Friday, June 21, 2013

We've Been Whining About ‘Modern’ Life for Over 100 Years

English: Last panel of the xkcd webcomic "...
English: Last panel of the xkcd webcomic "Philosophy". On the xkcd site, it displays with the tooltip "It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Do you think, thanks to technology, that modern life moves too fast? That email is too fast and frequent, overwhelming the senses and cheapening our correspondence? Or that we've forgotten how to relax (especially in cities) and that we spend too much “family time” staring into our own personal devices, rather than talking or going on long walks?
If so, you’re not alone. In fact, as cartoonist Randall Munroe demonstrates in the comic series xkcd, we've been complaining about the exact same stuff for more than 100 years. Munroe assembled a series of excerpts dating back to 1871 in which authors of the time bemoaned the pace of modern life, pined for days gone by and lamented the decline of human social interaction. 
See below:


What's old is new. Has "modern life" ever not been a pain to the generation living through it? 

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