As I combed through my Facebook feed, I felt a sense of impending doom and dismay that lost to us is a culture of slow. Where one might lie and devour, for days on end, a piece of craft or a sensual tome of literary delight. Fingertips brushing paper. Crisp, musty-smelling pages that don’t require you turn your screen-rotate off when you lie down. The luxury to pause ad libertum and take things in. Reflect. Imagine. Fantasize. Recreate. Germinate new ideas. Pick apart old ones. Toy with possibilities. Play with trivia. No, everything has to be done. Ticked. Achieved. Yesterday, if not soon.
Gone too, it seems, is a culture of depth. All is reduced to bite-sized, 200-character length updates. Connection is a flurry of ‘likes’, concurrence a simple ‘share’, and conversation an exchange of single-lined brevities, sent from mobile phones between stop-and-go at traffic lights. Few have the space or inclination to philosophise over cups of tea about bigger life questions. Or lead an examined life. Much as I resist, I too am swept up in the cult of busy. Wanting to smell the roses, and to be lost in the eternity of simple moments; of a dance. Or piece of music. Or sweeping the floor. But my calendar has filled up. The next timeslot rolls by. Things are due. Emails pile up. Goals and objectives await being met. Lists grow. And I surrender with a resigned sigh to the sub-optimal necessity of an efficient life, secretly fantisizing about my retirement from society proper.
So, progress could have bought us the luxury of time and alleviated the burden of work. It could have given us the freedom to revel abundantly in delicious past-times, and enjoy higher order pursuits particular to the human experience — of intellect, pleasure, play and interaction. Things we ought to be able to finally enjoy because we (in these very fortunate parts of the world) no longer have to fetch buckets of water for endless kilometers, and trade happens without us having to man our store-fronts, and we don’t live in fear of being devoured by wild predators. Yet clearly, it hasn’t. We live like we’re in a mad hurry to have to get somewhere, do something.
“We believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people… This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.” — Anais Nin
