Something I will return to again, I’m sure. That feeling that things move too fast now. That there is something lost when events and ideas and life moves constantly onward, faster and faster. That there is no time for thinking or reflection. Or to process life. Just to keep living it.
A related idea that I’ve heard expressed is that we never really live in the present. Since there is a delay in information passed from our eyes and other senses to our brains then really we are operating on a few millisecond delay, where everything we experienced has already happened. It feels like that to me, or that we are so focused on what is going to happen that we just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The modern world offers tremendous leverage. In theory. But when I look around at what we actually bring into the world, the contributions of people empowered by that leverage, I don’t really see where the added value is that offsets the costs. And maybe there are things that are not visible. Like research and scientific discovery. But in parallel we are getting less healthy, and life might be able to get extended, but it is a life propped up by a multitude of pills. So what is really gained? When a person before, removing accident and disease could live just as long with none of the pills and much more vitality?
I think we have lost a healthy relationship to time. When everything is instant, instead of gaining a vast amount of time, we actually open up opportunities to waste it in tremendously unfulfilling ways. Newtown and Galileo made their discoveries relying on correspondence with other minds that took months between sending out a question and receiving a response, and we can all agree I’m sure that they were successful, and that their achievements stand among the greatest in history.
Where is the gain? If we act as if solving problems that take time leads to more time then where is it? Maybe we solve problems that don’t need solving, or solve them for the wrong reasons, or just without sufficient thought for the underlying foundation. For what comes after and why what comes after may lead to more issues that than the original problem.
A theme I come back to, often, is the relationship between the explosion of technology innovation and the diminishing of quality in the products we use and the environments we build for ourselves to live in. We produce cheaper crap, and build cheaper crap for ourselves to live in. If we gave the Romans gas powered cranes and architectural technology, do we really think they would build concrete depressing buildings that crumble and are torn down after 15 years? Or would they make the Coliseum but on an even larger scale? The Roman Forum in more places. There would be an unprecedented explosion in beauty and quality. So how have we gone so wrong? And what is our legacy going to be?
We need a renewed commitment to beauty, quality, craftsmanship, to nobility in the physical and internal worlds we expereince.