Everything seems to move so fast doesn’t it?
New product. New product update. Removing the new product update because of a security risk. Rival product. Must buy!
Social media post. The need to respond instantly. The need to respond to the response instantly, so you can seize the narrative.
Must-see video streaming. Bingewatch it. Now it’s gone. Now it’s back. You don’t want to miss out.
We have more of everything, not enough nothing, and it’s all so much faster that it feels like we’re getting lost. Buy, update, post, comment, watch, we’re all doing so much it feels like we don’t have time for ourselves. We don’t have time to be people.
We don’t have time to be human, we’re moving too fast for human.
No time for a nuanced reaction or contemplation of a purchase. No time to wrestle with ambiguity, with the sheer humanity of our situation. We’re all on to the next thing or the current thing, but it’s always something we have to react to, as opposed to be ourselves having an experience.
In the age of 24-hour internet-enabled media and culture we’ve left our humanity behind. We’re posters, commenters, customers, influencers, podcasts, all checking off a bunch of lists as fast as possible. But we’re not people to the big corporations, to the algorithm, and to each other.
This is why I’m appreciating meditation and quiet walks more and more in my life. A chance to stop, to be myself, to just be. I’m not in Social Media Samsara trying to keep up on a hundred things that I don’t care about or really don’t care to have an opinion on. I’m just there.
You can go so fast you’re not human anymore. Slow down and be a person.