Infrastructure

The world is connected.  There is a metaphor claiming that it is getting smaller because it no longer takes us several months to get across the ocean and only seconds to get a message halfway around the world.  We are all becoming closer and closer.  Communication is faster and easier than ever before, so not only are cities denser, but it is also becoming difficult in first-world countries to find any time for oneself, without emails and text messages and related elements of "keeping up with the times."

Everywhere you look, there's this constant need to keep ahead, messages buzzing back and forth at ridiculous rates.  It's impossible to keep track of everything going on in the world.  By the time you finish reading one message, you have four more waiting for you in a never-ending sequence of current events flooded in your direction.  Everyone is perpetually connected, everything is tied together in a massive web of emails, phone calls, texts, IMs, and countless other things.

And every once in a while, you'll stop in the middle of it all.  Turn around and watch it all rushing on and on and on around you.  Everything passing by at this ridiculous rate, none of it stopping or caring about you.  Suddenly, you realize just how small a part of this world you are.  Just how much it all goes on without you, how much you don't matter to it.

That's when you feel lonely, and alone, and disconnected.  Of course, the next minute, you pick up the phone, open the computer, do something, anything, and once again feel like a part of the world.  Does it matter?  Does it make a difference that in that one moment there was nothing to feel and nothing to do?  That moment could have come and gone hundreds of thousands of times, but in the end, it has no result.  It end up where it all began.  Back in that rush of communication that forever runs our lives in this day and age.