Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Vonnegut contrasts lived experience with the modern compulsion to stockpile facts. The first sentence suggests that existence is immediate and fleeting: by the time we try to stand outside it and “think about it” as an object, it has already moved on. The second sentence turns this into a social critique—people seek security and status through “amassing information,” mistaking accumulation for wisdom. The implied irony is that information can become a distraction from attention, empathy, and presence, the very capacities that might make life intelligible. In Vonnegut’s typical manner, the remark reads as both lament and satire: a plea for awareness, undercut by the observation that persuasion is nearly impossible.