The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

With Chapter 4, Comer moves to Part 2 of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, in which he devotes his attention to solutions. As the chapter title indicates, he immediately sets out to debunk the notion behind the common complaint by over-busy people: Namely, that what we really need is more time to get things done.

Most people afflicted by the disease of hurry would not use extra time for deep renewal and rest; they would reflexively fill it with more tasks and projects like the ones that already consume all their time. For most people, having more time would not alleviate the problem, but compound it, because the root problem is not the amount of time we have available but our own disposition toward how we use that time. The solution, Comer writes, is not more time, but rather “to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters” (62).

Part of the problem behind contemporary society’s obsession with hurry is the unspoken idea that we should be able to do it all. This is false, Comer says. The truth is that we all have limitations of various kinds which prevent us from doing many of those things which we might want to do: limitations relating to our bodies, minds, gifts, personalities, families of origin, socioeconomic status, education, and so on.