What’s the RUSH?

You may have no­ticed if you’ve got this far in the mag­a­zine (I’m not even going to joke about the idea of any­one rush­ing to the back to read this col­umn be­fore any­thing else) that this month’s issue is all about the new decade and the rad­i­cal changes it could bring in all sorts of areas, from the en­vi­ron­ment and pol­i­tics to tech­nol­ogy and cul­ture.

What­ever nov­el­ties may be on the hori­zon, it is above all the pace of change that causes my head to spin. I’d fi­nally saved up enough money to get that Mini­Disc player be­fore the very idea was draw­ing snorts of de­ri­sion from the CD crowd. So you move on to CDs, and just as you’re putting the fin­ish­ing touches to your sludge metal col­lec­tion, your san­ity is being ques­tioned be­cause now it’s all about dig­i­tal down­loads - get with it! So you du­ti­fully in­vest in an ipod and you’re fi­nally get­ting the knack of con­nect­ing up to itunes be­fore you can al­ready hear the snig­gers: never heard of stream­ing, grandad? Dur­ing all that about six months have passed and you’re so con­fused and dis­heart­ened that you swear off music al­to­gether and learn to be con­tent with the voices in your head.

(I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have writ­ten that be­cause so­cial at­ti­tudes are also chang­ing rapidly, and it’s easy to imag­ine the dis­ap­prov­ing com­ments about how men­tal health is­sues are no jok­ing mat­ter, ac­tu­ally, and how that’s just typ­i­cal from a cis­gen­dered, meat-eat­ing, white male who prob­a­bly doesn’t even do yoga and who would no doubt vote for Don­ald Trump if given the chance.)

Ac­cord­ing to tra­di­tion, it took Bud­dha seven weeks of con­tin­u­ous med­i­ta­tion to reach en­light­en­ment, which is hard to imag­ine him doing these days with his smart­phone ding­ing him with a What­sapp mes­sage every 35 sec­onds. Imag­ine how his­tory and cul­ture might have changed if Bud­dha had passed on the joy­ous news that he had achieved nir­vana only to be con­fronted with blank stares as the peo­ple around him quickly cal­cu­lated whether he was being racist or sex­ist be­fore re­spond­ing with a dis­mis­sive: “Never heard of them, mate.”

Clearly, some changes can’t come quick enough. The leaps and bounds made by med­ical re­search today are to be wel­comed (and a lit­tle more fund­ing wouldn’t do any harm, if there are any politi­cians out there), while the fore­casts on the im­mi­nent im­pact of cli­mate change seem to jus­tify the ar­gu­ments that it should be re­ferred to as the cli­mate emer­gency.

Yet, there are other changes that need more time. Take one of the more im­por­tant con­tem­po­rary is­sues: foot­ball. A new man­ager is taken on and charged with win­ning the Cham­pi­ons League, which is no­to­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to do, but after spend­ing €300 mil­lion and only man­ag­ing a loss and two draws every­one’s call­ing for his head. At the same time, the sta­tis­tics say that the av­er­age age at which chil­dren are ex­posed to pornog­ra­phy these days is 11 years old, while ever more take-away restau­rants are of­fer­ing free food if de­liv­ery takes longer than 20 min­utes. Then there’s Apple bring­ing out a new iPhone (at up­wards of a thou­sand euros) every 12 months, while on the Au­di­ble plat­form you can lis­ten to au­dio­books at dou­ble the speed to get through them quicker. Mind you, I have no­ticed that it is tak­ing a very long time for av­er­age salaries to re­cover after the 2008 fi­nan­cial crash, but that’s just prob­a­bly me being cyn­i­cal.

Any­way, peo­ple who have read this col­umn be­fore will know not to ex­pect any pro­found think­ing, I just wanted to say, let’s slow down a bit, what’s the rush, and does any­body want to buy a Mini­Disc player?