Hassle and Bussle

A statistic came into my mind, as the furious spikey haired driver of a fiat punto gave me the victory sign. People now walk 20% faster than they used to. Judging from obesity figures and heart disease statistics; this is not due to greater levels of fitness. It’s due to a greater level of, well I honestly don’t know. Try as I might to ignore it, this statistic bothered me the whole way home incessantly popping into my head as I crossed the road. I wanted to know what suddenly made the world get itself into such a hurry.

The niggling fact remained in my head because I was reflecting on what reason existed to explain why the amount of times I have nearly been flattened in the street by drivers trying to get to their destinations a nano second quicker is becoming disquietingly common. Its not just drivers that seem determined to move me forcibly and quickly out of their way. People walking along the street, guzzling a grande crapuchino adagio from Costly Coffee while yelling down their phone as if actually trying to make everyone aware that they own a “Cell”, are prone to knocking me out of the way and not even noticing.

I was brought up to be staunchly polite: for instance if someone stands on my foot I will immediately say sorry. Why do I do this? Because I know that the other person won’t apologise and it just makes my life slightly easier? No its laziness. I can’t be bothered. I really should rant, tell them off and make my bluebottle esq voice heard or maybe the next time someone revs their engine and speeds up in my general direction I should stand there and see if they will run me over (audible sigh) all I want is a reason why the world moves so fast and has begun to ignore common courtesy; replacing it with plain rudeness. This might sound odd coming from a teenager because I have grown up in this hyper paced world and it is generally people of my generation that are guilty of this stressful quick existence.

What are we trying to do? I surmise it’s partly to do with how we have all converted to the church of Visa and it’s magical “Material world”. We want to consume as many goods as we can, own as many chattels as humanly possible, plus a few more. How do we achieve this? We spend as much money as our wages, salaries, loans overdrafts, credit cards and spare organs can get away with. People work themselves stupid cramming in as many hours as possible so they can buy more Ikea made throw cuchions. They go to the gym in pursuit of their ideal body in the hope of attracting a partner and when they cant do it they feel worthless because Hollywood and other pillars of the church of Visa try and make us believe that if we are not all the same we are worthless.

The problems created by the ridiculous stressful life people lead are not just that of rudeness and of inconsiderance. They have started to present themselves in peoples health. More and more people are dying young from stress enduced diseases such as heart attacks and high blood pressure. Also the second highest cause of death for males in Scotland is suicide next only to road accidents both of which have obvious parallels with stress induced situations.

A lot of people are probably thinking: Uh huh so what? Live for the moment, better to burn out than fade away, Carpet Dee m. However I don’t understand it. You can’t enjoy life if you are constantly stressed out. If you spend all your life trying to achieve and aquire things, you will never have any time to relish that which you work so hard for. I don’t know what’s going on in every single one of your lives and quite frankly I don’t care. I’m not trying to make people stand back and evaluate their life’s or anything quite as condescending as that. I simply want people to learn some manners and stop trying to run me over when I just went down to the shops to buy some milk.