What I am thinking of today is speed. When I was a young woman we had a saying--"speed kills". This referred to methamphetamine, cocaine, and other forms of amphetamine, which were as much of an epidemic then as they are now.
But it seems that speed kills in other ways to. Many traffic accidents and fatalities have excessive speed as a cause or partial cause. And in other dangerous situations as well, if we hurry we make mistakes, some of them with serious consequences.
But what are the larger consequences of speed? How did it become such a part of everyday life in the 1st world and increasingly in the 3rd world? What price are we and the rest of the biosphere paying?
I would posit that the advent of the technology to go ever faster and the rise of predatory capitalism go hand in hand. And the world is paying dearly for both.
If we just look at car dependence the pattern is clear. We have given over millions of square miles to earth choking asphalt for car only spaces, including freeways, roadways, parking lots, parking garages and the rest. We do this so we can get to work and be part of the consumer machine, but as time went on it became normal to live farther and farther from work and spend hours every day commuting. This time sink is borne entirely by the worker, and is an externality to the employer.
But the biggest winner was the oil and gas industry and the biggest loser was the climate stability of the planet, putting all life thereon in grave danger.
Do we really need to go that fast? Is going that fast a requirement in order to stay alive? Certainly not. For 99% of our time as the dominant species on earth we lived very well on foot and animal power. We simply went slower. We lived where we worked or close by. If a person visited someone who lived 50 miles away they would stay for a month.
But that is not all. Now that we have computer and cellular technology there is an endless push to have it go faster and faster. Never mind that not even 30 years ago if you wanted to use a telephone it was corded to a wall and if you were expecting a call, you simply had to wait for it. And before that by 100 years or so, what we had was mail.
I am not saying the technology itself is bad. I am using it right now. But why does it need to be reinvented to go faster every two years? I don't have to be a 5G conspiracy theorist to question why we need it. Why wasn't the milliseconds to get data delivered with 4G fast enough? 100 years ago, you would wait for the mail, and it was not being transported by jet.
Our brains are not really adapted to go this fast. Could it be partly responsible for the mental health epidemic of the last 40 years?
Then there is the waste that goes with planned obsolescence. When all of the supporting structures go to 5G, all your equipment must as well, or it won't work. Poorer people don't have money to upgrade every 15 months so they fall by the wayside.
And the landfill fills up with toxic e-waste. Another loss to ecological stability, another boon for the capitalist system that craves speed and novelty regardless of cost, as long as the cost is externalized.
This pandemic has had an unexpected side effect. Everything has slowed down. Some of us don't know how to handle it, we have been artificially jacked up on environmental speed for so long. Maybe all of our lives. We may not, as animals, be adapted for speed, but our lizard brains love it. It gives a seductive type of power. It is associated with money and there for with power. It has a sexual component.
No wonder fast cars, boats, and jets are alluring. No wonder we are drowning in stimulant drugs, first cocaine and then meth. No wonder the man with the fastest things gets the girl. And because it is our lizard brain we can't even see it clearly.
But slowing down even the small amount required by the pandemic has given us a glimpse into the toxic nature of a pace of life built entirely on an ever accelerating speed.
Speed kills. Not just us, but the ecological web we need to survive. If we don't slow down the bough will break and we will come to a grinding halt.
What steps can we as citizens take to slow our lives down, when we live in an economic system that requires us to go ever faster or be left behind? And, by "left behind" the unspoken term is "to starve to death".
What will it take to build a different system, one that moves at the natural speed of life?