Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Why can't we slow down?

Arizona Summer Wildcat

I just bought a new computer. It has the new Pentium III and over eight gigabytes of something or other that apparently makes it pretty fast by today's standards. By tomorrow, however, it will probably be obsolete. I can't figure out why it's important for it to be this fast and, soon enough, it won't be fast enough. Why is this?

Technology is getting faster everyday. People are finding new and creative ways to save time with every passing moment. Nothing seems to be fast enough to satisfy. Computers aren't fast enough. My first computer was a Commodore 64. With only sixty-four kilobytes of Ram, it had about the same faculty and chutzpah as a Gameboy. I was young at the time and didn't really maximize it's capabilities (I mostly just played La Mans or Burger Time or whatever other games my parents bought me) but it got the job done. Now I can play games like Tomb Raider and Quake, but I cannot honestly say that I have more fun with them than with the old 64 games. A recent special edition of CBS Nightly News said that in the next thirty years computers will work as fast as the human brain. When will we feel content?

Phones aren't even fast enough to please. In the past, people could only communicate through letters. Soon enough the telegraph came into existence but it was soon cast aside by the telephone. At first, people had to rely on an operator to connect them to their intended party. This took some time, but it was faster then the telegraph. Then came the rotary phone, which enabled people to make the calls on their own, but the touch-tone phone quickly surpassed this. But even this wasn't fast enough. We now have technology that allows us to pick up a phone, say the name of the person we wish to call, and the phone will dial the number automatically for us. Pushing seven little buttons takes too long? It takes all of three seconds. What's next? Are we going to have little chips installed into our heads so all we have to do is think of the person we want to call to have the connection made? Do we really want a planet full of cyborgs?

We can't listen to music fast enough either. Eight-tracks could only skip between groups of songs. With cassettes we could fast forward or rewind to individual songs but it was slow. Then CDs came along and we could skip between songs with the push of a button. But we still had to get up and manually change the disk when we wanted to listen to a new one, so we got multiple disk changes. I know a guy that has a sixty-disk CD changer. Sixty! I heard recently that they get up to three hundred. I don't even have enough CDs to fill that.

All this acceleration of technology is really just making us slower. Patience has been called a virtue, but now that it is looked on as an unnecessary evil. We are saving more and more time everyday, but for what? So we can watch more episodes of Friends and Ally McBeal on television. So we can shop more and buy more and use more. And we don't ever have to leave the house to do these things. Anyone with a credit card and Internet access can buy things online and have them brought directly to their front door.

This is not healthy. All of this emphasis on speed and the lack of satisfaction with its current position is a factory for stress and unhappiness. Take your time with things. If you are never satisfied with what you have then you'll never be satisfied and that is no fun.

We need to put our emphasis on people and improving and accelerating ourselves there. Get away from the gadgets and talk to people one-on-one and face-to-face. That's what's important. That's where true learning and satisfaction comes from. If we keep going in the same direction, people won't even have to leave their houses anymore. The only social activity will be through e-mail and chat-groups. Human reproduction will be done with the use of test tubes and airmail. That's a scary thought.

So just slow down and enjoy what you've got or you might not get to enjoy anything at all.