Dr. Dale Whelehan

And people are feeling like there is too much to do, not enough time to do it.

But actually, their brain is often just overwhelmed by the speed of which society has evolved.

Correct.

Yes.

So there's a fundamental theory called social acceleration.

Every time we get better, we make a technological advancement that's supposed to give us back time.

We have a tendency to fill that time automatically with something new.

And that's not to say that there isn't any impact of all that old work as well.

We're still ticking along doing that, but now we're layering in new on top of it as well.

And I think we're seeing this with AI.

You know, people are talking about using large language models in their work and they're overwhelmed.

There's this new research coming out suggesting that people are engaging what's called cognitive surrender, which used to be this way of thinking you thought fast, you thought slow, depending on, you know, whether you were actively engaging in rational reflection of work.

But now people are just not engaging whatsoever because they're so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it came from the Industrial Revolution, but it got tied up quite a lot with Calvinist kind of Protestant work ethic back in the late 1800s, which said that if you aren't being productive, you aren't being worthwhile, essentially.

So capitalism and industrial capitalism formed quite along that sort of moral way of thinking about our time.

And that is now completely institutionalized in how we have our relationship to time today.

You only need to look at people, the increasing level of hustle culture that we would have traditionally only seen in places like America, seeping into places like Ireland.

The idea that nothing is enough.

You know, there's always more I can be doing.

There's an anxiety, I think, around, you know, the achievement of the American dream or the equivalent of there, depending on your country.