Stuck on fast-forward
We're dying of speed and pining for slowness.
Welcome to Mutant Futures: a newsletter about culture, futurism and strategy.
It’s about time. After an extended break from writing on here, I’m back! Hope you all had an excellent summer.
This new essay is also about time.
Hope you enjoy it,
P
Over the summer, I embarked on a Substack side-quest interviewing people on the the theme of heat, and how it influences culture in the Mediterranean. That project left me thinking about slowness. Not the slowness of a summer holiday, or the ‘lazy Sunday’ once you’re back to work, but a deeper, systemic kind. Slowness as atmosphere. Perhaps the kind that was unintentionally prototyped in the lockdown days. Or maybe the kind embodied by blue zones—those near-mythical places known for extraordinary levels of human longevity.
My curiosity was this: can you import the logic of Mediterranean slowness into other, more Western contexts? In places like London, New York, and other megacities, is it possible to have slowness beyond marginal pockets of time and space? What would it take to amplify slowness in systems addicted to speed?
Equipped with my case study from the Mediterranean, I was determined to sketch out a vision for how slowness could take hold in more unforgiving environments. But I knew that I needed to do some homework. Before I could take on the future, I wanted to look to the past, and then the present. I needed to understand the origins of slowness as a cultural force, and why it matters so much today. So let’s start there.
The rise of the slow movement
In 1986, a group of Italian citizens protested the opening of a McDonald’s in central Rome. This sparked a national movement against fast food and everything it stood for: standardised (and Americanised) culture, homogenised flavours and vapid consumption. Slow Food quickly spread across borders, and pledged to protect local produce and farming methods in the face of agriculture’s corporatisation. But also, something more existential: the ritual of leisurely dining with family and friends, and the quality time that comes with it. Food was just the spark that lit the movement—this was about exposing the cost of industrial modernity and doing something about it:
Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modelled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles.
(from the Slow Food Manifesto, originally published 1987)
The movement was prescient: in the decades that followed, capitalism began accelerating daily life to unprecedented levels. In the Global North, long working hours, presenteeism and deadline-driven office culture left many people time-poor. Advances in mobile phones, email and the Internet promised to unlock more free time but instead raised the standards and expectations around how quickly tasks should be done. As Carl Honoré put it in his foundational book In Praise of Slow (2004), life became ‘a daily hike up Email Mountain’—this was the beginning of always-on culture and hurry sickness. The rituals that anchored one’s personal life (family meals, unstructured leisure, conversation) were squeezed by the modern “cult of speed.” Rushing was no longer the exception but the default, as the tyranny of efficiency imposed by our machines had disrupted all aspects of our lives.
Meanwhile, the slow movement had evolved into a philosophy that went far beyond food. Slow subcultures appeared in urbanism, travel, parenting and other areas. And while slowness showed up differently in each case, what united these offshoots was a shared ethos: to inhabit time in a way that served human, not industrial flourishing. To walk the slow path meant to uphold balance, meaningful connection and quality over quantity.
Speed is valuable, time is power
If the rise of slowness exposed the cost of speed to humanity, we ought to consider the economics of time for a second. The dominant model of time is linear (aka ‘monochronic’), meaning the future can be quantified and commodified. Labour is compensated based on how many hours, days, months someone works—you know the adage: time is money. And since time is linked to the cost of running a business, speed of output is encouraged at every level. As sociologist Barbara Adam put it in Timescapes of Modernity (1998):
Where time is equated with money, speed becomes an important economic value, since the faster a product can be produced, the less money-time is tied up in the process… Speed increases profit and shows up positively in a country’s Gross National Product.
From the personal to the macro-economic dimension, to be fast is to signal efficiency and profitability. But the rabbit hole runs deeper than that. Since capitalism decides when we have to work and when not, time is an instrument of power. The politics of time—who gets to decide ownership over our time and how—is arguably one of the most important power struggles of the 21st century so far.
And then came the attention economy
We all know how this part goes: after capturing our time, capitalism went on to colonise our attention in the late 2000s and 2010s. Social media platforms made the cult of speed more visible, blurring the line between living and branding—to exist is to project a certain kind of existence to others. Whether on Instagram, LinkedIn or elsewhere, to live was to post about it. Every single milestone, development, thought we have in our lives must be validated by the digital panopticon. Every moment of ‘nothing’ is stigmatised by it. To be successful is to appear busy, at all times and as loudly as possible. Suddenly, our relationship to the here and now, the present, was synchronised to platforms with no concern for ‘invisible’ time. The machine-like transformation of the individual, that the slow pioneers had warned about in their manifesto, was complete. Our temporal agency, our ability to run on non-machine time, was now at the mercy of machines—our personal devices.
