foot off the pedal maybe (before it ends in our mouth)
As I look through hundreds of photos and videos and contacts in my mobile devices, it dawned on me that humans were never meant to have this many unique experiences or connections. My (our?) ancestors would never have experienced or known people as much as we have.
Especially after the 1990s, everything snowballed and sped up and catapulted us through multiple eras that our predecessors had never had to witness.
Yes, they had experiences that most people in the modern world don't (plagues, world wars, etc), but they have never witnessed human destruction, innovation, and exploration at a global scale and with the speed we have (in real time sometimes!).
Their worldviews were generally limited to their vicinity because very few travelled beyond their hometowns/villages, not to mention other countries. Most adventures were learnt through stories from brave explorers and/or storytellers, not firsthand experiences.
Everything moved slower -- people, and things, took time.
While they mainly lived in the mundane, I feel like we are descending into madness.
While people back then are allowed to go through life at normal speed, people now are expected to survive in fast-forward mode or get left behind.
Catch up and keep it pushing, no time to waste! The rat race seems inevitable and inescapable, and now the race course has gotten even more complicated.
In 2025, you don't have to be rich to travel across CONTINENTS in LESS THAN A DAY by air. As long as there's a connection, it takes SECONDS to send walls of text like this to anyone ANYWHERE in the world. I can message my childhood friend from 20 years ago on Whatsapp (where I'm in multiple international groupchats) while having a Discord call with my friends from other countries. In the same computer, I will later livestream a game with some friends, and then do remote work alongside colleagues from different countries.
Imagine explaining all this to people hundreds of years ago. They'd either think it's madness, sorcery, or both.
Life has changed so much and so fast since Y2K, which I believe is largely thanks to the internet for being so ubiquitous, making tech and education are now more democratised than ever in the history of humankind. But I worry that we're going to reverse whatever progress we have made in humankind soon.
All this thoughtvomit started because I was just wondering about how AI is gonna make the internet implode. And now I marvel at how far we've come as humans while trying to regulate my emotions.
I wonder if anyone will be able to survive at the rate we're going... or if we'll all end up crashing and burning eventually.