Running faster to stay still

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Ian Pearson, BT, Jul 2005

Technology development is now too fast for many people. And life is too fast generally, (the two are strongly related). Everyone seems to be stressed. Technology is getting better, material wealth is at an all-time high, but more people than ever are eating happy pills and lots of people are miserable. It's a simple problem. In order to gain market share, everyone is working harder and longer, with more stress, but so are their competitors, so no-one wins. We earn more, but the price for the target standard of living keeps increasing too, apart from material possessions, which fall in cost. The materialist goalposts keep moving. People buy more and own more than ever, but are less happy. Attempts to fill self actualisation demands are also futile, since those goalposts keep moving too. The faster you travel, the more fences with even greener fields you see. Meanwhile, many of the things that matter for quality of life are getting worse - people have fewer meaningful relationships, fewer close friends, spend less time with them, and the mental overheads associated with keeping too many balls in the air prevent people from properly relaxing. The slow-down movement is gathering speed, if that isn't the wrong expression, and the anti-technology attitude is strengthening. Technology is accelerating, but isn't addressing the right problems. Even in BT, we are struggling to get people to understand the need for socially oriented services and keep making all the wrong products for point to point relationships, which aren't what people need. They now need to belong again, to feel loved and to love. Targeting at businesses and individuals just makes things worse and worse.