Is There a Natural Pace of Living for Human Beings?

I’ve been retired for about five years now, and I’m very much enjoying life at a different pace. When I was working full time, I was usually moving so quickly from one event to the next that I had little time to think about what was going on. I shifted gears like a Formula One driver—into one curve, out of another, flat out in the straightaway for as long as it lasted, then back into another curve. Don’t get me wrong: I liked my job and believed that my work was useful and important. But for the past few years I’ve been able to read, think, volunteer, work on the house and in the garden, play music, even write a little at a pace that feels right. I’m also with my family and friends instead of waving to them from my car as I tear off down the road.

I’ve often wondered if this pace feels right because it is closer to what may be the natural pace of the human species. One reason to think that there is a natural pace is that all known nomadic hunter-gatherer groups seemed to live their lives at the same, relatively leisurely pace (except of course when the men were chasing prey).

Hunter-gatherers “worked” when they had to—hunting, gathering, making tools and shelters—but were not, of course, driven to pile up a huge stash of nuts and tubers for future use. If you’re nomadic, it makes no sense to acquire stuff you have to lug from place to place. When they had enough for their immediate needs, they stopped “working.” Consequently, they had time to do the kinds of things we all like to do: relax with friends and family, tell stories, and have fun. The work of survival was important, of course, but it was only one aspect of the foraging life (c.f. Marshall, 1976, Turnbull, 1961, Tonkinson, 1978). Indeed, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins calls hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society,” not because they had a lot of stuff but because they had a lot of leisure (Sahlins, 1974).

Does that mean that the hundreds of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer life created within the Homo sapiens genome a pace of living that is connected to physical and psychological well-being—a natural pace? Some scholars would probably argue against this idea. Can’t we adapt to just about any set of conditions? Aren’t we the “most adaptable species” on Earth? Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, thinks we are: “The evolution of the brain is the most obvious example of how we evolve to adapt ... the capacity to adjust is itself an evolved characteristic” (quoted in Massey, 2013).

Certainly, human beings have adapted not only to widely divergent environments—deserts, savannahs, jungles, and the frozen north—but also to changing climates over the millennia. However, the pace of living and the relationship between the work of survival and the other aspects of social and family life in a band are surprisingly similar in the hunter-gatherer societies we know about, regardless of the environment they live in.

For eons, the tempi and rhythms of human life were matched to natural processes—to seasons, the migrations of animals, the growth of plants. Today, we live in a world that is whizzing by, and in such a world it’s hard to find a pace that balances work with family, friends, and fun. In an online article, Sahlins writes, “To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times” (Sahlins, 2002).

One of the most profound consequences of an ever-accelerating pace is that we are forced to make decisions on the fly. There is little time for contemplation, deliberation, discussion. Yet these are the components of the decision-making process human beings developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Foraging peoples make decisions as a group, and only after much conversation and discussion.

Is the accelerated pace of modern life the work of our old friend (and nemesis) the neocortex? Is it just another unintended consequence? Do our minds override messages from the rest of the organism—stress, anxiety, uncertainty, ulcers, and heart attacks—so that we can whiz along with the world, hustling from meeting to meeting, checking our emails, texts, and tweets every few minutes, shifting gears several times a day? Is our attempt to bridge the gap between our unlimited wants and our means indeed a “tragedy of modern times”?