The Cult of Speed
How learning to slow down can lead to a more fulfilling life
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of Time.
“When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.”
Milan Kundera
Slowness
Every day we wake up, we’re met with a world that seems to be moving just a little bit faster than the day before. For decades now, our lives have been speeding up through technological advancements.
While these advancements provide us comfort through speed and convenience, they have also been silently teaching us that speed equals success, that faster is better. That we need instant gratification.
But as the world speeds up, our understanding of it weakens. We in essence have replaced depth for speed. The certainty we require for balance in life has been replaced by efficiency.
As Carl Honore has pointed out in his book, In Praise of Slowness, when we obsess over speed, it becomes an addiction. In the process of trying to do more, and do it faster and more efficient, we lose out on the quality of an enriching life.
“Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not working? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave… when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”
We see this obsession with speed all around us. At work, detailed emails have become half-baked Slack messages. Homemade meals are a thing of the past and are instead prepared through processed ingredients. Relationships are done over text as it is quicker and more convenient than a call. It’s gotten to the point where we now even have AI to read and summarize messages from friends so we don’t have to spend the time reading them.
This is the state of the world today. With all the advancements made, rather than allowing our lives to slow down, they are speeding them up. And while it is tempting to believe we must all join the million-mile-a-hour cult of speed, we can choose to slow down.
“If we carry on at this rate, the cult of speed can only get worse. When everyone takes the fast option, the advantage of going fast vanishes, forcing us to go faster still,” writes Honore. “Eventually, what we are left with is an arms race based on speed, and we all know where arms races end up: in the grim stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction.”
Our addiction for speed has even weaved its way into our obsession with technology. Nowadays, FOMO (fear of missing out) has expanded outside of social situations and has taken over our digital lives. Instant streaming of music through Apple and Spotify, our endless doomscrolling of 24/7 news, our need to buy whatever pops into our mind on Amazon. Companies have tried to convince us we can consume it all if we want, but this is an illusion as time is too limited.
Yet the cult of speed continues to tell us if we go just a little bit faster, we can get even more out of life.
But would our ability to digest all of this even improve our lives? Possibly—a little. But in the grand scheme, probably not much.
While the world is asking us to always want more, to always give more, to always run faster and do more with our limited time, slowing down is the strategy that can in fact provide us a much more enriching life.
“The relentless overload that's wearing us down is generated by a belief that "good" work requires increasing busyness,” writes Cal Newport in his book Slow Productivity, “faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.”
Life is speeding up and it’s telling us if we don’t get onboard, we’ll be left behind. But going faster does not mean doing better work, or embracing life more, or understanding concepts more deeply. Rather, speeding up tends to lead to lighter touches. We get broader breadth, yes, but shallower depth.
In a world dominated by speed, slowness can become a superpower when used in a strategic way.
“Slow productivity doesn't ask that you extinguish ambition,” as Newport writes. “Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements.”
Speed leads to burnout, anxiety, stress, and exhaustion. Many of us fall into the trap of keeping our anxiety at bay by quickly moving from one task to the next, trying to get things off our plate. But that simply leads to more work, and an ever-present problem where the only way to keep the anxiety at bay is to go faster.
Instead, looking at some of the most successful individuals of history shows that they all allowed themselves time to think, to slow down, to process and properly digest.
Albert Einstein spent hundreds of hours in the patent office day-dreaming, allowing his mind to think through scenarios, many of which would be foundational to his theories on the universe. Carl Jung would escape to Bollinger Tower in Zürich to provide himself time for relaxation and reflection. Michel de Montaigne retreated to his tower to read history’s greatest voices. Nietzsche walked to process his thoughts. Thoreau escaped to Walden.
Very few people hold the ability to perform work at both a high speed and with high quality. Something usually has to give, and in today’s ever-changing world, we’ve sacrificed quality for speed.
Many of us wish for enlightenment, ways to improve our lives, yet we refuse to slowdown and dedicate the time required for it. Information is easy, it’s always available at our fingertips. Knowledge is difficult as it requires processing over time. Wisdom is hard, requiring experience, reflection, and time.
Each requires a different time commitment and speed and each has their own purpose.
In order to embrace a slower lifestyle, Newport outlines three things we should do:
Focus on fewer things
Work at a more natural pace
Be obsessed with quality
Rushing through a book to get to the next won’t help you as much as slowing down and truly understanding what you’re reading.
Writing one draft of a book and saying it’s done will not make it as good as several drafts with feedback from others.
Spending a few hours with family or friends without taking photos or looking at your phone will procure deeper connections than those through Instagram.
When we give ourselves the space to breathe, to slow down, to just enjoy the fruits that life has to offer, we not only have a deeper relationship to our experiences, but our lives become much more enriched.
“To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output,” writes Newport.
Embracing a slow lifestyle does not mean we have to escape to solitude. Rather, it is about learning to embrace life at the pace life was meant to be lived.
We can take five minutes in the morning to enjoy our coffee and center ourself for the day.
We can choose to eat a meal without also working at the same time.
We can take a walk without our phone snd allow ourselves time to just reflect and be.
All of these things and so many more help us live at a more natural pace and give us strength to reject the cult of speed.
As Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
It’s worth remembering, we only get one life. What’s the point in rushing through it if you can’t learn to savor it?
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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