Our technologies have brought us into realities in which there is no time to reflect

Esquire Magazine, February 2010
3,650 Days by Charles P. Pierce

"And the truly ironic thing about it, and the Mayans would have found it more hilarious than anyone else, is that the only true function of these speculative apocalypses is that they serve best as a distraction from - and therefore as protection against - actual catastrophes, which really do come..."

"In a fragmented, accelerated world, there was no way to see these things coming. Our technologies have brought us into realities in which there is no time to reflect, to make the connections between what we knew once and what is happening to us now.

"But the language of the vicarious reality within which we conduct so much of our daily lives - the one in which we can invest ourselves without really involving ourselves - had no vocabulary for what had happened because it had happened in the actual reality."

Interesting essay. Similar to the New York Times "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online". It seems our generation is gaining a lot, but losing more.