That a busy life is a stupid life

In his “Projekt Handlu Kabardynskimi Konmi” (The Proposal to Trade in Kabardine Horses), a largely overrated book in my honest opinion (an attempt to make a work of literature out of a travel book because there wasn’t enough material to write a travel book), its author, Sroda writes one accurate observation which I know from personal experience. Sroda lives in a small town in the North-east, population 7,000, (I know the town well, I nearly bought a lumberyard there once), and he reports that arriving in Warsaw always confuses him: there are too many stimuli. He means stimuli not like a drug addict – as a good thing – yeah, man, I can feel it – but like a typical country bumpkin, as distractions: buses, lights, sirens, hoardings, policemen, neon signs, beggars -- unwelcome things rudely demanding his attention. Too much information for the poor brain to process. One becomes exhausted, one has no time to look at anything in depth. Not like life in the sticks, where one can spend an afternoon contemplating a tree.

I remember well an observation, perhaps the most important observation, which I made on my last trip to Tokyo: that everyone was so busy, and so exhausted with their million daily stimuli and so busy with their million daily tasks, that he became, quite literally stupid, unable to think straight about his life and its priorities. One simply did not have enough free time, and when he did, one fell asleep with exhaustion. There is a price to pay for a busy life: a busy life just can’t help being -- a stupid life.