Unseen Things Below
There are two things in our relatively recent history that have totally changed the American lifestyle. I reckon even you are affected by them more than you realize.
Scheduling
The first was the railroad. The railroad allowed us to travel further and go to more places in less time. More than that, it introduced the Time Table.
Overnight, we became a people conscious of precise TIME.
This was a brand new situation. With horse and buggy or a boat you set your own pace, arriving whenever you got there.
But if you missed a train, you couldn’t go where you wanted to go until the next train. The pace of life, and the stress of travel, tripled overnight.
Radio accelerated the pace even more. Life on the air was divided into precise time slots—15, 30, 60 minutes. Each announcement and show had to start at the precise time to avoid “dead air” on a station. One show had to stop for the next one to begin. Radio life was strictly regimented.
Listeners became conscious of time in everyday life—of having the radio (and later, television) tuned in time to listen to a favorite show. We learned to adapt our activities to a precise time schedule.
Again, this was a new phenomenon, though it’s something we take for granted today, 70 or 80 years later.
Today most people struggle to keep pace with the time tables enforced on us every day. Work, breaks, relaxation—everything is now subject to some sort of a time schedule.
Scheduling increases our daily stress levels more than we realize.
Personal Image
The other thing that radically changed our lives was photography—capturing what a person actually looks like and preserving it on film, instead of slowly painting a flattering portrait on canvas.
It is much harder to flatter a person in photography.
The movie industry made a science of making people look good in publicity photos, on posters, and larger than life on screen. They created “stars” out of greasepaint and hair gel. These stars became America’s heroes—people who looked good photographed.
Casual photographs showed up the differences between the visual glamor of Hollywood and the modest backyards of America. It made people (particularly women) discontent with the way most people had looked for hundreds of years.
Make-up and fine tailoring suddenly became daily necessities.
This went beyond dressing to match a particular popular style. This was a complete mind-shift. Nowadays, if you don’t look good all the time, you don’t feel good about yourself.
As photography and video have become more accessible, we have became more and more conscious of our personal image in public. We know we can be caught on film at any moment—and that photo can end up ANYWHERE—so we make a conscious effort to protect ourselves against unflattering shots.
Fashion consciousness takes up time and saps emotional energy that we could be giving to spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.