Time & Perspective Quote by Georg Simmel

Modernity, Simmel suggests, is a kind of effortless rafting trip: the current does the work, and you mistake being moved for choosing to move. The line lands because it reads like praise - life "infinitely easy" - but the ease is a trap door. Those "stimulations, interests, uses of time" arriving "from all sides" sound generous until you realize they function as substitutes for will. Convenience becomes a quiet form of discipline.

Simmel is writing at the turn of the 20th century, when the modern metropolis, mass circulation media, department stores, timetables, and new forms of consumption were reorganizing everyday attention. His sociological insight isn't that city life is busy; it's that busyness can be externally authored. A person no longer has to generate desire, curiosity, even a rhythm of consciousness. The environment supplies them prepackaged, like a menu. You "hardly... swim" because the stream provides a ready-made itinerary for the self.

The subtext is a warning about personality under conditions of abundance. When stimuli are constant, selection becomes the real labor - and if you don't do it, selection is done for you by institutions, trends, and the crowd. Simmel's phrasing turns passivity into a bodily image: to be carried is to relinquish agency without noticing, because it feels like relief. It's an early diagnosis of what we'd now call attention capture: life gets easier at the exact point it gets harder to call your life your own.