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The same amount of information has always been out there, what has changed dramatically is our access to it. With the advent of the information age the level of accessible information has expanded exponentially. Our inherent ability to process it, however has not signifigantly changed. This leaves us feeling awash in reams of information we are helpless to process or change. Another point is what I consider to be the American worldview, e.g. that we must be filling our very waking hour with doing something. We have lost the understanding of simply being. like the famiy going fishing in the Rockwell painting. Being with family, rather than doing something. it's kinda a zen thing, but as I grow older I find more value in simply being sometimes.

>We have lost the understanding of simply being. like the famiy going fishing in the Rockwell painting. Being with family, rather than doing something. it’s kinda a zen thing, but as I grow older I find more value in simply being sometimes.

You are right; and the truly twisted thing about it is that there is a deadly-philosophy that many have embraced which invalidates ‘being’ for many: feminism.
Feminism, in practice, counts a man as nothing for his maleness; additionally it counts many women as nothing for being feminine (e.g. a young woman who wants to start a family right after high-school is looked down on and derided).

So then, in a culture that has so strongly embraced feminism there cannot be any of that “simply being” for many people because the being of that person is socially/culturally invalidated.