"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk"
No Aeroplanes
Hello all. Thanks for stopping by and reading. This is the second of my series of seven emails that pick up on three of the most useful, counterintuitive or inspirational ideas from each chapter of my new book, You Are What You Don’t. Each lovingly delivered straight to your inbox every Friday.
Today it's the turn of chapter two: No Aeroplanes. As usual, you can catch up on last week, or read this week's ideas with more detail, ideas, stories and (exciting!) full references on youarewhatyoudont.co.uk.
If you like what you read, please share with your friends, neighbours and livestock. If you've got any questions or suggestions - simply reply to this email.
Without further faffing, let's get on with the fast-walking, hitch-hiking awe-inspiring show.
#4: Irishmen walk faster than Indonesians – but are they happier?
Unfortunately, ever since the eighteenth century, when clocks were first used to quantify labour and Benjamin Franklin foolishly equated time with money, we've been increasingly anxious about how we spend ours. It's perverse, but rather than leading to increased feelings of comfort and security, a rising economy makes us feel harried and time-poor.
As the economy grows, so do wages, making workers' time more valuable, and the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems and the more anxious people are to use it most profitably.
Psychologists Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan found that pedestrians in Ireland, Germany and Japan walk significantly faster than those in Mexico, Indonesia and Jordan. The bad news is that faster walkers also feel more stress and have more stress-related physical problems, such as coronary heart disease.
Read the full story to find out how being more generous with your time - and perhaps quitting flying - can help stave off the problems of stressful modernity.
#5: 1 in 10 cars stop to pick up hitch-hikers - better than waiting for a bus!
There don't seem to be so many studies done on hitch-hiking these days, but comparing studies from 1975 and 2009 it seems that (among female hitch-hikers in France at least) a car is as likely to stop now as 45 years ago: about 10% of the time.
The 1975 paper found that figure dropped to about 7% for men (if they make eye contact). It seems that male drivers will stop twice as often as female and that blonde women who accentuate their bust size are most likely of all to be given a lift – a C cup can boost a woman's chances with male drivers to almost 25%.
Superficial, but interesting. Read the full post to find out what men can do to boost their chances (apart from travelling with a woman) - and how I beat the National Express hitch-hiking to Edinburgh. Funktastic!
#6: TV adverts are awesome
That's not a sentence I ever thought I'd publish! But it's true - TV adverts are awesome, or they can be. And when they're awesome, they can help heal our time-harried sense of modernity - the problem of fast-walking Irishmen having heart attacks.
According to psychologists Rudd and Aaker, when you feel under time-pressure you are:
less likely to help someone in distress or volunteer to help out in your community;
more likely to be impatient, eat unhealthy fast food, suffer from headaches and have low life satisfaction.
Boo to time-pressure, basically.
But psychologists speculate that time-expanding experiences of awe could therefore alleviate such symptoms of time-pressed modernity. In one experiment, by psychologists at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota found that something as simple as an awe-inspiring TV advert could expand our perception of time, making us feel less impatient, less materialistic and more satisfied with life.
Read the rest of the story for more about awe and find out what happened when awe struck in the middle of a No Aeroplanes pilgimage through a deciduous copse in Hampshire.
BOOM. That's all I've got for this week, folks. If you found something interesting, slather it around the internet like compost on the fields of ideas. If you didn't, send me an email with your final demands.
See you out there!
David