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As the pace of life in today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go. With so much to do and so little time to do it in, how are we to cope? Richard Tomkins sets about untangling the problem and comes up with an answer.
隨著當今世界生活節奏日益加快，我們似乎一直在不停奔忙。事情那么多，時間卻那么少，我們該怎么辦？里查德·湯姆金斯著手解決這一問題，并提出了建議。
Old Father Time Becomes a Terror
Richard Tomkins
1 Once upon a time, technology, we thought, would make our lives easier. Machines were expected to do our work for us, leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure.
時間老人成了可怕的老人
理查德·湯姆金斯
從前，我們以為技術發展會使我們的生活變得更安逸。那時我們覺得機器會替代我們工作，我們則有越來越多的時間休閑娛樂。
2 But instead of liberating us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate: as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium. And as each invention arrives, it eats further into our time.
但技術發展沒有把我們解放出來，而是使我們成為奴隸。新技術紛至沓來，令人目不暇接：一年涌現的技術創新相當于以前一千年。而每一項新發明問世，就進一步吞噬我們的光陰。
3 The motorcar, for example, promised unimaginable levels of personal mobility. But now, traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams.
比如，汽車曾使我們希望個人出行會方便得讓人難以想象?？扇缃?，城市車輛運行得比馬車時代還要慢，我們因交通堵塞而困在車內，徒然浪費生命。
4 The aircraft promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it delivered them. Its very existence created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking -- the transatlantic shopping expedition, for example, or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world.
飛機也曾有可能為我們拓展新天地。問題是，飛機提供了新的天地。其存在本身產生了對耗時的長途旅行的需求，這種旅行，如越洋購物，或遠道前往地球的另一半參加會議，以前我們是根本無法想象的。
5 In most cases, technology has not saved time, but enabled us to do more things. In the home, washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry. In reality, they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly, creating seven times as much washing and ironing. Similarly, the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming. 在大多數情況下，技術發展并未節省時間，而是使我們得以做更多的事。在家里，洗衣機可望使婦女擺脫繁重的洗衣勞作。但事實上，它們促使我們每天，而不是每星期換一次衣服，這就使熨洗衣物的工作量變成原來的7倍。同樣地，每周一次的沐浴為每日一次的淋浴所代替，使得用于個人穿著打扮的時間大大增加。
6 Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time -- the laptop-on-the-beach syndrome -- but added the new burden of dealing with faxes, e-mails and voicemails. It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet.
與此同時，技術發展不僅聽任工作侵入我們的閑暇時間――帶著便攜式電腦去海灘綜合癥――而且添加了收發傳真、電子郵件和語音郵件這些新的負擔。技術發展還向我們提供機會，在個人電腦上一連幾小時處理軟件故障，或把因特網上那些無用的信息塞進自己的大腦。
7 Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed: the information explosion.
除去技術發展，因特網指出了我們為何感到時間如此緊迫的第二個原因：信息爆炸。
8 A couple of centuries ago, nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers. Today, those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day.
幾個世紀以前，人類積累的幾乎所有知識都能裝在若干哲人的大腦之中。如今，這些大腦休想容納下一天中產生的新信息中的小小一部分。
