Have things gotten incredibly fast lately?

Over the past few decades, I feel that the speed of time has become tremendously fast.

Order food with your smartphone and it arrives at home in 20 minutes; traffic lights change faster; and all kinds of services and phenomena are speeding up.

I want to push back a little against this accelerating world, so I make a point of setting aside time and taking it slowly. One way I do that is by taking walks. Strolling from Umeda in Osaka toward Shinsaibashi is a daily routine for me.

There are days when I walk straight down Midosuji, while on other days I make a detour to Osaka Castle with a coffee in hand or walk along the Sakuragawa River, making use of all sorts of routes! I'll post a few of my favorite photos.

Each route has different scenery and different people passing by. Stopping at a café that catches your eye and organizing your thoughts in that moment is one of the wonderful things about taking a walk! Most routes take roughly one to one and a half hours.

That said, it takes only around ten minutes by train from Umeda to Shinsaibashi. From the perspective of the society I described above,my one-and-a-half-hour walking time may look like self-indulgent slowness

I think that in the days when people traveled on foot or by horse carriage, they could feel firsthand the continuity of the cultures and landscapes of the villages along the way. However, modern technology, which leaps instantly from point to point, increases the speed of arrival while whittling away the rich gradations of process and experience that exist along the way, and society is in effect thrusting a NO in the face of this “self-indulgent slowness.”

And I think the emergence of generative AI will further accelerate the efficiency and speed demanded by this society. Even for a difficult paper or complex information, all you have to do is ask AI and it hands you a summary in an instant. At the same time, however, this convenience can weaken the “deep understanding” that comes from carefully working through things with your own hands and mind, as well as the “physical curiosity” that drives the pursuit of knowledge.

In a society where the pace of work continues to quicken and all kinds of value are increasingly evaluated by numbers and a single measure of efficiency,what I personally value is “the ability to control my own pace of life without being swallowed by the speed of society.” Of course, keeping pace is a prerequisite for living in society, but on days off I make time to do some coding myself or write characters by hand with a pen (partly because I am afraid of losing the ability to write kanji), deliberately valuing the time I take.

The work of efficiently clearing short-term goals is an area AI will excel at in the future. Precisely because we are in such an era, we should deliberately take the time to explore “slowly” and deeply the subjects that interest us and pique our curiosity. And we should cultivate the time that is truly our own, beyond mere efficiency.

I want to live through this ultra-accelerating AI era in a distinctly human and heart-enriching way!