Our lust for speed is ruining our world

(Today is Blog Action Day when thousands of bloggers all over the world are writing on a single theme: our environment.)

Speed sometimes seems to be everything these days. We want to go everywhere faster, get everything faster, use it all faster, and throw it away faster.

Despite all the fine words spoken about topics like global warming and reducing our carbon footprints, I have yet to see anyone tackling the underlying issue behind the way mankind is raping the environment: our unquenched lust for speed.

We no longer enjoy the journey; we just want to arrive as quickly as possible. We no longer take pleasure in anticipating and working towards some major purchase; we simply borrow the cash and buy it now. Young people leave college and expect to earn high incomes right away. They want to be at the top before they’ve learned how to behave when they get there. They want to be leaders before they have the faintest idea about how to lead.

We must make more profits every quarter and always do it faster. Cut development and testing time. Cut training time. Cut out time “wasted” in sitting around thinking creatively. Stop slowing down on vacations and stay on call 24/7.

What benefit do we get from all this rushing around?
More stress, more anxiety, more physical and mental problems from high-pressure lifestyles. More demands to cut corners and risk quality recalls. More pressure to make more money faster, even if that means taking absurd risks or “fudging” the figures to the point where real dishonesty seems the next, most obvious step.

Short-termism is more about speed than limited vision. It’s more about wanting to reach some point faster than is truly possible and choosing to ignore the consequences to get it all and get it now. And it that means polluting the environment, ripping up the landscape, snatching up raw materials, and burning more oil, so be it. The future, we believe in our madness, is not our problem.

Where I live in Arizona, more and more homes are being built—even today—with no real understanding of where enough water is going to come from in the future to serve such a large population. The same is happening throughout the American west. The developers build now, take the money, and run. It’s not their concern what will happen in twenty or fifty years when there’s not enough water. They got their quick profits and some other idiot can live with the consequences.

Individualism is only selfishness in a fancy coat
By rushing everywhere more quickly, you’ll be bored faster as well and need to move on somewhere else. Minds, constantly overstimulated by media drenched in violence and raw spectacle, become numbed. To try to regain the feelings of excitement—so quickly lost in the welter of impressions&mdashpeople demand more, faster, louder, bigger; until we threaten to wreck everything in our madness.

Life is for living and living is a process. It takes time. The faster you rush through it, the less you notice along the way. The quicker you start to fear you may be reaching the end.

Much of the damage we are doing to our environment is reversible, but only if we’re prepared to slow down and stop expecting that every year we will be able to go, do, have, get, experience everything just a little faster than the year before.

Just think how great an impact on environmental improvement we would make if everyone slowed down by 10%—starting right now.