"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?"... Henry David Thoreau.
These lines were written while Thoreau was living in hut at
the edge of Walden pond near Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847.
Even then, this individualist philosopher recognized the problems of society's
materialistic value system.
It seems no one listened as we see the beginnings of the
twenty first century with the "Corporate Alien" dictate of
"desperate haste." Companies go in and out of business, they merge to
form bigger companies and exert an ever-growing influence on the general
public. Products come and go as there seems to be an ever growing need to
innovate.
Marketing dictates our entire existence: from politicians
and statesmen, whose campaigns cost millions to ordinary citizens whose lives
are being entirely led by the commercialism of today's media. The few that have
acquired large amounts of wealth are setting the standards for the rest of us
so that their wealth would continue to grow at our expense.
It's not enough for one family member to earn a living these
days. It seems that we're all hurrying to work and hurrying back home on our
workdays. Traffic rush hours are starting earlier and ending later. We're
always in a hurry to get somewhere in our cars. Some of us can't just drive; we
must chat or conduct business on our cell phones. It seems that many drivers
usurp the rights of the lowly pedestrian. The auto seems to have the right of
way because it's bigger than the non-mechanized walking individual.
Kids don't just go out and play, like people of my
generation used to do. Now kids have to be kept active with school sponsored
activities, so parents must also drive them back and forth from school, to
school and from one activity to another. Everything is so rushed, there seems
to be very little time to get to know something really well.
There is no shortage of cars on the streets these days.
People only walk far enough to get from their car to the store and from the
store to their car. Even if the store is a couple of blocks away, they still
take their cars. There are very few pedestrians, and these poor souls must
yield the right of way to most drivers or face death or serious injury. Hit and
runs are becoming very common. Drivers hit someone because they're in too much
of a hurry. They leave the scene because they can't bear to face the financial
and psychological burdens imposed by the complexity of modern laws.
When you consider all the news sources, if you did nothing
but read for twenty-four hours per day, you still would miss quite a bit of
news. Bloggers are encouraged to post every day, so that people wouldn't get
bored with your blog. We are living in an age of information overload and
"desperate haste."
It seems like everyone is desperate to sell us something.
Our emails are bursting with discounts on everything from Viagra to substantial
home loans. They promise to make us millionaires for $49.95. They give us more
credit than we could handle so that we remain poor but buy things as if we were
rich. They place spyware on our computers to track our buying habits.
The rise of the Personal Computer was, in itself, an
exercise in desperate haste. Thirty-seven years ago, there was a computer
called the Commodore 64 that ran with 64 kilobytes of memory and was able to
run basic office functions. Today's computers are being sold with from 4
Gigabytes to 32 and in some cases even 128 Gigabyte of memory and this number
is still growing as newer software gets developed. From 64K to 128Gb, today's
memory needs are much times greater than that of early machines. The disk
storage went from the single-sided 5.25-inch floppy storing 180K to commonly
available 1 Terabyte and larger hard disks and SSD’s. Disk storage has
increased over a million-fold in thirty-seven years.
Much of this progress was done to continually obsolete old
equipment and sell new equipment. It also adds to the frustration of people
trying to learn new software and just as they get good at it, it becomes
obsolete.
It seems the harder we work, the less time we have to stop
and smell the roses. The more we rush, the poorer and more frustrated we
become. As the world gets more corporate, the pace of our lives will quicken
even more.
Today there is no value, no idea, and no purpose that
doesn't have its roots in some financial scheme and we can expect that our
lives will continue to move with "desperate haste."
Mr. Thoreau had a suggestion for us if we want to challenge
today's overly fast paced environment. He said "If a man does not keep
pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
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