How Understanding the Idea of Social Acceleration Can Help You Make Sense of This Disorienting, Relentless World

Why it feels like you're living in a frenetic standstill

Last weekend, I found myself in a common scenario that many people in our modern world experience.

I was overwhelmed.

Over the preceding week, stuff just started piling up on my plate in my work and personal life.

A scheduling snafu put me in a position where I had to prep for more podcast interviews than I usually do, which meant more reading in a shorter amount of time. Some recorded interviews have also been taking more time than usual to edit, which further ate into my schedule. Due to the podcast crunch, I got behind in writing articles for AoM and Dying Breed.

Exacerbating the professional pile-up are burdens on my personal bandwidth. It just seems like a lot is going on. The kids have activities and events that require giving them rides or coordinating rides. Church responsibilities over the weekend took up more time than usual and then needed some back-and-forth texting between different leaders in different organizations to coordinate things.

I've got a bunch of open loops on projects around the house: installing a new fan in my daughter's bedroom, following up about getting new windows installed, calling the car rental place to extend our rental while our car is in the shop, following up with a caterer about food for a party we're planning, taking care of some retirement planning stuff, and more.

On top of those projects, there's just a lot of social/family stuff I've had to think about. Helping kids with pre-teen/teenage problems, answering texts from friends and family members, and trying to figure out if I could make it out to a funeral in New Mexico for a family member who recently passed away.

By Sunday night, I was ready to declare time bankruptcy. Just delete everything on my to-do list and run off to a monastery in the desert, declaring a vow of simplicity.

I'm sure many of you can relate.

This feeling of constant acceleration, of life moving too fast while demands pile up, seems to be a defining characteristic of modern existence.

There's a sociologist named Hartmut Rosa who has studied this phenomenon and has even given it a name: social acceleration.

When I learned about Rosa's theory of social acceleration, it provided a framework to help me understand why I and so many others feel overwhelmed by modern life.

Knowing about social acceleration hasn't cured me of feeling caught in a time crunch, but it's helped me become a bit more compassionate with myself and others who feel harried by the pace of modern life.

Maybe it will help you, too.