There are 6 main time zones that people life in.
2 where people focus on on the past
- Remember all of the good old times
- Family records
- Birthdays
- Good times
- Bad times
- Family rituals
2 where people focus on the present
- Hedonistic: live for pleasure and avoid pain
- Seek knowledge
- Seek sensation
- It doesn’t pay to plan
- My life is fated by my religion, my poverty, my conditions that I’m living under
2 where people focus on the future
- To resist temptation
- To work rather than play
- Depending on your religion life begins after the death of the mortal body
- To be future oriented you have to have trust that the things you do to prepare for the future will be carried out
- The closer you are to your family the more likely you are present oriented
Italy has a La Lega movement where they want to cut the country in half.
- They feel the top half of the country (the northern portion) does the majority of the work where the southern half is “lazy”
- They found in general the northern half of the country is future oriented where people in the south tend to be present or past oriented
Book: Geography of Time – Robert Levine
- Went around the world doing experiments on the pace of life
- How much time has elapsed when you do certain activities?
- In different cultures people do things at different paces
- You can identify cultures by their life pace
- Cities with the highest pace of life: men have the most coronary problems
We all begin life as present hedonists
- We want pleasure and we want to avoid pain
- He believes schooling takes present oriented people and makes them future oriented people
American children
- In America a child drops out of school every 9 seconds
- Study: By the time a boy is 21 years old, he’s spent 10,0000 hours playing video games alone
- Brains are being digitally rewired and they will never fit in a traditional analog classroom
- Its boring
- They control nothing
- Its passive
- Learning in school is all about the delay of gratification
All addictions are addictions of present hedonism
- Food
- Drugs
- Sex
- Gambling
- Etc
If kids are future oriented
- They understand that they should not smoke
- Understand they should not have sex
- Understand they should not do drugs
Present oriented kids
- Know the consequences but that knowledge never feeds back to change their behavior
We are under estimating the power of technology in re-wiring young people’s brains
USA Today study asked how busy Americans are
- 50% busier now than I was last year
- Sacrificed friends, family, and sleep for my success
- Supposed you had an 8th day
- They said “I would work harder to achieve more”
Sit Down Dinners
- 20 years ago only 60% of American families had sit-down family dinners
- 5 years ago 1 in 5 had sit-down dinners
- You can’t have family values if you don’t have family meals together
