A lovely little manifesto on the dangers of living an accelerated existence:
Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.
I admit: I routinely find myself scrambling to reply to unread email that requires no response. The success of alternative communication engines such as instant messaging, social networks, and the ubiquitous Twitter testify to the now-universal realization that email, that venerable old man of the electronic age, has utterly failed to improve our lives.
In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.
via A Manifesto for Slow Communication – WSJ.com.
