“I can not do it.” How often do you say these two words? I have enough because I really don’t have time to do everything I have planned, although technology offers me many time-saving tools: I send emails and voice messages, pay bills and shop during the day. But again, why do I feel this way?

The same question has occupied the German thinker, sociologist and Jena University professor Hartmut Rose for the last decade. “Modernity is about saving time,” he comments. “All machines, from the railroad to the microwave oven and digital technology, are built to save time.” However, the more we find ways to do something in less time, the more things we have to do. Why is this happening;

Modernity, Rosa argues, is associated with a “system of constant acceleration of life,” which he calls a “system of dynamic stabilization.” Simply put, in order for our capitalist societies to maintain the status quo they have achieved and stay in the race, they will have to constantly accelerate productivity, innovation, competition.

By the term “system” he understands not only the economy, but also the system of health care, education and culture. “Dynamic stabilization is also linked to economic growth, technological acceleration and cultural innovation. However, the growth rate is greater than the acceleration rate,” he says, and gives a simple example. The time it takes to write a letter is twice as long as it takes to write an email. Well, he continues, if I used to write 10 emails a week, now I can write 10 emails in half the time. Correctly; “The problem is that before we only wrote 10 emails, today we will write 20, 30 or even 40 emails a day. Thus, the growth rate is greater than the acceleration rate. Therefore, we feel that we never have time for correspondence. It’s the same with transportation: we take a car to save time on foot, but end up covering long distances. It’s a structural problem,” he says.

But the pursuit of time has consequences, and not just individual ones. In my comment about the phenomenon of burnout, Rosa seems to agree, but understands that the consequences are deeper. “There are two problems with speed,” he comments. “First, if you don’t have enough time to get to know and understand the other person, what I call alienation occurs.” The second problem, he adds, concerns the energy we have to waste every time to keep the “motor of our accelerating life” in balance, mental energy as well as natural resource energy. “The high speeds of the social system cause the atmosphere to burn out, we overheat our atmosphere and psyche from the pressure to move faster and faster.”

We can’t just slow down. We will end the economic and political disaster.

But there are three things that by their nature cannot go faster. The first, he says, is the unchanging rhythm of nature, the second is our mental world, which takes time, and the third is democracy, which by its very nature takes time. “As our society becomes more complex and rapidly changing, the consequences of our actions spread over time. Decisions become more difficult and complex, and many visual and social groups must be considered. The logic of democracy is to slow down decision-making processes, and the logic of the market and the media is to speed them up, so we have a desynchronization between the economy and the media, on the one hand, and politics, on the other.

I think about what Hartmut Rosa is telling me, and already I feel that I will not have time to ask him everything I want. So what can we do? Should we download time management apps on our mobile phone or slow down development? Neither, argues Rosa in her book Acceleration and Alienation, published by Plethos. “One of the reasons I wrote this book,” he explains, “is because people always think that the problem of time is their problem” and “they see this as their personal mistake, and there are many books that confirm this, and they are told to meditate or practice mindfulness. I believe that we cannot solve the structural problem individually. As Adorno said, there is no good life in the wrong system.

“Slowing down is not the answer,” he continues. “We can’t just slow down. We will end up with an economic and political disaster,” he notes, referring to the economic crisis in Greece and what caused the stagnation in development.

Therefore, he proposes a different approach to our relationship with the world and with people, which he calls “resonant”. “The first step in this relationship is that something touches me and then I respond. I don’t stay the same, there is a shift in my thinking, but the next element is something that I don’t control, unmanageable, I can’t predict what will happen and what the result will be, ”he says. and that risk, the lack of control, discourages people from letting go.

We can “tune in” to animate and inanimate things, Rosa says, but probably not digital ones like algorithms, which is why he worries about living in virtual environments like the Metaverse. He doesn’t even like the name “Metaverse”—it means, in his words, a closed universe, “has a tendency toward authoritarianism,” and he worries about the impact on our psychology. “We live in such a big world, literally and figuratively, that it is impossible to be in harmony with everything and we see the world as a point of aggression, something that we want to hit, trample, control. The logic of the digital world fuels such aggression.”