Recently at an editorial meeting of a uni-versity club magazine, almost all its writers raised the same topic: "What's wrong with Taiwan's society?" "What can we do about it?" The discussion which followed was lively, but revolved around the questions themselves and the incidents behind them, and was largely based on the information and opinions presented in the print and electronic media. No-one proposed any answers: all that emerged was parroted condemnations and a shared sense of worry.

As the 21st century approaches, people in Taiwan seem to have the feeling that the wheel of time is spinning ever faster. Ubiquitous news reports of disasters and violent crime, often sexual, and the incessant discussion and censure they provoke, make us feel that from the safe, caring Taiwan of the past, we are hurtling towards an immense black hole, with no idea where we will end up.

Although the media discussions include many insightful perceptions, they seem to have little real effect, for people have no time to distill their own opinions before new incidents grab their attention and spark off another orgy of lament, anger, worry and frustration, gradually whipping up a state of "mass anxiety."

This phenomenon may be connected with Taiwan's new media environment following the proliferation of media organs in the 1990s. They demand a huge volume of news to fill their pages and air time, and in an information market with little or no segmentation this causes the same events to reappear again and again in a short space of time in newspapers, magazines, radio and television, creating a cumulative, amplifying effect which robs people of the space for their own "self." Superficially we have the greatest possible freedom of speech, but on a deeper level freedom of thought has become a luxury.

On another tack, sociologists once expected that freed from drudgery by the many labor-saving gifts of the industrial revolution, people would have masses of time for more thinking, sport and leisure, so bringing human civilization to a more advanced and harmonious state.

But that is not how things have really developed. Even looking at Taiwan alone, electrical goods and automobiles may save much time for many families, but possessing newer and better "things" has become their goal in life, and "progress" has become synonymous with "earning money." We cannot help asking: have we gained more time to spend with our families, read, write letters, take exercise, or think? It seems that though liberated from physical toil, we are even busier and wearier, and have still less scope for self-realization!

Perhaps this is something we should be reflecting on even more than crime or disasters. We need to seek out sources of spiritual renewal, for if each of us can find a place of purity and quiet within our own lives, then society's ability to heal itself will be enhanced.

Thoughts like these lie behind this month's cover story articles "Weekend Shuffle," "In Search of the Great Leisure Seeker," and, from an eminent philosopher, "Lao Ssu-kuang on Leisure." Can the new two-day weekend help us escape from a "busy, blind, benighted" lifestyle and make us emotionally a little more carefree, so that we can be a little more thoughtful and graceful in our behavior towards others? We hope the longer weekend will not merely generate commercial opportunities for the leisure industry, so creating a new source of vexation which actually robs us of our "selves."

Any discussion of leisure and human nature should not ignore the natural world which is at the heart of all human culture. If we become divorced from nature we run the risk of losing our cultural roots. Thus the social ills seen in Taiwan in recent years are to some degree related to the over-hasty pace of industrialization.

During the interviews for our article on the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, center director Samson Chou made an observation worth reflecting upon: during Taiwan's industrialization, we have unconsciously thrown away the agricultural values of hard work, frugality, helping each other and looking to long-term results which were at the heart of social stability.

We cannot turn back the clock, but we can choose to rediscover the values fostered by thousands of years of farming culture, and thereby rediscover our selves. "Picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, I gaze on the southern mountains with tranquillity"-what matters most is the "tranquillity," not the fence or the mountains.