Technology and Choice and Plagiarized Quotes

"Cultural and technological evolution have outstripped biological evolution, putting enormous stress on the human animal - particularly those in the business and professional classes, who are most driven by status competition and the burgeoning pressures of capitalism."

There are some technologists who believe that the pace of innovation - taken for granted by most of us but lightning fast in terms of human evolution - is far outpacing the ability of the mind to adapt to it.  For most of our existence things changed very slowly or not at all - it has only been in the last hundred years that things have gotten dizzyingly fast, making a lot of us feel stressed and out of control.  Personal computers have only been around for 20 or 25 years, for instance, yet now we have cell phones that have more processing power than the NASA computers used for the first space launch, and I am NOT making that up.

There's also a school of thought that all of the personal choices we have and the opportunities to remake our lives in almost any way we can envision may contribute to some of our feelings of anxiety.  In the not so distant past we didn't have the ability to escape our lot in life - no matter how dismal our prospects we knew how our lives were going to turn out.  This might have caused physical discomfort but tamped down the tendency to anxiety - you didn't have to feel bad that you weren't living up to your potential because your potential was nonexistent.  

This quote is from a man who wrote a book based on a diary he kept during his 61st year: 

"A few years later, in my late 50s, when I could no longer pretend I wasn’t heading into the last turn, or for the back nine, or toward the clubhouse (someone should make a list of all the euphemisms we employ to denote the onset of aging) - after another cough that wouldn’t go away, after the onset of the existential angst that seemed to set in after 55, and especially after my parents died - I realized that I had forgotten the instances that made turning 50 feel unique."

What does my anxiety buy me?  I'm not afraid of failure or what anyone thinks of me.  It is currently the big mystery in my life.