From n+1 magazine, a fascinating piece on the "relentless acceleration" of modern life. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa's concept of "social acceleration", it ponders the paradox that the widespread availability of labour-saving devices in the modern world has coincided with the perception that we have less time to ourselves than ever before. "The feeling comes about", it is explained, "because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed". Technology thus seems to save time with one hand even as it steals it with the other. But where is sleep in all of this? No mention is made of slumber in the n+1 article, but if we follow its logic then we might speculate that we enjoy less sleep nowadays not because we have less free time, but because the notion that there are other things to do than sleep -- better things to do than sleep -- has never been broadcast more enticingly or insistently through our waking lives.
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