Tomorrow's People

by Susan Greenfield

  But strangely, it seems that time is not as high on the agenda as better living conditions, more exciting work, more stimulating recreation and more freedom. A sense of fulfilment can be gained through work as much as, or perhaps even more than, through leisure activities. Moreover, being busy carries high status. How often do professional folk, on meeting, exchange exasperated sighs of fatigue and helpless head-shakes at the dizziness of their schedules? Yet rarely does anyone (me included) confess to taking any counter-measures. The faster that new emails push those of a few minutes earlier up and off the screen, the more your cell phone sings out its tinny call sign, the more important you must be.

  This premium we place on status might explain the current tendency to exchange leisure for a higher standard of living, even though we have less time to enjoy it. Just reflect for a moment on the amazing statistic that if productivity gains were translated directly and completely into free time, we would have to work only half the year – but would have a standard of living closer to 1949 than 1998. Until the 1940s unions negotiated for shorter working hours; now their biggest concerns are salary and security.

  Some voices in the wilderness may be starting to plead for us to stop devaluing free time, claiming that work is a means to an end not an end in itself. But is this maxim really robust for the years ahead? After all, if it is human nature to need status, a sense of self and self-fulfilment, then work will meet those needs more obviously and easily than leisure. Perhaps leisure time, because it is down to you to spend as you wish, sneakily forces you to question what you are and what your life is all about. In the old days there were hobbies. The labouring classes had clearly demarcated slabs of time away from the coalface or assembly line: traditionally, racing pigeons, allotments and sport led to a sense of identity, skill, fulfilment and pride that would not otherwise have been generated from monotonous and hard daily grind, which effectively made one operative the same as the next. But now, given a world of physical ease and sensual gratification, of freedom from drudgery and pain, a cyber-world of instant information and fantasy, what will you do with the nooks and crannies of free time opening up within your life-narrative into a lengthy old age?

  One ‘solution’ will be to blur the distinction between work and play, and by blending them much more preserve the all-important element of status. According to findings from Penn State University, free time in the USA is up from thirty-five hours a week in 1965 to forty. But we tend to underestimate our periods of leisure since free time is now so fragmented: some twenty-five hours is taken during the working week, from Monday to Friday. Meanwhile, the weekend has ‘simply become an extension of the week’, concludes John Robinson, coauthor of the ‘Americans’ Use of Time' study. Increasingly our lives, and those of our children, are programmed – so leisure just doesn't feel like leisure. Surveys show that already we feel less and less free, and more pressed for time. Cell phones and laptops extend the working day and increase the workload, rather than compressing it. Leisure is so structured and constrained that it is no longer the relaxing alternative to work – for example, a gym in the USA now opens at 4.30 a.m. to accommodate those who want to work hard and keep fit, and thus have to cut down on that most indolent and sensual of activities, sleep. Increasingly we are storing up leisure time for old age but, as we have just seen, the future seems to hold the promise, or threat, of an old age that is a far cry from the ‘pipe and slippers’ retirement of the mid 20th century.

  In the previous century, for most of society, work enabled you to eat whilst you had fun and found fulfilment in activities such as going down the pub, playing sport or going to the cinema. Now the ideal workplace offers both fun and fulfilment just as readily as the home offers a place to work. A reduced working week of thirty-two hours may well increase leisure time to sixty-four hours, but we are no longer private; unless you take extreme and unusual measures you remain available 24/7. ‘The cell phone gives me the freedom to play golf, but it also means that I can be interrupted as well. It's a necessary evil of an ever busier world we live in,’ explains one 53-year-old car dealer.

  The blurred line between work and leisure, then, is both positive and negative. Yet the habit is embedded in our culture to fill time, with work or leisure – we must be emphatically doing something, accruing status or seeking oblivion as a sensory sponge. Professor Robert Levine writes in A Geography of Time: ‘The idea of doing nothing is so foreign to us. Clearly, in the US, doing nothing is bad. People sitting and staring – there's just something wrong with that.’

  The problem that we have with sitting and doing nothing at all, not even indulging in a hobby, might be because such vegetation holds no status or sense of achievement at all. We already prefer, it seems, an endless chain of homogeneous waking hours where work and play merge, and we can perhaps sublimate the frightening question of who or what we are that would otherwise be posed by stretches of unstructured time. Until recently, the brute needs of survival constrained how long we could spend in pipe-and-slippers mode in any case. And we have made our priorities, so far, such that truly free time is minimized. But what if the automated cyber-future denies us our work, and offers us no alternative to leisure?

  One possibility is that we will choose to ‘go real’, like the ‘real room’ in the future home in Chapter 2. Because we will be so unused to low-tech personal interactions such as having a gossip face to face, or going for a walk together, a visit to a ‘family interactive sports and entertainment centre’ might be an attractive novelty. At Mount Florida in Broward County, like CenterParcs in the UK, there is an area enclosed under a dome – in this case some 800,000 square feet. Here the ‘leisure-maker’ can ski, skate, toboggan, hang-glide, rock climb and body surf, as well as indulging in a movie, shopping, eating, walking through an aquarium and so on.

