Which, do you think, is the most depressing part of the following story? Angelina Jolie, according to Us Weekly magazine (not necessarily to be believed) and about four million websites (even less to be believed), used IVF to conceive her twins not because she needed to but because she didn't have the patience to get knocked up in the normal, grunty-grunt way. She chose the procedure, says the alleged source, because she wanted more children more quickly, and “wouldn't have to deal with the stress of trying to get pregnant. She could just knock it out”. Aah, bless.

So, is it worse that a) instant gratification is so normal that people now require an immediate, copulation-free foetus in the same way that they might open a packet of Mr Mash to save the time it takes to boil three potatoes, or b) that it is considered a chore to have sex with Brad Pitt?

On balance I'd say the former (although Brad's gorgeousness arguably peaked in Fight Club). Because wanting to accelerate every human experience is the sickness of the age. Whether the story is true or not (it hasn't been confirmed by Brangelina's camp), it is an extreme version of how we lead our own fast-forward lives, speed-reading our children's bedtime stories, lipo-sucking because we're too impatient to diet, reading the review instead of the whole book to save time, time, time. Nothing - literally nothing - happens quickly enough for us anymore.

Who has not mentally machine-gunned a dawdling Sunday driver or rasped “come on, come ON” because Google took 1.2 seconds to come up with 177,276 search results rather than the usual 0.5? A friend, frustrated by ambling old dears who block the pavement slowing him down on his way to work, often imagines they are evil penguins in a computer game which he zaps with a harpoon because “they've got all day to buy KiteKat whereas I need to be somewhere, OK?” I cannot judge him for I frequently fantasise about Tasering people who, having just used a cash machine, continue to stand there and Put. Everything. Back. In. Their. Purses. Very. Slowly, as if the rest of us in the queue are just standing there to take the night air.

Which is why Barack Obama stands out like a welcome beacon of zen. This week in an overheard aside to David Cameron he confided that “the most important thing you need to do is have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking”. Without that, he said, “you lose the big picture”.

You can say that again, Barack. A thousand fist bumps to you. Such as when you find yourself upstairs compulsively checking your spam-filled e-mail inbox when you could be watching Harry Hill's TV Burp with your family downstairs. Or when the passenger on a train stares fixatedly at the ghost-white screen of his BlackBerry for the entire journey, oblivious to the beautiful sunset outside.

The super-busy are so often the dullest people because they don't think, they only “do”, skimming the surface of life in a shallow feast of 15-minute windows seldom reflecting, not even for a moment, on what any of it means.

A recent study by the British Council which timed pedestrians walking in cities across the world concluded that the speed of life is 10 per cent faster than in the early 1990s. Last month it was reported that “65 per cent of young professionals are ‘too busy' for friends”, preferring virtual Facebook interaction to the real thing.

This will be no shock to those of us accustomed to phoning friends and quickly realising they are writing e-mails throughout the conversation. Clickety click clack, they go while making vague sounds of feigned interest such as “mmm, mmm, sounds great” when you've just told them your dog is on fire. It's like trying to talk to the teenager whose distracted glaze says: “Whatever, fogey, wind it up. I just heard my phone beep and if I don't read that text which probably says something really important like ‘Gr8! lol x' I might actually die.”

But this dim, distracted impatience of the hurrysick, multitasking generation who live “full” lives but aren't actually “there” for them is not peculiar to teenagers. No, no. Check out the sallow pockets of light now dotted around theatres as pig-ignorant audiences check their BlackBerries throughout the performance.

In his essay Is Google Making us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr observes that he now seems less able to engage himself deeply in long, complicated narratives or arguments. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski,” he says. It's so obviously true. Anyone who doubts that our attention spans are dwindling is seriously...oh, who cares? I sometimes find myself talking to two-year-olds and having to stop myself saying: “Yes, yes, but what's your point?”

In his new book, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein argues that the internet has habituated people into “juvenile mental habits”, where they don't have to stick with anything that bores them and so use it mainly not to stimulate or educate themselves but to stay in a constant, illiterate cycle of inane social chat on Facebook and MySpace. Is it coincidence that, as he reports, two thirds of US undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30 per cent since 1982?

Oh, can't we stop all this and just have a cup of tea and a Gregg's pasty instead? Maybe, if Obama becomes President, he can lead the Western world into a collective Slow Movement where you get shot in the legs if you run up escalators. Maybe he could start by going round to Brangelina's with some incense sticks, a giant Toblerone and the box set of Murder, She Wrote and tell them both to chill the hell out.

After all, if two of the “hottest” people in the world get together, take each other off the market and then (allegedly) fail to have sex at every opportunity, that should probably be made illegal.

Times Recommends

• Police beg us for food. What hope is there?
• Moral darkness that engulfed Baby P
• More to Advent than cheap chocolate