Are we driving ourselves crazy?
These days it seems people just can't live without technology and machines in their lives. People have home computers, portable computers, PDAs, office computeres, and it seems nobody can be more than a few inches from a telephone these days. It seems everyone from the high-level corporate executives to high school students must have a cell phone on them at all times.
And everyone is in a hurry today.
There was a time when our ancestors traveled by foot, horse or animal drawn wagon, and a letter could take weeks to get from one point to another. When the train first began to carry passengers, people were known to faint from seeing the scenery going past at a dizzying 15 mph. People lived a much slower lifestyle. There was rarely a need to be in a hurry. A person could take the time to stop and chat with a neighbor as they went about their business.
Conversation was an art in those days. People would spend hours engaged in deep, meaningful conversation about a myriad of topics. They actually got to know each other. It would have been unheard of to not know your neighbors, even if those neghbors lived several miles away. People took time for people.
And people lived in and with the elements. They spent a great deal of their time outside working, traveling, or just enjoying the day. The idea of staying indoors all day would be unthinkable to these folks.
Today many people live a stone's throw away from people they have never met, or know very little about. They have no time to get to know their neighbors, and "friends" are often just names on a computer screen, or someone you see from time to time. They have no time to spend in conversation with people. They are in too much of a hurry to get wherever it is they must go.
On the roadways, heavy traffic may be moving at 35 or 40 mph, but that isn't fast enough. We must go faster. We want to live our lives at 90 mph at all times. We get impatient with the microwave because it's taking too many seconds to heat that "meal". We must multi-task. Drive the car, talk on the telephone, and eat something resembling food from a paper wrapper in order to save time.
And please, please don't let any of our multitude of machines and electronics break. End of the world! What a catastrophe! You mean I may have to actually DO something myself? No machine to do it for me? Egads!
But exactly what are we doing with our time here? Are we really living? Can what many spend their time doing actually be called living? Or are they just going through the world in a mad rush and frenzy of activity, a slave to all of this madness we called civilization? And why are we doing it?
Well, to make money, of course. What's the money for? So we can live, and buy the things we need to buy. Right? I'm not so sure. What if we're so busy in all this frenzy of activity that we actually forget to live? What's the point? Can we even take a little time out to live? Can we put down that cell phone, turn off the computer, park the car, and walk away from it all for a little while? Would there be a major catastrophe if we did this? Really?
What would really happen if we just took a leisurely walk, stopping to look at the scenery, or to chat with an actual live person once in a while? What would the world come to if we decided to slow down a bit and take a little time to actually live our lives for a change?
What about all those "needs" we are working for? Are they really needs? Are they just wants? Do we really, truly need them at all? Hmmm.
Are we so caught up in this maddeningly fast life we have created that, in the end, we are just driving ourselves crazy?