On Time-Sickness

**Taken from an unknown source

"We have forgotten how to look forward to things, and how to enjoy the moment when they arrive. Restaurants report that hurried diners increasingly pay hte bill and order a taxi while eating dessert. Many sports fans leave sporting evnets early, no matter how close the score, simply to steal a march on the traffic. Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well."
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"'Time-sickness' can be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness. Kundera thinks that speed helps block out the horror and barrenness of the modern world: "Our period is obsessed with a desire to forget, and it is that desire that gives it over to the demon of speed..."
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"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." --Thomas Merton