"Life happens at 1x. Every conversation you’ve ever had. Every walk, every meal, every meaningful experience. None of it comes with a speed dial. We’re biological creatures wired for real-time processing. When someone speaks to you in person, you don’t get to fast-forward through the parts you find boring."
To keep beating the "medium is the message" drum may feel monotonously repetitive in 2026, but things continue to get out of hand.
Just last year, Apple added up to 4x playback on Apple Podcasts while Spotify permits upwards of 3.5x speeds. Second-screen viewing entered everyone's lexicon after Affleck and Damon railed against Netflix's watered-down flop (RIP "The Rip").
The West has always been a culture obsessed with speed, but we've more and more become obsessed with adding as many inputs as are available to our senses.
"The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress. Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness..."
~ Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
Today, you'll find more people without any intention, without the presence of a rule for their life that keeps them from reverting to prehistoric statures than you'll find with limitations imposed for the sake of flourishing.
When one tries to jam all the content in the world between their ears, they may never find what was already there to be a treasure trove of its own.
In the same breath that I bemoan the potential knowledge awaiting my 21st century web-crawl (as I too have been chronically diagnosed with what the documentary filmmaker Max Joseph calls the "reading version of FOMO"), I fight to recognize the power of slowness, depth, and constraints.
"That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing [Gegenüber] because it must also process background events..."
~ Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
To reclaim our "inwardly infinite capacity for mindfulness" requires new paradigms and renewed commitments to practices that drag us counter to the flow of the "future" toward which tech companies point us.
For the first time in too long a time, I'm going to go listen to a podcast on 1x speed... I'll let you know how it goes...