The Semiotics of Urgency
A cultural theory & brain science exploration of why we are always in such a damn hurry.
Bee Branch : Have you ever heard that the brain is like a discounting mechanism? Say someone gives you a present and it's a diamond necklace and you open it and you love it. You're all happy at first, and then the next day it still makes you happy, but a little less so. A year later, you see the necklace and you think, "Oh, that old thing."
And do you know why your brain discounts things? It's for survival. You need to be prepared for new experiences because they could signal danger. Wouldn't it be great if we could reset that, since there aren't a lot of saber-tooth tigers jumping out at us? Seems like a design flaw that our brain's default settings signal danger and survival, instead of something like joy, or appreciation. - Where Did You Go Bernadette? (Movies)
We seem to always be in a rush in our society. From driving our children to school to ensuring we get that thing our boss wants on his desk by noon — expediency seems to be such a normal part of our identity and world that we think it’s who we are. From fast food to fast forwarding on our televisions we are inundated with opportunities to never live in the moment. But, we were never meant to live in a state of emergency.
The need to be in a state of emergency was a gift given to us by evolution. When a threat much larger than us appears in our environment, a host of neurochemicals communicate with one another to get our bodies ready to move away from the threat. It is about readiness, biological movement, and using our cognitive resources that leads to an extremely limited form of awareness and focus. Ultimately, urgency leads to being closed off from new opportunities.
So, what happens when a whole culture defines success through the lens of reifying urgency?
We are always in a hurry because we’ve made it the normal way to be in our culture. In fact, we tend to become impatient if something we order doesn’t arrive when it says it should. This makes it extremely difficult to be open, flexible, and/or curious. In fact, it doesn’t allow us to be any of those things.
We justify this spirit of urgency by judging and becoming critical of slow people, slow processes, and slow things. We either avoid them or attack them when we are forced to experience them in our lives. We don’t like contemplative practices unless it fits into our busy lives — which is, ironically, counterproductive to what meditation and other related practices represent.
We think of urgency as a resource that we should have complete unedited access to. If we perceive urgency as a resource or strategy to use to get what we want, then it means we have to continuously be in a perpetual state of an ongoing emergency. We justify urgency in our daily lives by accepting the normative messages around us.
In a state of emergency, we tend to relate to situations, relationships, and everything in between as something to get through. We cannot simultaneously live in a state of expediency and a state of calm. Being fully present becomes a myth we strive for, rather than a possible outcome.
We justify the presence of drastic extremes in our lives by romanticizing them through their synonyms - such as determination, priorities, tenacity, or determination.
However, determination does not require emergency thinking to get things done.
Determination is simply the ability to use our focus in a singular direction to achieve the goals we desire. In fact, urgency can mess up the trajectory of our path if we rely on emergency thinking. The same is true of tenacity or any other idea that we use to justify a sense of overall expediency.
If we mediate all of our goals with uncritical velocity we simply create a fast journey without enjoyment. American school systems reward students when they turn in something ‘on time’, or even early. However, if deadlines are not adhered to, students’ behaviors are vilified by teachers and parents.
Notice that we get conditioned to want this experience of praise by making other behaviors unacceptable in educational contexts. We praise students for being quick or on time — but, never ‘late’. Late is a very relative term when understood universally. It depends upon the context that ends up defining whether something has arrived when we expect it to.
Urgency relies both on time and expectation.
Another element of living in a state of fear-response is that sometimes we can live through the fears of others. The tendency though is to think that the ‘others’ fears that we can experience is just through other humans — but, in reality, we can experience urgency through cultural values.
If a culture has adopted a mindset toward urgency, then we can appropriate this perception filter and think it’s the normal way to be. Keep in mind, that a state of emotional emergency is the assumption that there is always a threat in our world we need to either avoid, fight against, or become fully immobilized. Living in a biological state of emergency and thinking it’s normal (because of how our culture rewards us for it) is only bound to wreak health-based havoc for anyone.
If we always think we’re out of time and see time as part of an overall threat, we could never be present with those we love, we can never truly be emotionally engaged, or even know how to truly use all of our skills to further our situations.
In short, if we fear time, we can never be in the moment. On top of this, urgency forces us into selective attention. This is a psychological method we can use either positively or negatively. Selective attention as it’s connected to the emotional experiences related to urgency (i.e. fear, anxiety, and stress), also come with anger and competitiveness.
Meaning, when we live in an ongoing state of thinking things need to happen right this moment, we think we’re going to lose something we want — so we also live in a multitude of other experiences — like scarcity.
We chase time only to lose it. We know it’s not the best way to live, but when we get trained in almost every part of our society to think we are always lacking something (i.e. time) then we try anything to get it back.
A fear of running out of time also influences how we make decisions. Research has shown that scarcity thinking creates an ongoing habit of impulsivity (which can lead to destructive behaviors). Urgency ensures we never think through our choices. We end up justifying bad decisions as environmental rather than personal.
Following omission of an expected reward, high-urgency subjects are more frustrated and display greater impulsive responding compared to low-urgency subjects. This task has also been used in rats to investigate the neurobiology of negative urgency.
Converging evidence now indicates that a neural system involving interconnections between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala may play a key role in individual differences in negative urgency. This work may inform prevention scientists and practitioners implementing drug abuse prevention and treatment interventions.
If we don’t alter this culture of worshipping urgency, we could end up creating a culture of negative addictive behaviors. This means we need to reduce rewards that are aligned with scarcity, competitiveness, and militant deadlines. If we don’t, then we have to honestly be responsible about perpetuating mental health stressors, drug addiction, and other unhelpful choices that emerge from systematizing a society that looks up to people who can’t operate without deadline thinking.
We need to secularize these overdriven, overspent, and overanxious work and life cultures filled with unmerited martyrs that we’ve come to measure our self-worth and success by.
Slowing down. Appreciating others. Appreciating the nature of experience. These are ways in which we all can participate in reclaiming our need to embrace a more poetic existence. But, this also can seem a bit trite. If we continue the narrative that it’s normal to be in a consistent state of perpetual emergency, it can lead to neuroticism. Not, just individually, but culturally. Meaning, we can end up praising everyone from presidents to our bosses for performing socially acceptable neuroticism.
However, the next step to personal adoption of romanticizing the moment is to then have a direct hand in creating cultures that also manifest communities across society that demand a new way of being self-reflective. One practical way is to develop an ongoing set of socially discursive practices that upset the current identity-rewarded paradigms we think are normal in our society.
We need to begin rewarding a society where time is not perceived as an enemy and release us from the addiction of seeing humans as machines who simply produce. We need to be psychological advocates of meaning, purpose & joy that seem to be victim of time-constrained worldviews.