"Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness."

"Everywhere, even in rural America it seems, people strive to be busy. They tell pollsters they're too busy to register to vote. To look busy and important - or because they can't help themselves -people obsessively check their smartphones every ten minutes. In surveys, people say they're too busy to make friends outside the office, too busy to date, too busy to sleep, and too busy to have sex. Eight in ten Britons report being too busy to eat dessert, even though four in ten say dessert is better than sex. We're in such a rush that the typical sound bite for a presidential candidate has been compressed from forty seconds in 1968 to 7.3 seconds in 2000.

Remember those unused vacation days? People say they're too busy to take vacation and too busy for a lunch break. [...] Being superbusy has become so normal that it's now a joke.

[But] Life in the early twenty-first century wasn't supposed to be so busy. [...] In the 1950s, work hours did finally begin to fall. Leisure time was on the rise. "So my question," Ben Hunnicutt told me, "is what the hell happened?"

Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, Ben Hunnicutt says, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. 'Then we starve the capacity we have to love,' he said. 'It creates this "unique heart," as Saint Augustine said, that is ever desperate for fulfillment."

p. 48-53

From Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One has the Time by Brigid Schulte

"No one is still. Why such a fixation on speed?"

"A man or a woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings. For all is in motion. [...] No one sits under a tree with a book, no one gazes at the ripples on a pond, no one lies in thick grass in the country. No one is still.

Why such a fixation on speed? Because in this world time passes more slowly for people in motion. Thus everyone travels at high velocity, to gain time.

[...]

Frustrated and despondent, some people have stopped looking out their windows. With the shades drawn, they never know how fast they are moving, how fast their neighbors and competitors are moving. They rise in the morning, take baths, eat plaited bread and ham, work at their desks, listen to music, talk to their children, lead lives of satisfaction.

Some argue that only the giant clock tower on Kramgasse keeps the true time, that it alone is at rest. Others point out that even the giant clock is in motion when viewed from the river Aare, or from a cloud."

From Einstein's Dreams: A novel by Alan Lightman