How an accelerating world is affecting our minds

The cost of speeding up

Photo through a train window by Marshall Mateer. Creative Commons license.

In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator sits in a train musing about the landscape he’s viewing through the train window. The landscapes are fleeting, momentary glimpses of houses and fields, like shifting fragments of a dream. He contrasts this perception with that of an unhurried walker taking in the entirety of a landscape. Riding the train has changed his view of the world into one like watching a fast film.

Proust captured something essential in the early years of the twentieth century: how technology accelerates the world. A century later, in our digital age, technology has become so deeply interwoven into our everyday lives that it might seem like the pace of the world is speeding up.

That is not far off. Speed has fueled progress: we can reach people, access knowledge, diagnose and treat illnesses, transact business, travel, respond to emergencies—all faster. Rapid data collection can track climate changes in near real time. Speed breeding enables several generations of new plant breeds to be bred in a year as opposed to requiring several decades.

Financial markets have accelerated, with algorithms as key drivers of speed. In high-frequency trading, algorithms generate rapid recommendations that push traders to accelerate their transactions to keep pace. New infrastructure makes trading even faster. Data centers have been built in Carteret, New Jersey, near the NASDAQ servers to enable ultra–low-latency data transfer. In this world, shaving off even a few milliseconds makes a difference in trading.

But not all acceleration serves everyone well—it can create pressures. The current news cycle spins increasingly faster, making it hard to keep up with changing headlines. This is driven largely, if not wholly, by social media. A study published in Nature by researchers at MIT found that stories spread and decay faster on Twitter (now X) than in the traditional media of radio. As a result, news lingers in the public consciousness for shorter periods, placing an increasing burden on society for sense-making to keep up with the changes.

For those who get their information from video and audio, consumption of content has also sped up. Most people now listen to podcasts and audio books at 1.5 times and double the speed, and some even up to 4 times the speed, according to statistics collected by YouTube. People can consume more in a shorter amount of time, but with high speeds may only be getting a superficial understanding of the material.

Speed creates pressure at work. Over a hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor, the founder of scientific management, measured workers’ speed and efficiency, even determining the optimal shovel load a person could lift. Today, the speed of online purchase and delivery has created new pressures for warehouse employees to fulfill orders faster. The company Woolworth’s in Australia uses algorithms to track warehouse workers, measuring how quickly they pack boxes or load trucks, even timing their bathroom breaks. Amazon has disciplined employees for not meeting speed targets. However, the state of California sued Amazon for not informing its employees of their productivity quotas. Such algorithmic calculations work fine for robots, but humans can break under such pressure.

What about knowledge workers, who feel pushed to produce in shorter deadlines? A report by the UK Institute of Employment Studies found that three-fifths of British workers report working under tight deadlines and two-fifths feel they have to work at high speed.

How does our accelerated world affect our minds? The paradox of speed is that moving faster can slow us down. Email, Slack messages and texts are sent at lightning speed, pressuring us with expectations that we’ll respond instantly. The fast pace of communications also means more effort is needed in managing a higher volume of notifications and interruptions. Workers inundated with interruptions often try to compensate by accelerating their pace, a pattern I found in a study showing that people then work faster to keep up. We found that the consequence is measurably higher stress, which can harm performance with more errors.

Generative AI speeds up the production of information in the workplace. But even when we produce information faster, the human mind remains a bottleneck. It makes it a challenge to keep humans in the loop.

Decision-making is also affected. To keep up with the demands of rapid information flow we default to fast, intuitive judgments: Type I thinking. Sometimes such thinking makes sense and it’s efficient, like when we respond quickly to a call, email or text. But it also leaves us prone to making bad judgments. For example, a manager who quickly reviews a report with incomplete data might make an overly negative assessment of an employee’s performance, even though over the long term, that employee performs well. At times we need to be able to pull back and reflect, to get an overview of the information, to look at all sides, and to do divergent thinking, which means considering different ideas and perspectives. This Type II thinking cannot be rushed and is needed for deeper and more careful decisions.

The strange paradox is that while we can communicate instantaneously, it keeps us tethered to our screens to respond fast. And so we watch the world speeding by through our screens, like Proust’s narrator watching the world flash by from the train car.

What we can do is resist speed when we need to. We can slow down. We don’t need to follow consistent news updates or check email constantly: checking once a day suffices. Organizations, too, must recognize that “faster” is not always “better”—people’s well-being matters. To truly understand the world—to think, to judge, to create—requires time. Acceleration alters not just how fast we move, but how we think. We may not be able to slow the world, but as Proust’s narrator sensed how technology could reshape perception, we can also realize how our digital technologies are affecting our senses and our practices. Our thought and behavior, unlike technology, cannot be rushed without consequence. Technology will not decelerate any time soon, but we can choose how we meet its pace.

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You can read more about how technology is affecting our lives in my book Attention Span, now in paperback with new exercises to improve your focus.