@ Ease

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
- Milan Kundera, Slowness

I was leafing through my copy of Big Issues: The Examined Life in a Digital Age the other night and was struck by this quote. Owen Edwards excerpts this in his essay “Remembrance of Things Fast” in which he critiques the speed with which we live in the modern era. Some call it “social acceleration” and when pushed to its limit it is characterized by the acceleration of change such that experiences blur and memories vanish.

Edwards wrote the essay in 2001. If then he was anxious, today he must be utterly overwhelmed. In many ways, the internet has gone from mere accessory to displacing the world that built it. Bits are replacing atoms at an alarming rate. In 2008 alone, the world created 487 billion gigabytes of information (up 73% from 2007).

This is both beautiful and terrifying. The internet is the great democratizer, unlocking information and making it accessible to anyone that can plug in. It proliferates on the principle that there is virtually no cost in participation. It is that paradoxical book shelf that can accommodate seemingly infinite books at little to no marginal cost. But while the economics can justify an infinite stream of information, something must be said of the psychological implications. Today, amidst the flurry of activity that is one’s inbox, mobile phone, tweets, and web apps, many are overstepping the line of hyper-productivity. In a world of one-to-many communications, simply keeping up with the stream at times requires super-human capabilities. Which is really to say that we’re going too fast.

The internet opened up a landscape of unfathomable possibilities. And here we are at the foot of the New World, itching to grab all we can. The new Manifest Destiny is reaching the end of the internet. And with every new bit consumed and new level of productivity, we experience more but retain less. The new thesis is 140 characters long. It’s delivered in real-time and flashes across the screen and our minds in a matter of seconds. The phone is buzzing, the browser several tabs deep. unread emails number into the hundreds. We are awash in all of it. The answer is in your sigh, in your closed eyes and refrain. The key isn’t more information. It’s more focus.

Slow down.