World Speeding Up...

A friend of mine, my former editor at High Times for about 15 years, wrote on Facebook that he was upset that the attention spans of the youth have been reduced to the seconds it takes to tweet. I agree, and here's how I responded...
The Warhol 15 minutes of fame, the instant gratification, the byte of information have allowed a lot of people of all ages to forget to slow down, to forget that reading the book a few pages a day is a savory experience, as opposed to skimming or going to summaries and missing the joy of the pace in favor of the race. It's the going there that is the purpose; the getting there is the excuse for the going. I agree with you. I watch journalists who look up wiki notes and think they've done an investigation, while old school me is saying "Ten more calls. Ten more interviews. Someone I'll connect with will have something to say that I have not considered yet", and for me, while that's a pain, it's paid off always--when I worked for you, Steve, and since. In my other work, in the Amazon of Peru, I watch people arrive, do six or 10 ayahuasca ceremonies in a week or three and decide to open an ayahuasca retreat and serve people and I want to scream. They don't realize that they have no idea what they're doing and shouldn't be doing it. But when I tell them, they laugh and call me an old man, tell me the world is different now. The world is not different. A tulip still takes an hour or two to open daily and is worth watching now and then, despite it taking you away from your phone or Ipad or whatever. We're in the speed-up times, and it is only going to get worse: LSD takes several hours to change your life. For a lot of people, that's just way too long.