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Oh, hell, the recipe calls for a can of tomatoes. No worries, there’s one in the basement. I’ll just go down and—wait, I should bring up the dog treats while I—there’s that tax folder. Better move it so I remember to file this year’s backup and—did I get Andrew to sign that form? Because we need to send in the tax stuff, which means it’s also time to cut back the grasses and clematis, and—
And I am back upstairs, sans tomatoes.
First I lost my once prodigious ability to multitask. Now I am losing my—what would you even call it? Sequential memory? Presence of mind? Continuity of self? Thoughts slip away too fast, each new one bumped aside by the next. Before, a string of ideas chugged along like a toy train. Now the cars fall off the rails one after another.
People past sixty quibbling about memory is a trope as tired as the same people at the end of a good party. I suppose we are nearing the end of a good party. Or at least a party that held terrors, flirtations, a bit of overindulgence, and a few moments of fun. But now that everyone is equally scattered and distracted, the vagaries of memory are no longer the elderly’s special domain.
Nor is the mind-rattling pace a new problem. Goethe diagnosed it in 1825. An age that he—ha!—thought was moving too fast. In a postscript to a letter, he coined a name for this condition in stick-it-all-together German fashion: veloziferisch. From the Italian velocita, meaning speed, and the German luziferisch, meaning Luciferian. A reference to hell’s angel, Lucifer—thus a negation of the good. To Goethe, Bildung—healthy motion, organic growth—was good. And the accelerated speed of the era was destroying any chance of it.
Speed was not automatically bad. But Goethe felt there was a limit point, and once you zoomed past it, the velocity became dangerous and disfiguring. He saw the Machine Age as rushing industry and communication, which then increased the pace of social relations, culture, and everyday life. In the resulting blur, the natural rhythms of organic growth were outstripped and left behind.
Goethe never sent the letter, but he used his invented word again four years later, in a revised edition of his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants. Today, veloziferisch has been resurrected as code for our acceleration, made exponentially faster than the Machine Age by computers, then the internet, then AI. Each of which would have been revolutionary enough to last an earlier, more organic culture for at least a millennium.
Slow down, I want to tell the world. Slow down, I do tell myself. Keep your mind focused on one task at a time, and solve that before you move to the next. Mindfulness is no longer a pretty idea, something to practice later when there is time. Mindfulness has become a grim necessity. And while paying slow, single-minded attention does feel serene, forcing myself to make it a habit only reminds me how far I have slipped out of the loop. In this culture, it is exhilarating to move fast, and if you break things as you go, all the better. Rush of power. Rush of power.
In Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Goethe describes the world around him as one in which nothing is given time to ripen. In English translation, “one lives from hand to mouth, each moment consuming the previous moment, wasting day after day without producing anything lasting.” He could be describing a poorly paid remote worker constantly swamped with email and Zoom meetings. “Do we not already have enough pages for all the daily papers!” he exclaims, adding that “everything that anybody goes about doing, writing, even what one intends to do in the future, it is all dragged before the public eye.”
How I would love a chance to sit him down with social media. “No one can suffer or enjoy themselves for a moment except as a means of mere entertainment for others,” he writes, prophesying the selfie. The what-I-had-for-breakfast photos. The Insta filters. The TikTok reels. The memes. All of which would boggle his mind, yet he already sees the arc that will lead us to them.
In his masterpiece, Faust, Goethe shows his character’s restlessness, his craving for a full life, his FOMO, to be destructive. Faust is crazed with impatience, willing to give up his scholarly reflections and sell his soul outright, if that will let him “plunge into life’s whirl,” prove himself a man by rushing headlong into the new way of living.
We all know where that got him.
Go too fast, and you enter a dark chaos. Even in the 1820s, Goethe thinks modernity is making it hard to stay on course, to live naturally and calmly. He winces at the newfangled batteries, electric motors, express mail, steam-powered locomotives and engines, clanging factories—in short, the shattering of nature’s peace in the pursuit of wealth. Others of his day also rail against the deadening, even immoral effects of mechanization. Thomas Carlyle, who named The Age of Machinery, describes it as focused entirely, “with its whole undivided might,” on “adapting means to ends.” But only Goethe takes issue with speed itself.
And the telephone has not even been invented yet.
Come forward; rev up to today’s speed. Now think small for a minute. Okay, not a whole minute. Three seconds. Imagine all the hurt feelings, even ruptured relationships, left in the wake of a rapidfire, thoughtless digital exchange. First, we realized the dangers of email: its speed and compression made it hard to express the right tone and convey subtle complexity. We solved that dilemma with a few smileyfaces, inserted with a single key tap. Soon email felt too slow, and we switched to texting, thumbs vibrating like hummingbirds dipping into a foxglove. Lifelong readers gave up on long books—tedious and too hard to take in—in favor of short stories. Articles were tagged with the number of minutes that would have to be sacrificed to read them. Road rage flared. Sound bites damaged civic discourse. Doomscrolling, eyes darting across headline after headline, slid people, slick as a waterslide, into depression.
Goethe saw a dangerous separation beginning, prying apart the mechanical and the organic. He saw, writes the scholar Bryan Norton, “a traumatic rupture lying at the very heart of modernity’s self-image.” Today, that self-image has shed its linear, step-by-step rhythm, its laborer versus robber baron tension. Instead the gap, ever wider, is between the organic (which does not change) and those manipulating the slicked, speed-of-light digital world we think will make us more than human. Faster, stronger, smarter—by virtue of artifice. Nobody can keep up. Nobody can experience it all. Our definition of “a full life” is increasingly distorted, devoid of the symmetry Goethe found important. We are further than ever from the natural world of body and soul.
Chaos is inevitable, say the accelerationists, Elon Musk chief among them. Speed it up, let everything implode so it can be remade from scratch. The latest version of the Faustian bargain.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
