Overloaded

My pal Tony, over at the CWC posted this great piece today. In it, he muses:

"You reach a certain age, and you begin to wonder how come you never paid attention before, why you never noticed that with each change of season, your life becomes less and less about living, and more and more about something else."

Then I just popped over to The Tyee, and found this great post from James Glave, in which he writes:

"I want my experiences and places and purchases to feel honest, comfortable, deliberately human-scale, authentic."

These subjects are also on my mind of late, and I wonder: Is a collective western-world shift occurring?