Time has always been the obsession of humanity for as long as we could remember. We’re afraid that we’ll use too much or too little. We spend time figuring out how well we can spend time. And it’s in that obsession, that fear, that desire, in which our monuments are being built.
Uber doesn’t sell anything new, it sells time, it does so by cutting the duration between you standing on the side walk and you getting into a taxi. Facebook doesn’t change the manner in which you talk to people, it cuts out the time it takes to do so, rather than sending a written letter that takes days or even weeks to deliver, it’s instant. The gossip didn’t have to transfer by word of mouth half way across campus, Zuckerberg bridged the two together. If it wasn’t for the internet, I would be under candle light writing this to the moss and the mold in the corner of my room, hoping that in a couple of years maybe a handful of people would read it. Instead, I’ve got you. Thanks.
In physics you can get from point A to point B with either:
- A lot of time, low energy cost
- A short time, high energy cost
It’s nice to think that this rule is confined exclusively to the physical universe, but it runs in our lives as well.
We can think of the ship as the “experience”, and it’s entering through our system so fast, so inorganically that our collective psyche’s are having a difficult time making sense of it all. Want a well-cooked meal? Order it on your phone and it’ll arrive in 20min. Want the love of your life? Start swiping. Don’t want to go all the way to the cinema? Home streaming. The cost is skyrocketing. Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit, and every pixel of information presented to you is just so fast, so new, that information no longer became something to be processed and used, but consumed. Technology evolved at a cost of our own evolution.
The finished product is always on our minds. This desire to make it quick has left our own spirit in thirst of still waters. But can we muster the strength to go against the offerings of the times? Can we simply sit still and embrace the vibrations of the universe? Can you stop for a moment and see the beauty that is your life.
