Me too. Everybody else too. Burned out and bad news-ed to death.

It’s one result of being alive during a tsunami of information and technological innovation and cutthroat profit making.

Each of our poor Psyches has to find its way every day through mountains of opinions disguised as facts; through vast deserts where every grain of sand is an advertisement for a new product while actual product satisfaction fades like a mirage on the horizon; where no sooner do we figure out how to arrange our facebook page than the proprietors change the whole format; where no matter how many hours we work we still worry about money, about whether or not we can afford to live. Now isn’t that a weird thought? Whether we can afford to live…?

Yet the basic equipment we have for filtering data and processing change is no better than the equipment our hunting/gathering ancestors had living in small, stable communities. The raw mechanics of a human being — the brain, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, the muscles, the bones, the psychic relationship between conscious and unconscious knowledge — don’t change quickly. Can’t change quickly. The raw mechanics of being human take thousands of generations to change.

So while we think of ourselves as ultra modern — sporting the absolute latest and fastest sort of phone — we often find ourselves acting like cavemen.

Or, feeling completely exhausted and overwhelmed. Over-whelmed. Whelmed-over.

Perhaps it’s inevitable, as Robert Bly speculated one time during a lecture on the human shadow. Perhaps with each technological advance there’s a necessary and corresponding spiritual loss. Perhaps each conscious gain has to push out some older unconscious entity, like knowing which plants are poisonous, in order to gain a toehold.

Who knows? What we do know is that microwaves cook so fast we get impatient if it takes two minutes to boil water. We do know we can connect ourselves to the whole world via the internet, as long as we focus on the monitor and don’t look around the room we’re in. We do know we can walk down the street or drive a car while talking to someone miles away, but only if we ignore the people right there in front of us.

Ach… I fear that unless we’re very careful from here on out, each technological advance will only make us more impatient with each living breathing moment; will only take us farther away from the here and now which our instinctual human natures call home.