or whenever.
I fully recognize that this is something peculiar to myself, and I would never begrudge anybody else for showing up at e.g. 2:04 for a 2pm meeting. But I would definitely apologize for being a few minutes late if I did the same.
It's neither an American truth nor the nature of the Universe, it's a story. Older than America (not the continent nor the people in it, but the idea), to be sure, but not that old. The necessity of work, indeed the celebration of it, is obviously interesting to discuss in the age of automation.
...in the West culture.
At what point does that become less reasonable than expecting other people to show up at the time they agreed to show up?
I really think it's very disrespectful.
2. The real world works asynchronously. Either if you are a jerk having no regard for other people's time, or you are a very punctual person getting out of your way to be on time for others (by coming earlier), there is wasted time to be expected. One can prepare for that and act like a functioning piece in a loosely coupled system, or to just blame others.
What you are suggesting, which might work in Spain, is that you schedule a meeting for 10am that might not start until 1230 and then, to be safe, you couldn't schedule another meeting until 330 or 4 and that might not start until 6pm.
That would be a really difficult thing to fold into the way Americans work if you want to get anything done, especially on a startup timeline. You don't have 3 months to talk to 20 potential investors if you are trying to raise money. You have to do that in a week.
My family is Bangladeshi. One of the characteristics of the culture is a total inability to be punctual. Its always drove my dad up the wall, even though he grew up there. So when I read articles like this, I just think of people like my dad--the linear time minorities in these places. Pacing around waiting for guests who show up at 10 for dinner scheduled for 8.
I have a hypothesis about the nature of this particular trait.
I wouldn't frown upon it if the person made it understands it's essentially a hypothetical statement about what one believes the end-result will be of changing a small yet pervasive dynamic of a culture.
It's essentially the same thing as, for example, arguing that the American lack of a social safety net is counterproductive on the whole.
I certainly believe so, but it could just as well take away the drive Americans are famous for and result in a complete collapse of the American empire.
Like, actually using words to describe reality. Danged useful. Triply so in the business world. A little more reliable than using words to describe a shared dreamlike version of reality.
When the agreed time for a meeting is arbitrary, it shouldn't really matter that the meeting is re-scheduled. It only causes problems if you have so many tasks in your agenda that you can't change the arbitrarily assigned time for the meeting - but if you're in that situation, perhaps your schedule is already too busy?
What would happen if you became ill? Or if bad weather made it impossible to arrive to the meeting? If you find valid the answer of "well, in that case some meetings can be re-scheduled or cancelled", then why would you not find that acceptable for all your planned tasks in normal circumstances as well?
If you're not going to hold to a schedule, why make a schedule at all? Why not just say "We'll talk sometime" and let it happen when it happens?
edit: And just because I'm not able to rearrange my schedule literally at the arbitrary whims of the person I'm meeting with doesn't mean that I'm too busy? It means that I have plans for later in the day, and not all plans are fluid. If I'm planning to get dinner with my fiancee at 6pm and you show up two hours late to a 1 hour meeting that was supposed to start at 4pm, is it my fault for having the indecency to schedule dinner with my family, or is it your fault for being two hours late?
I'm not trying to be combative, even though I know it reads that way. I just think it's a weird thing to say "if you can't rearrange your schedule, then probably you're too busy; if you can move one thing, why can't you move all things" and I'd be interested in having a discussion about that mode of thinking.
Real life is hard. When that situation presents itself, you'll have to decide what's more important at the moment. The dinner with your fiancee or the meeting? I do these kinds of decisions every single day. It requires patience and cojones.
Americans want to do it all to the detriment of their sanity and health. Just pick the most important thing and do it. Reschedule the meeting or the dinner. Whatever has the lowest priority.
Taking the example of CocaKoala: you schedule a meeting, that is supposed to last 1h, to 4pm. So the meeting would take place from 4pm to 5pm. Then you'd schedule to have dinner with your fiancée at 6pm. Well, has the meeting supposedly finished at 5pm, you can get on time to this dinner. BUT if the person you're meeting with decides to only show up ate 6pm, all your later appointments will be ruined! I would never wait 2h for someone, especially if I have other appointments. And if you hope that someone will wait for you all that time either that person is too much patient with you or doesn't have anything else to do...
Btw if you make an arrangement, it's your responsibility to show up on time! Is not about how busy you or the other person are, is about respect!!
Best regards ;)
Exactly! The comments in this thread are making that possibility look like an evil thing.
Think of how this article would have looked if we were comparing performance of applications or operating systems. Gone would be the deep explanations of "why" and the attempt to make all approaches equal but just a different mix of trade-offs.
Instead, the article would have found output metrics that could be compared to decide which techniques were superior.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028501...
It appears to be emergent turtles all the way down...
That's something you can learn by being involved in the north american corporate workforce.
When I took my very first job at mcdonalds I was told "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean."
That work ethic is very prominent in american culture.
If you're not working, you're not achieving your full potential. And that needs to stop.
Sketch out a new idea perhaps? Daydream? Read the paper? Or your favorite blog? It's not "wasted time".
All I am saying is it's not the end of the world that somebody is "late". And that having free time isn't a burden if you know what to do with it.
Except, who walked on the Moon, and who didn't?
And I can still gaze in rapture upon the rocky sphere held in the sky by chains of gravitation.
No wonder Americans stick to the imperial system.