I’m a bit irritable today. The air here is overcome with smoke from the wildfires in Canada and is affecting me poorly. I can’t even imagine how the people feel closer to the fires. I wish them well.

It seems nowadays, things move fast. (I hope I don’t sound like an old fogy.) We’re moving faster. Needing to consume energy drinks to keep up. According to Dunkin Donuts, “American runs on Dunkin.” We want things now! Dinner gets cooked quickly in a microwave or delivered in a flash. There’s next-day shipping with Amazon Prime. Streaming allows us to view what we want when we want it. We jump from one activity to the next. Oh my God, my head is spinning!

It’s no wonder a year goes by seemingly in the blink of an eye.

It’s not because we’re getting older. It’s because business convinced us we need to move fast. People want to blame society, but the root of it is business – greed, and power.

Essentially, we’re puppets. We fell for all the marketing propaganda and commercialism out there. We need an iPhone to survive, and by golly, if our kids don’t have an iPad, our race is doomed! Recently, I accidentally forgot my phone at home and thought, what if something happens, there are no pay phones? We have little choice regarding having a cell phone for communication.

I like to watch The Foods that Built America on the History Channel. It shows how companies created and sold products like Coca-Cola, Jif Peanut Butter, etc. When things were first made, it was done with care, and the inventor/creator was proud of it. They wanted others to enjoy what they created, and they earned a living—nothing wrong there.

But something changed along the way. Small businesses got gobbled up by bigger businesses, and profits were most important. They spent money on advertising and marketing campaigns to get American consumers to buy their products or services. Jif Peanut Butter had (has) ingredients that were (are) bad for us. The company put out a marketing campaign to shame mothers with the “Choosey mothers choose Jif” commercials to get them to buy their peanut butter, which worked! The company told the American public what to do, and people fell for it. Heck, I used to eat Jif Peanut Butter too! So food ingredients have been cheapened and replaced with products that are not good for us, and we either don’t know or don’t care.  Production is super fast, getting more products out to the market in record time, so the shelves are stocked when we rush to the store to buy groceries.

Wow, is anyone else getting exhausted just reading this?

The by-product of all this rapid expansion into a speedy life is anxiety, depression, and other illnesses/maladies brought on by stress, food additives, or substances, to name a few. But no worries, the pharmaceutical companies have answered the call and are here to numb, jolt or pacify any problem that exists because of that. Around the hamster wheel we go, speeding around the sun.

Most of us didn’t even see it coming. We just moved with society, one YouTube or TikTok video at a time nudging us into a dimension that sort of resembles a life but is partially lived online in a pseudo universe contrived by big businesses who want our money. We can’t bear not having that connection to the world out there because the media has convinced us that what’s here isn’t good enough and we need this or that to be happy.

Yesterday, I was going through pictures on my computer. I was shocked at the number of inspirational memes I had accumulated over the years (1,510!) I thought, why do I have this many? Then it hit me. The more I see them, the more I think I need to read them to live a happy life. If you think about it, the Internet shows us that we don’t know enough and that we need to spend our time watching, reading, and learning more and more and more. Information floods our brains, and time escapes us. We are prisoners to a screen. We move around the sun, and we never notice how fast it’s happening.

There’s a hollowness inside us we try to fill with consumption, no matter what type. I know. I’ve been there. I got hooked on social media just like many others, and I’d say I would only look at Facebook for fifteen minutes, but somehow an hour passed. I never remember an hour of school ever flying by like that. Is social media more entertaining, or is there something about its addictive nature that sucks us in like a whirlpool we can’t escape from?

We rush time. Racing for this or that. Wanting to get things done to start something else or work on a few things at once. Our brains can’t keep up, so we drink caffeine or energy drinks (not good for our bodies). Yet, I see kids drinking them. I have to wonder what illnesses will arise from all this energy drink consumption that could have been prevented if we didn’t have it.

We have the power to slow things down. We don’t need all this technology to survive. And we certainly don’t need all the things we think we do to be happy. We’re being force-fed a steady diet of negative ideas that create fear to control and manipulate us into doing what big business wants.

That’s all it is. If you lighten up on media (tv, social, etc.) for a few days, your life will improve. I’m not saying to live under a rock. Just be mindful of the amount of negative stuff you allow in your life.

The quality of our lives comes back to mindfulness, being aware of what we think, consume, and do. If we want a better life, we have to make an effort. If you get a hiccup along the way, take slow deep breaths (I know it isn’t easy to do today with the smoke) and step in the direction you want to go. You can do it! Give that to yourself.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you find something of value in my words.

To Reducing Our Speed,

Francesca