There was a really interesting show on the radio this morning that was talking about the speed of life and how it has changed over the years.
It seems like one of those cliched things that grandparents say - I remember when I was your age that things were so much slower, we used to take our time…. etc etc. But it’s totally true. There were some fascinating examples of things that we do now - ranging from ads on tv, how quickly people walk down the street, how many drivers multi-task to how much editing goes on in films. And a few interesting statistics - did you know that we know make as many phonecalls in one day as we used to in the whole of 1980.
Yes, life is quick. We multi-task, all the time. Eating and working, driving and on the phone, trying to get everywhere quickly. Very quickly.
It sort of begs the question of how far can we take this. Do we have a limit to how fast we can go? I was re-reading about Dunbar’s number this morning - is there a parallel for something like this? A somewhat arbitrary “speed” that really is our maximum? There must be - presumably - a top speed for human social activity - just in the same way that there is for human physical activity (ie the 100m sprint).
How far can we take this? At what cost are we speeding so much? Did anyone say burnout? Or is this really the best way to progress, test our limits and make the most of all that we have?
