Everything Is Going Too Fast
News exists in our lives more as something to consume rather than as a means for civic engagement.
A single glance at my social-media feeds makes me anxious, for many reasons. One is the feeling of impiety it brings. I read about a mass shooting, and not five seconds later I read about the kind of dress a celebrity wore at her surprise wedding. A moment later there’s an article about a European heat wave that is sure to be deadly, BA.5 run amok, and another one on the best bronzers and highlighters for brown skin, before a turn to an exegesis on the Supreme Court and an argument between.
On a timeline, there is no respect for what is serious. Every time something of political or moral concern shows up, something trivial competes with it immediately, flattening the importance of the serious matter into just another post in the flurry of activity. I worry that this has socialized us to treat tragedies as spectator events, or even entertainment. We are rubbernecking disaster every day.
I do not interpret this habit as a lack of care. But we are shaped by our habits of consumption. And news, today, exists in our lives more as something to consume than as a means of civic engagement. It’s as though we just add impending collapse to the motley assortment of facts that we pick up daily. And a buzzing anxiety grows about what we should do.
If you raise this feeling publicly, a chorus of voices shouts back in response, “Vote, vote, vote.” As committed to that particular form of civic and political participation as I am, the chant feels at once cynical and sophomoric. Voting takes place on a handful of days in our lives. On thousands of others we’re also living, breathing filthy hot air, worrying ourselves sick, and feeling urgency.
There are no easy ways to live now. But I do think we have to be deliberate about moments of quiet reflection in which we make decisions about what we will do, however modest, in response to so many social and political challenges. And by that I mean what we will do in a sustained fashion—both in terms of what we commit to knowing about by regularly reading and keeping abreast of those topics, and also in terms of what civic actions we will weave into our daily lives. I’m not one to rail against the internet or the television. But I am an advocate of regularly stepping away to concentrate one’s attention. It still feels inadequate, of course. But it is something.
On my feed the other day, I saw someone mention that in very hot climates, people are forced to slow down. Unfortunately, economic systems in the West make that very rational behavior untenable for many people who are forced to work long hours to get by. Isn’t that something? A basic survival technique, one that is essential now as the world gets hotter, one that might help us think more clearly about the world we live in, isn’t even plausible. It makes me think back to my childhood. In summertime Alabama, the air was thick and hot, pressing you into stillness. And we, children who had leisure time because generations of adults had fought to protect our childhoods, were told to sit still. We could let our minds empty. And it was wonderful, because that’s when our imaginations took over.