The modern cult of acceleration
Skipping forward to 2025, we’ve entered late-stage temporal capitalism. An era of mass time and attention poverty. Speed is yesterday’s news, acceleration is the new normal. Let me break down why acceleration feels inescapable right now, and why we need slowness more than ever, on a personal, technological, organisational and systemic level:
Personal:
For all its negatives, the early 2020s seemingly left us with a new-found appreciation for work-life balance, by normalising remote work and less commuting. But now, it seems like that was just a pendulum swing. Further shifts, such as the rise of TikTok, numerous economic instabilities and of course the AI revolution, have left us attention-poor, burned out, and financially vulnerable. Here are a few observations:
We’ve reached peak burnout culture, yet most of us have to keep going: due to the double whammy of cost-of-living and jobs market crisis in many parts of the West, most of the working world has no choice but to submit to the demands of their existing jobs, despite exhaustion and white-collar disillusion. Slowness is therefore unthinkable at best, and at worst, career suicide.
Dopamine culture is everywhere: our chronically online, instant gratification culture has intensified through the TikTokification of media, AI-generated slop, and the endless offering of digital entertainment. Our attention has been fragmented into tiny cycles, speeding up how we consume culture. We turn to our algorithmic dopamine dispensers every chance we get, and yet, we’ve never felt emptier.
Optimisation culture is leading to unhealthily obsessive lifestyles: the logic of acceleration has seeped into identity and aspiration, as can be observed from cultural signals like TikTok’s “-maxxing” trends and the cult of wellness wearables (such as this one), which has created another type of burnout.
Technological and organisational:
Unsurprisingly, acceleration is also intensifying due to technological upheaval, turning the screws for workforces and organisations alike:
AI is having a paradoxical effect on work itself: as VC and tech writer Tina He observed through the lens of Jevons paradox, the labour-saving effect of LLMs and other AI-based tools is just accelerating the pace of work by raising productivity expectations. However, it remains dubious how much more productive it has made workers.
Big Tech is going pedal to the metal: while the AI boom has made Silicon Valley go into overdrive, the corporate world is mirroring this, by frantically adopting enterprise AI to reap the benefits of automation at scale. It’s also notable that the Trump administration has been labelled as accelerationist.
Work-life flexibility is regressing: return-to-office mandates have been on the up and hybrid work flexibility is in decline in places like the UK. Layoffs and workforce restructurings are making constant headlines, putting existing workers on alert and increasing the feeling of churn from employee turnover. In the tech industry, they’re calling it the ‘shut up and grind era’ and working a 996 is now normal in Silicon Valley.
Employer-employee trust is also regressing: the corporate world has beeen doubling down on workforce discipline, with the use of bossware and stricter office attendance monitoring on the rise.
Systemic / planetary:
On a global level, the age of acceleration is ignoring the fragility of the ecosystems our economies are built on:
Continuous growth on a finite planet is looking increasingly delusional: the endless pursuit of business and GDP expansion treats the Earth as if it were bottomless, but the planet has biophysical limits. Every resource extracted today is just borrowing from the future. This is the central critique driving the degrowth movement. Ecological economist Timothée Parrique puts the situation bluntly: slow down or die. Meanwhile, economic losses due to extreme weather are very real—ironically posing a threat to GDP.
Accelerationism is testing our decarbonisation goals: the boom in AI is fuelling massive demand for electricity, water, construction and related resources, with relentless data centre expansion on the horizon. While AI holds the promise to also accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions, the consensus on AI’s net impact right now is far from clear.
The billionaire fantasies of space colonisation and super-AI fixing everything are undermining our planetary conservation efforts: Jeff Bezos thinks millions of us will live in outer space by 2045 and Sam Altman is betting on AI solving the climate crisis. But right now, accelerating these tech oligarch dreams is only accelerating (irreversible) ecological tipping points.
Doom? Not on my watch
Whether we like it or not, most of the world is ruled by a system hell-bent on financial and industrial growth, propped up by a rigid temporal culture. And while alternative cultures of time do exist (as you’ll find in geographies like the Mediterranean and Africa), when it comes to business, trade and commerce, even those places aren’t safe from the Western model. I believe that challenging the temporal norms of the West could also unlock something for the wider world.
Our relationship with time governs everything: from our smallest decisions, to how society is structured. A shift in our temporal ‘climate’ can have knock-on consequences from micro to macro level, making slowness a powerful lens for imagining transformational futures.
Slowness isn’t about rejecting the clock as if capitalism didn’t exist, but choosing when to ignore its rule. It’s about us authoring time, as opposed to time authoring us. That said, critiquing the system is just half the story. Now that I’ve hopefully made the case for recalibrating our relationship with time, we must think about where to look for new horizons of slowness.
More on that in the next essay…
I love ‘gentrification of slowness’ idea. Such an important topic
Great topic. I think the quality of our experiences have a lot to do with it. This is why when we experience wonder and feeling of awe experientially life feels longer.