I find it largely depressing that W.B. Yeats was bemoaning the acceleration of culture back in the 19th century:

These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade over which man has leaned from the beginning. The people of the cities have the machine, which is prose and a parvenu. They have few events. They can turn over the incidents of a long life as they it by the fire. With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold. It is said the most eloquent people in the world are the Arabs, who have only the bare earth of the desert and a sky swept bare by the sun. "Wisdom has alighted upon three things," goes their proverb: "the hand of the Chinese, the brain of the Frank, and the tongue of the Arab." This, I take it, is the meaning of that simplicity sought for so much in these days by all the poets, and not to be had at any price.

Yeats wrote that in his introduction to his collection Irish Fairy and Folk Tales,published in 1888. Almost 120 years later, I'm still sitting in my chair nodding in agreement. "Nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold." What would Yeats make of us now?