Life Moved More Slowly

From Buddhist Geeks Podcast Episode 148: “Work, Sex, Money, Dharma,” a conversation with Martin Aylward:

There's a quote by Lao Tzu, who was an exact contemporary of the Buddha. So living two and a half thousand years ago in rural China.  And when he was an old man, he wrote: "When I was younger, life moved more slowly. People had time for each other. Nowadays, everything moves so quickly. Everything's so complicated, people don't have time for each other." And you know, that's two and a half thousand years ago in China.

So one has to ask well, has life been constantly getting more and more crazy and complicated, and people having less and less time for each other over those two and a half thousand years? Or is it that there's that tendency of mind as we get older, to look back and idealize something from our own memory as being simpler, and then kind of apply that to the outside world. And so that can happen in any generation, and it can happen around anything.

It can certainly happen around the Internet, taking us away from ourselves rather than just being the latest tool.