There's a pretty clear pattern in other words, things I've started and not finished. The same thing could be seen in my academic work. I have folders full of documents that I have begun writing and never finished. And likewise with creative writing, I start writing stories, developing characters, and then just abandon them and move on to something else.
I've always envied people who throw themselves into things with full attention and focus, and keep going with that thing until it's done to the best of their ability. Instead I flit like a butterfly from one thing to the next, never fully paying attention to the thing at hand because my mind is all over the place. Yesterday in one of my tutorials (I teach small groups of first year undergraduates) we were discussing the research process. One of the things they have to do is interview a member of staff about their research. They were expressing surprise at how specific you have to get at the PhD level of research and saying that they'd have a hard time being that focused on something so specific. I was thinking: "no kidding!" I've often wondered if it actually takes that first kind of person, the really focused, detail-oriented type to do a PhD, or if there is in fact room for the dabbler type like me. One thing that I find heartening in this respect though is the pace at which I move. In other words, slowly (except when shooting down a zip line and busting up my knee). I think the effect of the fact that I move slowly is that things seem to go by really fast. Therefore, the initially interminable-seeming 3-4 years of a PhD actually will not seem that long to me. Especially since there are only two years left! I think it's going to go by really fast and in that respect, hopefully I won't significantly lose focus again over the course of that time (I've already done it once).
I think there are certain time biases built into our society. For instance, if you are an early riser and get to work early in the morning, that gets respect. Sleeping late is seen to be lazy, even if the person is more of a night person and likes to work late into the quiet of the night. There are also certain paces at which we are meant to do things, which are also affected by culture, social class etc. Like having children for instance, recently there was a girl of 10 who had a baby much to the shock of the British middle class, to which 30 is probably a pretty average age for procreating, which would be seen as shocking to the Roma people to which the 10-year-old girl belonged.
On the subject of socio-cultural perceptions of time, RSA has made a nice little video of a book written about this:
One of the articles I was going to post regarding women was about women in the Netherlands and their attitude towards work. In short, rather than wishing to compete at a level with men, and to relentlessly climb the career ladder, they valued being able to work, but in a more casual way, so that they could still invest much of their time into their lives outside work, with friends and family. The article compared this attitude with a more North American attitude wherein women are in fierce competition with their male counterparts and wish to be treated in the same way and climb the career ladder in the same way too. This modern expression of feminism as it were has the flipside of being potentially really hard on women to the extent that many may not wish to participate in careers to this level and would prefer a more flexible and balanced, or slower-paced life. There is so much pressure to be the superwoman with a high-flying career as well as a perfect homelife, perfect body, perfect children, perfect everything...
I think this TV ad sums up the attitude pretty well:
We are being told all kinds of things by society all the time. Not just by advertising on TV, but also through our peer groups, our families, through our work colleagues, through products that are created (ready meals for busy families anyone?), through the options that are offered to us... We internalize so many of these messages without even noticing them, and start to think we have to be certain ways. In many cases, there are good reasons for the messages society gives us, like the general social norm that you do not hurt other people. Such norms mean that society functions reasonably well and that people who don't conform can be punished. However, many of the messages we get are much more arbitrary, perhaps unnecessary, and serving the aims of particular sectors or members of society. Is it possible to decipher all the messages we get from society and then make critical choices about them? Is it necessary? And, how do we know how many of the messages we've received have been internalised so that we now think they are ours, part of ourselves? Indeed, do we have selves outside of the messages we've absorbed? What does it mean to be 'authentic'? Does it mean that we've confronted some of these societal norms and decided to fight back against them? Or are we authentic regardless, simply through having either accepted or rejected various societal norms?