I believe I’m a dying breed. As pretentious as that sounds, please hear me out. My concerns this time are over how everything seems to be moving faster all the time. It’s so hard to find activities, places, and humans who are chill, easygoing, slow, and intentional. Hardly anybody else seems interested in resting, relaxing, slowing down, and having simple fun. Conversations now run a mile a minute, and interruptions are so common that folks even interrupt themselves multiple times whenever they talk. Asking a simple question about someone’s familiarity with something often produces a long monologue from that person, which completely overshadows and usually prevents the follow-up points I had in mind to say. This is all exhausting to try keeping up with or slowing things down to a more manageable pace, and it’s getting harder and harder to find others who gravitate toward easygoing interactions. Those who do tend to be much older than me, and I fear that when they die, so will this approach to life.
This has been in the back of my head since last month when I watched this video about a Disney short film based on Casey Jones called The Brave Engineer. In turn, that pointed me toward Steamboat Bill, which I had heard of last year though didn’t listen to until recently. That reminded me of Steamboat Bill, Jr., both the version I saw on YouTube when I was in high school and the one with live music at the Florida Theatre in 2017. It also prompted me to finally watch Steamboat Willie after knowing a bit about it since I was a little kid. It’s surprising how much vintage media about steamboats and trains is still popular and easy to find nowadays.
However, this goes even further back to the removal of the Liberty Belle along with the destruction of Tom Sawyer Island and the Rivers of America at Disney World last year. While those weren’t my favorite Disney attractions, I still found them quite satisfying. I particularly enjoyed the peace and quiet of sitting on a rocking chair on Tom Sawyer Island while looking out over the river, something nobody will ever get to do in Disney World again. Unfortunately, those fairly quiet, slower, chiller attractions will be replaced by an area that, to me at least, sounds like it will be much louder, faster, and far less peaceful.
There is also my recent trip to the last Adventure Landing in Florida. Despite being an amusement park, you could slow down and enjoy it at your own pace. Each location I visited all seemed as if they were frozen in time 20+ years ago, and that’s a large part of what made them charming to me, alongside the relaxed atmosphere. Even the larger location with a water park and more attractions could still be a place to chill and play through one thing at a time. Sadly, it sounds like one or more of those locations will be replaced by apartments or shopping areas.
These are just a few examples of slow, fun activities and places being taken away and replaced with fast-paced activities, tons of screens, or places to live, work, or spend money. Is that the future? Will everything soon require payment, technology, and moving at breakneck speed to go anywhere or do anything? I hope not, and I fear that my hope is misplaced. Most folks nowadays either seem to want that kind of world or be powerless to prevent it. I don’t know exactly what resulted in me noticing these things and wishing for everything to slow down. Plenty of folks saw it long before I did; finding such people as Mister Rogers, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, and others with similar dispositions is exactly how I learned most of what I have about this stuff. I’d much rather be around any of them and talk about life, philosophy, human relationships, my dog Sawyer, or just be present together than spend even one minute with any of the many folks who race through conversations as if the whole point of talking with someone is to get to the end as quickly as possible. I doubt any of this will change anytime soon or even ever. I hope I will find a way to find peace with it and do what I can to live life at my own pace.