The world is going too fast

Modern man desperately back slope crumbles. We're coming to stay in the same place, in this constantly leaking. Because if we stop one second to run - after work, our emails, our appointment, our obligations, our money, after which time the file - we fall. In unemployment, poverty, neglect, desocialisation.

This is a portrait of modern, according to the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. The time now is faster and consumes us, like yesterday Cronos children. The acceleration technique, work on screens, transportation, consumption, has led to the acceleration of our frantic pace of life. Then precipitated social change. Nothing resists.

Trades change in a few years, the machines in a few months, no job is assured, traditions and knowledge disappear, couples do not last, recomposed families, the social elevator down, the short-term rule , events sliding.

The feeling of not having time, everything is going too fast, that our life line, the feeling of being powerless to slow us anxiety and stress us. And Hartmut Rosa, 45, a professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, is expanding its "critical social time" of "late modernity" in his masterly study, Acceleration (Discovery).

After studies of Paul Virilio worried about speed, Hartmut Rosa examines the dissolution of democracy, values​​, reflection, our identity, carried by the wave acceleration. Maintenance back while already, all leave behind us, we are many.

It's back, when we felt most acutely how our lives are accelerating. We even often feel that the holidays are past at full speed. How to explain this sense of urgency permanent?

Hartmut Rosa: Today, the time has annihilated space. With the acceleration of transport, consumption, communication, I mean "acceleration technique", the world seems to shrink both spatial and material.

Studies have shown that the Earth appears to us sixty times smaller than before the revolution in transportation. The world is at your fingertips. Not only can travel to all corners quickly, inexpensively and without much effort, but it may also, with the acceleration of communications, it provides simultaneous, download or order almost every music book or film of any country, in a few clicks, at the same time it is produced.

This speed and proximity seem extraordinary, but at the same time every decision in the direction of acceleration involves reducing options for the enjoyment of travel and transit country, or what we consume. And highways that motorists are no longer visit the country, it is reduced to a few abstract symbols of roadhouses and standardized.

Travelers flying aircraft at high altitude landscape, hardly see the big city where they land and are often transported in camps, who do not have much to do with the real country, where they propose multiple "tours". In this sense, the acceleration technique is accompanied by a very practical annihilation of space along with a faster pace of life.

Because, even on vacation, we must do everything quickly, gymnastics, diet, recreation, we read a book, listen to a disc, or visited a site. That's why we hear at the beginning: "This summer, I did

Thailand in four days." This accelerated pace of life creates a lot of stress and frustration. Because we are still faced with the inability to accelerate too much consumption itself.

While it is true that you can visit a country in four days, buy a whole library click of a mouse, or download hundreds of music tracks in a few minutes, we will always be plenty of time to meet the locals , read a book or enjoy a loved air. But we did not. It is always counted, we must hurry. This is a major stress related to the accelerated pace of life, the world is offered in a second or a few hours by plane, and we never have the time to enjoy it.

According to you, the acceleration of life is reflected in the increase more rapidly the number of shares to per unit of time. That is to say?

These days, people returning from holidays and already all of you and I wonder how they will manage to overcome their list of things "to do." The mailbox is full, new bills arise, the children want the latest school supplies, should register for this course professional language course that would give me a professional edge, I have to take care of my plan retirement, health insurance offering guarantees optimal, I am dissatisfied with my service provider, and this summer I realized that I neglected my body was not doing enough exercise, could lose my youth allure, so competitive.

We feel a real sense of guilt at the end of the day, feeling vaguely that we should find time to reorganize it all. But we did not. Time as resources are shrinking inexorably.

We feel the agonizing feeling that if we lose these hours now, it would be a handicap in the back of a flying, while competition between individuals, the heart of the machine acceleration sharpens.

And even if we could find a little time, we would feel guilty because then we would not find a moment to relax, spend time relaxing with our spouse and our children go to the show or family, enjoy some brief of this life. Ultimately, you see, is the increasing number of actions per unit of time, the accelerating pace of life that pushes us all.

At the same time, each episode of life is reduced ...

In fact, most episodes of our days shorten or thicken, work to start, where the rhythms are accelerating to "streamline". But also outside. There has been a reduction in the duration of meals, breakfast, moments of pause, time spent with family or to go to a birthday, a funeral, a walk, to sleep.

So, to do everything we need to densify these moments. We eat faster, we pray faster, reduces the distances, speeds travel, we try to multitask, the simultaneous execution of several activities. Unfortunately, as our temporal resources are reduced, and the increase of the volume of shares densification quickly become greater than the speed of execution of tasks.

This results in a subjective manner by an increase sense of urgency, guilt, stress, anxiety schedules, the need to accelerate again, the fear of "not being able to follow." Added to this is the feeling that we do not spend our lives, they escape us.

We are witnessing, as you say, a "compression of this," which is becoming more elusive. Can you explain?

If we define our present, that is to say, real close, like a period with a stable, durable enough for a character that we were carrying experiments to build the present and the near future enough time so that we serve and our learning to be transmitted and that we can expect results almost reliable, then there is a great compression of this.

At the age of acceleration, this whole becomes unstable, shortens, we see wear and the rapid obsolescence of business, technology, everyday objects, weddings, families, political programs , people, experience, know-how, consumption.

In the pre-modern society, before the great industry, this linking at least three generations because the world did not change much between the grandfather and the son breakfast, and the first could still pass on their expertise and experience the second values.

In high modernity, the first half of the twentieth century he is contracted to a single generation grandfather knew that now his grandchildren would be different from his, he had not much to their learn new generations become vectors of innovation, it was their task to create a new world, as for example in May 68.

However, in our late modernity, today, the world changed several times in a single generation. The father has much more to teach his children about family life, which is always changing, the jobs of the future, new technologies, but you can even hear 18 year olds talk about " before "to discuss their 10 years, a young specialist remonstrate with an expert barely older than him on the" up to date ". This shortens, fled, and our sense of reality, identity, diminishes in the same movement.