The Accelerating Western Present

As we all grow older, we in the West – and increasingly, people all over the world – become more aware of how life seems to be speeding up. There is a sense that we are expected to run faster and faster, to ‘keep up’.

(People often talk about meeting to ‘catch up’ – as if life was a race.)

If we feel life is a race, why are there so few social rewards, in our 'forward'-rushing culture, for being on the last few laps?

And why is death - the finishing post, after all - one of our few remaining taboos?

Along with a sense of acceleration, there is a sense of there being more and more of everything to fit into the same limited time/space – a kind of clogging of the arteries, of the mind, the airwaves, roads and streets.

Growth – more – has become our economic imperative – more stuff in the shops, more ‘choice’, more people on the move – holidaying, going further and further for shorter and shorter times (acceleration) – gobbling everything up faster and faster.

We probably need to be a bit older to have a sense of this accelerating dynamic in our culture, of its arc, or trajectory through the decades. Younger people have less to compare the present with, less adult memory of the pace of life before now.

But living in a less industrialised culture can give us a glimpse of ways of life in which there is a completely different (more spacious and relaxed) sense of time – and we ourselves can experience this, feel the difference in our minds and bodies (which are after all one).

Another thing to say about young people and this accelerating impulse of 'modern' life: each new generation born into this global culture is the bearer of its on-rolling, wave-like movement - as consumers, as targets of advertising, as swimmers in the choppy waters of the employment pool, as well as in the role of the next new instigators of 'more, better, faster'.

Young people in each new generation are both the victims and the champions of our galloping ‘advance’ – as we in my generation were both champions and victims of rock 'n roll and sexual liberation, and our parents’ generation, perhaps, of Hollywood glamour.

updated 19/2/12