  The innovative feature at Mount Florida, however, is a personal video-camera strapped to your head, which enables you to relive your experience and to keep a record of it, and your personal profile, at the centre. The intriguing question, though, is this: which experience would be the most valued? On the face of it, the video would be little more than the beach snapshots of yesteryear or today's home video. But a worrying feature is the extent to which you are living on film.

  I once went to a wedding where, after the ceremony, we were all left in the hot-oven air outside the church whilst the bride and groom went through the whole ritual again – just so that a benighted relative could capture them in close-up on video. It seemed to me, as I stood in the unforgiving glare of the noon sun fantasizing about a cold, fizzing glass of champagne, that the marriage ceremony had really taken place in order to make the video, as opposed to the other way around. As the sweat trickled down my back the bizarre thought took hold that it was the record that was the all-important goal, not the wedding experience itself.

  Could it be, then, that in the future we will be so used to living life through the screen, so used to replays and freeze-frames, to editing and air brushing, to mingling the virtual and the real, to experiencing heightened colour and sound and even smell, as well as explanatory commentary, that the moment-to-moment activity in the real world will pale, literally, by comparison? An alternative, but equal, deterrent to ‘real’ activity could be that we become so unused to the physical interaction of our bodies with the outside world that the whole experience would be rather frightening and too intimate – a little as killing, skinning and butchering a rabbit for the pot was second nature to our ancestors but would be ‘too much’ for many people today. Direct stimulation of the senses – wine, women and song – has always offered a way of spending precious free time. But the new technologies are changing the degree to which we wish to be stimulated, and offer alternative cyber-stimulation.

  And as well as second-hand stimulation there is the prospect of a completely second-hand life. Watching other people, fictional or real, is, of course, nothing new. Our favourite activity is currently watching TV, for an average of four hours a day,
although a trip to the cinema still holds entertainment value – the whole experience of going to a film contributes to a more complete escape from reality. Julie Taymor, director of the film Frida, draws an analogy between watching a video at home, compared to a visit to the cinema, and the experience of praying at home, compared to going to a place of worship. She argues that people like ritual and awe, structure and comfort in the face of chaos. And the home-bound internet doesn't awe in the same way as the cinema, just as the immediacy of the human voice, laden with innuendo, has so much more impact than email. The world wide web is ‘too safe, too anonymous and too antiseptic’; we are attracted to the big screen because: ‘We want to be touched emotionally, be viscerally moved, perhaps have our minds challenged, or at best blown. We travel to a different place when we enter the world of the storyteller. Some call it escape; some call it experience.’

  Live events, or even being part of a cinema audience, heighten sensations but technology may change all that, as it will our expectations, habits and needs; in the future, such intense stimulation could be beamed from the walls of your own home. Take watching sport as a particularly good example. Mark Leyner, a novelist and screenwriter from New Jersey, USA, reflects on the endless need to spectate: sport especially offers one of the last places where the improvisational and the unexpected occur. However, he regards as ‘relics of the past’ the ‘self-aggrandizing preening of the ringside celebrity and the self-annulling ecstasy of the anonymous face-painted fan’ – in short, simply being there. Already some of those attending sports events, most usually in the USA, watch Jumbotron screens, suggesting that ‘being there’ is not the top priority nor indeed the sole reason for watching. Leyner thinks, contrary to the view that we like being in a seething mass of sweaty humanity, that there will be no valid reason to attend live sports events ‘except for the opportunity to begrudgingly share cheese-drenched nachos with complete strangers or stand in line and chat with other people who also have to urinate badly’.

  Rather, the appeal of cyber-intimacy and the option to control sensory intensity will outweigh the first-hand experience. There will probably be an increase in the interfacing of real, physical sports and the cyber-world: the next generation could have the opportunity to compete with top-level athletes on computer games. At the same time there are already a surprising number of spectators of networked computer games, and this trend can only continue to grow. Changes in work practices, the dominance of IT and the rise of robots will also reduce our personal risk, and perhaps therefore place emphasis not on feelings, raw sensations as such, but on thoughts; computer-enhanced TV will zoom in on your particular curiosities and predilections, even as personal and bizarre as an edit that highlights the times when ‘players groom themselves and spit’, to take Leyner's example. Data-mining will pervade all aspects of our lives, even our leisure and pleasure; as a result, the appeal of a world that caters for your desires and is under your control, although second hand, will be greater than that of the first-hand press of a real world that won't comply with your personal dictates. We can take this idea to extremes, and hazard that in the future each of us will have our own mix of programmes tailored to our interests and proclivities. ‘Real’ behaviour will be seen as too messy, antisocial, unhealthy and time-wasting. Instead, all leisure could be conducted on the couch.

  Of course quite the opposite may occur, as a reaction to the cyber-world, and very dangerous activities may become popular. For example, as well as the established means of risking life and limb in air, water, mountains and caves, by white-water rafting, jumping from planes and so on, futurologist Ian Pearson predicts that we will see a rise in new high-tech, high-risk sports such as ‘zorbing’, whereby you roll down a hill anchored in an inflatable sphere. However, the future of these sports may well depend on wider lifestyle factors.

