Library

Reading the Impressionists book (from below), I discovered Gérôme, who was initially very much against impressionism. I looked him up because his academic style is sublime and wanted to see what familiar paintings belong to him. On his Wikipedia page, at the Death section, this is written, which stuck with me (after it struck me):

“By the end of his life, Gérôme felt very much a man out of his time. In 1903, recalling his first meeting with Charles Jalabert in 1840, he wrote:

At that time, Paris had nothing to do with the Paris of today: no railways, no bicycles, no cars; we were less agitated, and certain districts, among others the one we lived in and which we called the Latin Quarter, had a provincial aspect in their calm and tranquility. Now everything is changed; we no longer walk, we run like crazy; if we are not crushed during the day, we have a good chance of being murdered at night. It is charming. We have witnessed the end of a world, we are witnessing the dawn of a new one, which lacks the picturesque and above all serenity. The day is not far off when, through our customs, our ways of being, our love of the dollar (auri sacra fames), we will no longer be French, neither in spirit nor in heart. Horrible to think of! We will be Americans!^[35]

On 31 December 1903, Gérôme wrote to his student and former assistant Albert Aublet, “I begin to have enough of life. I’ve seen too much misery and misfortune in the lives of others. I still see it every day, and I’m getting eager to escape this theatre.“ He was to live just ten more days.^[5]“

I turned bold the parts that struck me . It seems that as time passes, the more we “run like crazy”. I’m probably biased by living in London, but even I as a child, just around the millennia, remember the tranquility of life compared to what I witness now closing on being 40. Even here in London, older generations tell me how serene everything used to be, and just like Gerome said above, you could be worried of being murdered at night now.
Or could it be that feeling like this is a “feature” that comes with going through life? As the majority of us report time “speeding up” as we age, (attributed to having the same routine by the way, as scientist looked into it (lack of novelty)), could it be a by-product/confirmation bias that make us sense the outer world “run like crazy”? So, like spiritualism says: what’s inside is what’s outside? Or as we get older and our biology slows down, we perceive the younger generations that start to fill the world around us “rushing”?
But no, because, of course, as eras went by, as we moved from the simplest of times to almost like cyber-punk of nowadays, our technologies and options proliferated and that can cause a lot of angst.

There could be that effect, that life seems to be getting more difficult, even when it is becoming more comfortable: we increasingly have to work more to pay for the necessities and for providing for our family. If you are familiar with the current crisis of the world not having enough children to support the older generation, most of the childless people report that it is mostly because of the financial pressures. (I shall look into that first sentence’s theory at some point, hence I want to study some economics, to understand things like this better.) There is the K-shaped economy though, which is increasing drastically nowadays, so we could throw that into the pot, too.

So I wonder if it’s a class-thing; do the elites, royals, aristocrats etc feel the same way? I guess it depends on the person, because most rich people I know or heard of are industrious. They just work on different things and levels. Then I know some that just leisure through life, and gets every chores done by others without an inch of stress in life. (Well, I guess that’s Sloth, as in one of the deadly sins, so that’s that, and that could be ingrained as they born into that lifestyle. Probably rare).
And we still haven’t touched the real wealthy. The Daily Stoic book mentions this a few times, and the bottom line is that they are just as much humans as us, and can’t escape the same human problems. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were both the richest in Rome, and they wrote these, while Epictetus was born a slave and preached the same as the other two.

I guess the answer could lie in-between/a mixture: chaos (entropy) is increasing, financial pressures growing, while our perception is relative, but can be altered by our state of mind/spiritual level with practice and awareness.