I am not surprised to surprise myself by how much life rhythms have accelerated and become “professional” in recent years. Even in a cultural context like Italy’s—where compared to Northern Europe a more relational and spontaneous attitude persists—an impulse toward planning and efficiency has spread.
Technology usage has become strikingly pervasive in both private and productive spheres. The wealth of information and communication allows us to evaluate everything and keep everything under control, increasing the pressure and expectations we perceive from the social environment around us and that we impose upon ourselves.
Our mindset is changing, as is the speed with which we do things. With the increase of external stimuli, we feel we have less time to carry out tasks; the rise of perceived standards for how they must be done induces us to greater tension and focus in executing them. The American technological dream of making our daily and working life maximally productive, efficient, and professional seems to bear its fruits.
If this is the current state of affairs, it is worthwhile to deeply understand what each of us is gaining, and what we are instead losing or at least neglecting in this phase of development of our modern era (the “hyper-modernity”). To move forward in reflection, I draw from a recent experience staying at a nice hotel in Rimini, for short stays during my teachings at the Alma Mater in that location.
It is a high-comfort environment (modern, clean, orderly, comfortable in furniture) with a service not only punctual and efficient, but also generous in quality (rarely do I have better breakfasts…). Yet, I tell myself, something is missing—namely, the human warmth of those serving me: riding the wave of the cult of efficiency (to which I myself contribute), it becomes harder to catch someone’s gaze, to enter into a moment of attunement, to exchange an extra word, to emancipate from a perceived sense of tension and pressure. Focused on doing things quickly, impeccably, by protocol, we sometimes neglect the importance of relaxing, breathing, opening ourselves to a restoring smile.
By infusing human relationality with professional and “transactional” traits, we risk making it colder and more arid—i.e. less able to nourish us deeply. If it is true that our soul is constantly seeking connection, authenticity, naturalness and calm, the dominant culture of the current historical conjuncture instead exalts the thrill of individual performance and collective efficiency.
It makes it harder for us to devote genuine attention to human relationships, as well as to those with the broader (social and natural) environment that surrounds us. I believe Life is trying to teach us something through all of this—inviting us to a deeper reflection on the need to mature our level of awareness. We need to ask ourselves in exactly what ways the push toward efficiency is improving the quality of our doing and of our feeling, and how it can be put at the service of a life project that is intimately satisfying, authentic, beneficial to all.
At the same time, we might begin to let go of excesses, recovering moments of gratuitous quality for ourselves, for those with whom we relate, and for the organizations to which we belong. It may be greatly helpful—and perhaps inevitable—to lift our gaze beyond Western and Westernized societies, contaminating our mentality with that of other cultures around the world.