The Pace of Daily Life is Unbearable
And everyone wants us to accelerate
Once again, I’m grateful for all of you who took the time to fill out my reader survey. The most common response to the question of what has been keeping you from reading lately is “time.” Overwhelmingly, everyone is crunched for time. Which resonated with me because I’m in the middle of reading the book Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by Harmut Rosa for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (tentative title). In it, he argues that one of the three main ways the modern world has been dramatically accelerated is the “pace of life.” Yes, there has been what he calls “technical acceleration,” by which he means things like computers, cars, the Internet, AI, and other machines that have spend our actions along. But also the pace of our lives have sped up. Instead of the dishwasher freeing up our time so that we can sit and read books, we end up spending that “free” time doing other chores or managing other technologies (the washing machine, our text messages, our AI agent, and so on). Our pace of life also speeds up because we tend to multitask now. Instead of just doing the dishes, we do the dishes and listen to a podcast on self-improvement. We dictate a text message while we drive. While we watch a movie, we scroll on our phones. There’s always something else happening. Because if we don’t multitask, we fear we’ll be desynchronized, that we’ll fall out of time with the rest of the world which is moving at a much faster pace than us. And that sounds terrifying. So what are we to do? What does it look like to live temperate lives at a human pace, and how do we deal with the guilt and shame of desynchronization?
