Why sticking with the familiar is just fine
Faster, bigger, better: this is what today’s world demands of us and what we think of as normal. But according to German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, it leads to alienation from ourselves and others.
You believe that today’s society is characterized by acceleration. Could you explain?
“In today’s society, we have to continuously grow, accelerate and innovate in order to keep up. When it comes to companies and organizations, this means that without growth, costs will rise and companies will go bankrupt or jobs will disappear. But it also applies to us as individuals. We have to grow and improve: standing still is like being on an escalator that is going down. Stagnation means decline, and this is the case for many different aspects of our lives.”
“No sooner have we bought ourselves a new cell phone, it’s already obsolete. When we don’t check our email for a few hours, our inboxes are over owing. If we don’t work hard enough, we can forget about getting a promotion. Competition is one of the most important characteristics of today’s world, and time is a central element in competition: you could define competition as ‘performance per unit of time’. This is why we have become slaves to time.”
