Everything is Fast
What I’ve Learned About Time, Technology, and the Soul in a World That Will Never Slow Down
The world started moving too fast at some point in my life, or maybe it was my life that was moving too fast for my soul. The progression of my dad’s Alzheimer’s happened fast. My mom’s health decline sped up faster than I could comprehend it in real-time.
The days went by too quickly. Is this just what getting older feels like, I thought? There are many unacceptable and unsatisfying answers to that question, many of them trite, and I’m too old to be trite. No.
I would get to the end of a day and feel like I had just finished my morning coffee. “It’s over?” Not even the early days of the COVID lockdowns—when I was holed up in a lake house in Michigan for two months, without being able to bustle about in the city—made a noticeable difference. In other words, that period of time didn’t help me slow down. On the contrary, everything sped up. Frantic friends and colleagues wanted to Zoom at all hours. This forced ‘downtime’ was not downtime at al…