We sure like speed. We speed after more speed so we can get speedier. One day we must hope to be the speediest of the speeders. But the race is not human.
We desire speed in our lives so we can get going. We don't want to wait for anything. Fast foods, fast cars, fast transactions, fast thinking, fast construction, fast wars, fast commercials, fast stories, fast music, fast art, fast showers, fast flushes, fast fixes, fast internet connections, fast! Fast, faster... maybe someday the fastest. Maybe we'll be the bestest of the quickest.
Moving so fast that we don't have any time for anything. So maybe if we speed up we can catch some time for ourselves. Maybe. At least that's what we're speeding towards.
It could be honestly said that our lives are faster, speedier, quicker than our history as humans has ever been. And where has all this hurriedness gotten us?
Sorry, I don't have time to think about that. I'm too busy to think. I have too much going on. My life is moving so quickly and I have so much to do, I wish I could take a quick nap!
There is a common thread in all this - high technology.
High tech can't crank out its product fast enough. High tech automobiles, trains, planes... so we can go faster, quicker, speedier. High tech communications so we can communicate with more people thus reducing our communications with those people so we can communicate with others only because we have the technology to do so. High tech is the manure for speed.
We are rushing to catch up with this high tech world that high tech is creating for us so we'll have more time.... sometime. It's never quite clear when high tech will actually deliver the promise of more time. High tech cannot stop and neither can we who are plugged in to high tech. High tech costs a bundle! We're in a hurry to pay for it. And when high tech gets the money from us it's in a hurry to get faster. There's other high tech lurking around the corners to overtake the slower high tech and what good high tech would allow such a thing? High Tech is not so much a product but has become an addiction... an addiction to progress (another by-product of speed), and it does so without drugs.
But the society that is dependent on high tech is more collectively apt to turn to drugs. 'Speed", the slang for any drug that prevents us from ease. Starbucks, which gives the image of flying, doles out caffeine by the millions of gallons daily to keep us going and going and going, like the Eveready Bunny, that has no time to ever stop.
We flagrantly dis anything that hints at ease. Those pictures that we see in advertising, showing a person or family relaxing in the latest Italian designed sofa, watching a 72" flat screen LED digital television, tucked in a 4.25 million dollar home on lake front property, never hint at the need for speed to pay for all those things. Why would they? If we took time to think of how to pay for all the high tech, we would quickly reach the conclusion that it'd take a lifetime or two to pay for, by then, the obsolete. High tech would by then be far advanced... moving quicker than we could pay for it.
It permeates our lives, this lack of ease - causing us dis-ease, for which we have little time for. The pharmaceutical companies are willing to mask the disease to keep us going. They even encourage it. They are in partnership with high tech... doling out drugs quicker and faster, the prescriptions being written and filled at record pace. No time for time.
Time has become illusory. So many can't fathom having any time, except for sleep, and even that's become compliments of the drug companies. The ads are full of sleep aids... so inviting, so comforting... ah! finally a restful night's sleep! It couldn't have been without a sleeping pill.
"I like this piece of art, Cecil. How long did it take you to complete?"
C: "Thank you! That took about three months, working on and off."
"Damn! Where do you find the patience to do something like that? I could never do anything like that..."
Patience. No longer patient, we don't even have time for it. Patience? Rubbish! Who has time for patience? We've got too much to do and so little time to do it, and we have the nerve to think of patience? How ridiculous. Marriage? Takes too much time and patience. Just get divorced and move on. Nobody wants the burden of marriage anymore... it's just not a feasible institution.
Sad state of affairs, Mr. Dolemout. We've given up ease, patience and even time to be victims of high tech. And high tech is the only winner. We're dying from dis-ease, we've become the patient instead of patient and we're saving our time for our sickbed.
And yet, the majority of high tech junkies would have it no other way. The adrenaline rush is addictive. But as all addictions become, even the high tech becomes deadly. And who really wins and what is the prize? Time out.
Cecil
25 June 2006
New Moon
<center>What's left?</center>
<center>what's left
from what
time was
before
our time
leaves us
left behind
?
___</center>
