Where Does The Time Go?

I am noticing that as technology advances and we have more and more efficient ways to do things: washing clothes, vacuuming rugs, checking out books, microwaving food, we don't ever seem to come out ahead time-wise.

For every advance in labor saving devices that is made, I notice an increase in something else. Now we have more clothes than most of us ever wear. We vacuum carpets more often than we beat those old carpets on the clothesline. We run reports on everything because now it's in the computer we can, and we often go out to buy food because it feels faster and easier than cooking it at all.

Any time saved is soon filled with more detailed tasks. Life doesn't get simpler, it becomes more complicated.

It is as if human beings need to be frenetically busy. Once that meant looking for food to eat and firewood for fires that could protect and keep us warm. Now it is such a tangled maze that people die. Not because we don't have food, or can't cure an illness, but because we have devised the idea that since scavenging for food and staying alive is no longer limited by nature's bounty, or man's skill, it must be limited by something else.

We have learned to do all sorts of things, but the basics haven't changed. People still die for lack of food and medical care. People still freeze to death and die from heat stroke. People still kill themselves trying to do more than time allows. It doesn't appear to me that we have really made much progress at all. We have only created the possibilities.

Someone needs to teach us how to take advantage of them for the good of all people.