"Social acceleration"

Have you noticed the increasing "volume and velocity of modern culture?"

I'm not sure who it was posed that question recently but, YES, I've sure noticed! I bet you have too (unless you are either highly emotionally intelligent or your head is stuck in the sand).

I believe it was in Mike Woodruff's 'The Friday Update' (12/29/23) I first heard mention of the term "social acceleration." He pointed to Carl R. Trueman's piece 'The Desecration of Man' that contains this:

More recently, the flux has been intensified by what Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration. If Marx was correct that industrial production was a source of constant change in society, it was so in large part because it depended on technology that was itself constantly changing. We too live in an era of constant technological change, but it no longer affects merely industrial production. Technology shapes how we live in every area, from education to romance. Our lives are technologically shaped in public and in private, and the technology changes so fast that we are unable to assimilate one development before another overtakes it. The result is a dizzy feeling that our ability to control even our personal worlds is constantly slipping further away. In such a context, the questions of who we are and what we are meant for become impossible to answer. Indeed, to borrow from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” things seem constantly falling apart, and that includes the consensus on who or what man is and what he is for.

 

So, do you ever have that feeling where it seems the whole world is trying to tell you something? Everything you hear, read, the things that happen to you, how you feel... it all seems connected and is pointing to the same thing. 

I don't know if social acceleration was necessarily the thing for me, but it seemed just the latest.

• So much frustration at work and with society in general over the past several years
• More drinking than I care to think about
• Finally losing it and leaving my job
• Isolation
• Church
• Books & articles
  
• Health problems
• Sobriety

I don't know... maybe I could go on. It seems a lot has happened and yet... it kinda/sorta feels like I've been here before. Not really here, here; but close to here. 

I've had some brushes with the desert fathers & mothers over the past year. We discovered a church endeavoring toward contemplative spirituality. For Christmas I bought myself Henri Nouwen's 'The Way of the Heart'... and I just started reading it. [In case you're wondering... nope, it's not about my physical heart problem, but the inner heart].

The first section is on Solitude. As I read page after page it felt strangely like I've read this book before, but either I have forgotten or it just seems really familiar.

Anyway, THIS is either what it's all been pointing to, or this is -- the way. I think. At least for now. For me.

So, I realize this is sorta vague and may not make much sense, but on this holiday Monday it's where I'm at. I will hopefully be posting thoughts from the book... and ways I am battling social acceleration in my little mind/world.

Plus it was -8 degrees fahrenheit this morning and I have an odd week full of things to do and this was all I could come up with today. :)

Carry on. Resist.