In the mid-80s my father was about the same age that I am now. He was the same father that I'd known all my life. As usual he would comment on the events of the day with the perspective of a person for whom everything was either black or white. The AIDS epidemic was in full bloom --- bad. The then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had declared a moratorium on the deployment of middle-range missiles in Europe --- good. Underlying everything was the unshakable belief that there would be a stock market crash and another great depression. It was just a matter of time.

Several months earlier, I'd gotten my father a computer terminal with a modem that allowed him to connect to a BBS (bulletin board service). He was a dedicated reader of several newspapers and a voracious consumer of news. My belief was that we could use this service to keep in daily touch since we lived in different communities, a long distance call apart.

I've always been an optimist. At the beginning I could only see the upside of this arrangement. I knew it would take a bit of time to get him up and running and comfortably using this system and I was prepared for the trips to see him for both training and encouragement. Eventually, I came to realize that my optimism was unfounded and we abandoned the project.

On one of my last visits before abandoning my plan, we had what seemed like just another anodyne conversation. He was kvetching as usual about the usual things... the state of the world, how he didn't think this was going to work and how he was tired. As I tried to assure him that things would get easier, he turned to me and in his often patronizing way said, "Things are going faster than when I was your age. When I was your age things were growing after the [second world] war. There were terrible things happening then, there was McCarthy and the cold war, but at least you knew what was happening. Now you can't even keep track of what's going on." Unlike when he was younger, his voice trailed off. He was truly tired.

But I was determined to see my plan through to completion. In that, I was a lot like my father, convinced that I would succeed in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It took me a few more visits before I --- finally --- threw in the towel.

While, at the time, that interchange with my father seemed inconsequential, it's something that I've recalled many times over the years, increasingly as I've approached --- and now passed --- the age that he was when he made those remarks. I've come to realize that, like my father said, the world seems to be going faster than when I was young. Increasingly, I find it difficult or impossible to keep on top of things, to integrate the new into my established experience.

When I retired from over a decade working in the Internet server and software engineering industry I had a really good understanding how things worked and how things were developing. Within four months, I felt out of touch; within less than a year, I realized that I couldn't go back even if I had wanted to do so.

Why did this happen to my father and why did the same thing seem to be happening to me? Unlike my father, I did not come of age the onset of the great depression nor did I grow up in a family in which my parents fled the pogroms of eastern Europe to establish a new life in Canada. I had not had to live through the trauma of the second world war with its seemingly binary conflict between "good" and "evil". I was at the leading edge of the boomer generation, a generation that came of age during a time of increasing tolerance and expansion. Our best years were wrapped in the struggles of idealism, of optimism and increasing social cohesion. For many of us, in a burgeoning middle class, the world was our oyster. All roads that previously had led to Rome now led to anywhere the mind would travel. We were faced with so many possibilities, most of which were positive and nourishing of both body and soul.

While my father and I had had very different life experiences, why did we end up, in our mid-70s, feeling in much the same way?

The simplest conclusion was that what we both experienced was a natural process of aging. As we age, we are unable to process our experiences as quickly as we once could and, hence, the feelings of "life passing you by" and "the world moving faster and faster" were just an unpleasant byproduct of the natural aging process. For many, these observations seemed to justify this conclusion and there was nothing more to it than that.

While this quick and neat package of "evidence" and "conclusion" seemed reasonable on the surface, I found it totally unsatisfying. While easily plausible, there were other things happening in societies around the world that raised in me the question, "Is that all there is to it?"

As a university science student in the mid-1960s, I would often head to the university's science library when I had a project. There I would head to the stacks and pour through books that I thought might contain relevant information, sometimes to no avail. In such situations I would head to desk that handled inter-library loans. I'd submit a request and, if successful, a number of weeks later I might receive a book from another academic library at another university from elsewhere in our province (or even further afield). If this process yielded nothing of use, I would try and find graduate students or faculty who might be able to illuminate me by shedding light on my project. On occasion, this entire chain of events would not yield anything of significant value and I would find myself at a dead end.

The notion that, just over thirty years later, I would be able have virtual access to virtually all of the world's academic libraries, was inconceivable. What, to me, was even more astounding was that wide open access to humankind's knowledge across all domains could be an impediment in the search for knowledge. It was feast or famine. At least, in my time, I knew, with some certainty, when I'd reached the end of the road. Youth, decades later, would be faced with the daunting challenge of figuring out fact from fiction in a world of information surfeit.

I noticed that, in spite of our increased access to knowledge and our increased connectedness, in spite of our overall increased standard of living and the fact that many of the jobs that exist today were inconceivable three or four decades ago, society seemed much more ill at ease. 

Why does that seem to be so?  Is what I am feeling just a matter of aging or is society moving faster for everybody. This was a question that intrigues me and for which I seek an answer.