Someone who makes sense.

Though I am in advertising, I am also a child of the 60s. As such, I have always been anti-materialistic, anti-acquisition, anti-thing-gathering (except for books and dvds.) This morning I found a wonderful essay, the whole of which you can find here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/346

The author, Rebecca Solnit, starts off this way: "THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons."

Basically, what Solnit rails against is what many of us alte kockers rail against: speed for speed's sake. The mania of getting it done now because there's a meeting scheduled on account of there's a meeting scheduled because it's the only time it could be scheduled since there are so many other meetings scheduled. "I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought." The conundrum is that the language to describe the ineffable splendors and possibilities of our lives takes time to master, takes a certain unhurried engagement with the tasks of description, assessment, critique, and conversation; that to speak this slow language you must slow down, and to slow down you must have some inkling of what you will gain by doing so."

Solnit is good. Let's slow down fast and think about this.