Journal Entry #4 (28/5/2026)

Overwhelming Pace

Two weeks ago I went to Hiroshima to attend the 38th Annual Conference of CANELA. This is a symposium in which researchers from the spanish-speaking community in Japan (although many people come specifically for this event as well) meet once a year to present our advances in research and create a community. It was my second year attending.

I was very happy to be able to attend this year again, and by presenting the last day. I would be able to reunite with the friends I had made last year and that I hadn't the chance to meet again meanwhile. I guess there are those kind of friends that you meet in these symposiums, and that you just meet again in these spaces. Unfortunately, as it happened to me before, I got extremely sick with fever and headaches the days prior to my trip. Of course, that wouldn't stop me going, but still, it was quite painful.

I had arranged arriving a day before the symposium would begin, and that night I met with two of the friends I had made last year. Despite my condition, I ordered a beer. We sat at the izakaya, and we were chatting for some hours, catching up with what had happened in our lives during that whole year.

That is when I felt that strange sensation. To this point I am not sure if it was my fever getting worse, the alcohol, or a combination of the both. But I felt that something was wrong with that conversation that we were having. More specifically, I felt that something was wrong with the pace of it. Exactly, one of my friends, who was very enthusiastically talking about her love life, was, as I recall it, explaining everything in an extremely fast pace. And not only that, she would just jump from one topic to other, and then go back to the previous one, everything really quick, really fast. I just couldn't understand what was going on. Then I began looking at my other friend. Looking for compassion, for someone who would relate to this feeling. But I didn't find that. In fact, what I found out was something that intrigued me even more. Not was this friend only able to follow the whole conversation, but at one point, he was doing so by at the same time checking something in his cellphone.

Completely lost, I decided that the only solution was not to question. Go with the current, and react to the thing said at the moment. But I couldn't help wondering if this had always been like this. I may be sounding like an old person now, but is this influence of the social networks and the doomscrolling in which everything appears to us really short, in very brief exciting attention-getting format? Is it possible that this is somehow been translated to how we communicate in real life? Maybe it is soon to say, but I don't think I could follow the pace if this becomes the new norm.