  Usually, leisure activity offers a counter-balance to what we have been doing most frequently and most recently. If we have been sedentary, working or studying alone, sleeping well and perhaps leading a monotonous, routine life for a few days, then the appeal of stimulation is obvious – be it white-water rafting, dancing or playing sport, or at least watching it. On the other hand, the excessive stress, constant vigilance and rapid decision-making that characterize many modern jobs tend to steer us towards ‘chilling out’, reducing stimulation in the immediate environment and slowing down the pace of living. For example, a Stress Reduction Center in New Jersey, USA, offers ‘a little bubble of calm in the craziness of a mall’. For $10 you can enter a tinted-glass booth and sink into an ergonomic lounge chair. A virtual bombardment then follows – the sights and sounds of a tropical rain forest, which is supposed to induce brain-wave activity conducive to pleasant, dream-like visions, as time-out from the chaos of the street.

  This centre is the latest in a long line of environments, albeit particularly small and synthetic in this case, that offer a way of manipulating your mindset by a wholesale manipulation of the input to your brain. The same net feeling of overall relaxation, however, could be just as readily induced by being on a mountain. I have long been intrigued as to what net brain state generates that final feeling, common to both situations. Similarly, what common brain state generates the overall feeling of ‘joy’ that can be induced by such otherwise disparate phenomena as downhill-skiing, orgasm, fast dancing, or bungee-jumping?

  If we knew more about the configuration of working neuronal assemblies that click into a particular pattern across the brain corresponding to such net common feelings, although derived from different routes, then clearly we could understand why, for example, certain drugs such as Prozac work as they do. Prozac manipulates the very same transmitter system, serotonin, that is rapidly changed when your perceived status changes in a group. To reiterate an important point, however: the molecules of serotonin do not have high status or happiness locked away inside them. The big question is how drugs such as Prozac transform the global brain landscape, and how that landscape translates into an emotion.

  Drugs change emotions directly. Already the burgeoning drug culture is offering a route away from one's problems into a temporary oblivion. As I write this, the UK is teetering on the edge of decriminalizing cannabis, perhaps even legitimizing it completely. Instead of coming to terms with, if not circumventing, the difficulties of life, we increasingly seek the chemical equivalent of shutting our eyes and putting our hands over our ears; surely we will soon be living in a society of under-fulfilled, glassy-eyed zombies ripe for control by a minority, like the consumers of the happiness drug ‘soma’ in Huxley's Brave New World.

  Drugs are a sledgehammer means of reconfiguring working brain connections more dramatically than the far more subtle manipulation of the environment through the experiences of daily life. The use of drugs might therefore offer for many a more direct and efficient route to bring about a counter-balance to their work, or provide a substitute in its absence, by offering excitement or relaxation. Everyone knows that different drugs can achieve either of these ends: alcohol, cannabis, benzodiazepines, morphine and its derivative heroin are all depressants of the activity of the central nervous system. Amphetamine, ecstasy, caffeine and cocaine have an opposite, stimulant effect.

  Note that in the list above I have purposefully interleaved drugs that are both prescribed and proscribed, and indeed which vary enormously in their potency and potential danger, in order to focus instead on the type of effect that they have on the brain. Although all these drugs work to different extents and their precise biochemical action varies, their action on the brain results in either of two types of pattern across the brain. We have yet to discover what the actual patterns of connections are that relate to stimulation and relaxation respectively, but once we do know – perhaps thanks to advanced imaging techniques – then it may be possible to drive the brain into that precise state with certain types of direct brain stimulation, or even using highly specific external software comprised of appropriate rhythms, shapes and colours. Although
it would probably not be feasible to implant a memory or idea into the brain, it might eventually be possible to identify the more basic and generic configurations that underscore a particular human emotion – the final common pattern of connections driven by a smile, a drug, a song, a dive or a jump. Feelings could then be manipulated directly, and, most significantly, remotely – not just by you but by someone else.

  But even in Brave New World the citizens worked. What about the real future? We have seen that IT is only now coming of age, and bringing with it completely different systems of computation, in the form of silicon-carbon hybrids as well as quantum computers, which will challenge any secrecy or privacy that we thought we might still have had. Accordingly, IT will transform the workplace, the workforce and the manner of work. One scenario, as we have seen, would be that the vast majority feel so anxious about keeping up with the just-in-time-skills mentality that they seek solace in direct chemical comfort or some other activity, say the second-hand narrative of a fictional or real screen-based hero, that distracts from a sense of inadequacy.

  Alternatively – as Huxley in the mid 20th century could never have foreseen – sophisticated and pervasive automation could free from work the many who are not highly trained technocrats; but the long hours with nothing specific to do could pass very slowly, unless one had a goal, a sense of purpose. Again, powerful stimulation of the senses, either with drugs or with IT, might offer some distraction, but not the sense of status and fulfilment that seems so important to the human condition.