Instantaneous communication and the propaganda for needed and urgent improvement are silently eroding our social and mental perceptions.
Every new year comes with a celebration of the clock, the calendar, and the way we measure time in relation to our narrative. Social shifts responding to technological advancements have made space for new ways of viewing our positional relationship to time.
The modern shift to instantaneous updates provided by technological advancements placed a premium on convenience and normalized speed as an inherent virtue. Through our obsession with increased efficiency, we’ve conflated speed with progress, creating a system that demands that we match its accelerated pace.
We’ve moved from scarcity to abundance in content creation. We can generate text instantly. What once required significant time investment—writing a report, creating a company, designing a logo, creating music, or marketing yourself—can happen
in moments. The movement of acceleration didn’t begin out of nowhere. The establishment of digital audio workstations in the ’80s transformed the music production process, and new photo technology in smartphones made everyone a photographer.
Collaborative media networks made co-creation immediate and constant. Today, we’ve reached a point in technology where the ease of creation itself has generated urgency. The fact that we can create instantly makes us feel as though we must constantly outpace our ability to meaningfully metabolize what we’ve created. Time has always had tension, but we’ve never moved this quickly before.
French philosopher of speed Paul Virilio voiced concern that modern progress has been conflated with its propaganda. The shift to live feeds, instantaneous updates, and connections has destabilized the relationship we have to the natural cycle of time by recalibrating the ways we view progress.
Virilio found that the promise of progress, which at one time served to relieve us from scarcity and suffering, has progressed into a system that feeds our collective neurosis. In the past,progress meant survival, machine adaptation replaced strenuous labour regimes, and communication technologies connected fragmented communities. But today’s technology’s concerned with generating abundance. Progress has become less about what we’ve achieved but our capacity to keep moving.
Through equating progress with acceleration, advancement has become self-justifying, demanding our acceleration to self-optimize, that is, less about arriving somewhere and more so about remaining in the race so as not to fall behind.
Progress has become ideological: constantly moving, becoming, improving; our obsession with acceleration tells us that faster is better. Being available to the constant overload of instantaneous media to consume and communicate can make you feel like you’re always on the clock; this is what Virilio refers to as an accelerated reality. We forget when we’re done and what progress looks like.
A fear of stagnancy occupies a formlessness produced from the persistent pressure to create yourself, which sustains an environment of fear that both occupies and preoccupies the interactivity of the collective consciousness. Fear thrives on our inability to operate in real space-time; the natural pace we need to metabolize our spatial-temporal experience. Terror cuts to the quick because there is no time to metabolize fear when slowing down is seen as unproductive.
Carl Rogers, an American psychologist, and one of the founders of humanistic psychology, highlighted the ways society can create conditions of worth, which can create a cognitive distance from our actual selves and our ideal versions of ourselves. The rapidly increasing commodification in virtually all spheres of social life can project harmful conditions of worth into the media we consume daily.
The propaganda of progress reminds you of everything you have yet to do and what you need without explaining why you need it: a gnawing sense of urgency to stay in the game. We live in a matrix that seeks to push the idea that opportunity fades when it’s left alone. Here are all the things you could tweak about yourself.
Beauty and fashion companies tell you dizzying stories about the kind of body that’s attractive and that attractiveness will bring you joy and fulfillment; you too will live this joyful lifestyle as the bright smiley faces in the advertisements do. Fitness promotes this concept of constantly improving; with the new diet and fitness lifestyle, you need to eat to be healthier, fitter, and better. You can never be healthy enough or fit enough; progress is a constant, pushed goal.
Our shiny screens exaggerate the gaps between you and who you should be—selling a joy that’s said to be outside of you. It seems it’s become easy to measure ourselves against some existential comparative checklist that you couldn’t recite back if you tried. It’s equally as easy to do busywork in a system that convinces you a certain type of work and energy is the key to success, but this isn’t true for everyone.
There’s an incongruity in the speed of the design and our natural cycle of doing things and in the way we regard time that obscures its meaning through acquainting speed with progress. When we accept conditions of worth that are outside of who we are, when we become obsessed with a movement that isn’t ours, or with a progress that isn’t real or sustainable to our being, this creates a social ecosystem that lives off fear.
Real progress requires a level of intuitive guidance; the propaganda of progress neglects to remind us of the importance of slowing down. When we play by its rules, get up and go, keep going—we go against our intuition and wonder why we feel exhausted and yet unsatisfied. It’s so easy to ignore our intuition in a system that convinces you a certain type of work and energy is the key to success, which frames natural cycles as unproductive or irrelevant.
In today’s social fabric, the obsession with constant self-improvement has framed progress as no longer something we can arrive at naturally, but something we’re constantly chasing. Modern technology’s role in furthering the momentum of instantaneity in the pursuit of progress has sustained a social environment of fear, where slowing down and operating at our natural cycle to risk becoming stagnant—or even obsolete.
We must remind ourselves that just because we can doesn’t mean we should. It takes a lot of self-awareness to detach from the constant rumble of pings, images, and stories to pursue personal objectives that fulfill us. Relating back to time that aligns with our natural cycles urges us to slow down to revere the processes: planting the seed, the ripening, and the blooming of our ambitions.
The tools of today can generate an abundance of possibilities. There’s pleasure in gauging a sense of kinship with the vastness of constant motion that requires us to know ourselves enough to know when it’s time to slow down.
If the choices we make happen at lightning speed, rest becomes resistance to the constant pressure to move quickly. In an era obsessed with acceleration, the best thing you can do for yourself is take your time.
Tags
Opinions, self improvement, Technology
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