The Urgency of Slowing Down

Speed has become a buggy feature of the machine

Growing up, I never really questioned the pace of things. Speed was rewarded. Fast learners. Fast workers. Fast decisions. The faster you moved, the more capable you were seen to be. As I grew older, something in me started resisting that rhythm. It wasn’t rebellion. It was curiosity. A quiet question: why is everything moving so fast?

Over time, I’ve come to believe that this speed is not just a by-product of our systems. It is embedded in the system itself. Especially capitalism. It’s easy to praise what capitalism has done, more access, more choice and undeniably more innovation. But what gets overlooked is how it reshapes not just our economy, but our attention, our values, and even our speech.

Speed, in our modern culture, is not a glitch. It is a feature. And that’s the problem.

In In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honoré writes about how our obsession with doing everything faster affects every part of our lives. It has affected our health, relationships, our creativity, and even our ability to think. The faster we move, the less time we have to question. And that’s convenient. Systems that thrive on inertia do not want people asking too many questions.

Speed demands that we fall in line. That we do things the way they’ve always been done. It rewards repetition over reflection. Innovation, ironically, has become about faster execution, not deeper thinking.

We’ve come to treat speed as synonymous with success. But when you’re always racing, you rarely get the chance to ask where you’re going, or why you’re even on the track. Well, you can’t if you are locked in the rat race.

“Fail fast” is a motto I’ve heard often. In tech, in entrepreneurship, even in education. But something about that phrase has always bothered me. When you fail fast, do you really learn? Or are you just moving past the failure before you understand it?

Sometimes we fail because something was fundamentally flawed. Other times, it may be because we didn’t understand the full context. But when speed becomes the goal, failure becomes a pit stop instead of a classroom. We patch things, we pivot, and we move on. But we rarely go back and reflect deeply. It would shock you how often this happens in everything around us, from our work to our relationships with people.

There’s something to be said about the kind of learning that takes time. The kind of learning that makes you sit with discomfort. The kind that doesn’t come with a product demo or a pitch deck.

Slowness makes room for questions. Honest questions. Messy questions. Questions without clean answers. But our culture often treats questions like friction. They slow things down. They challenge the script. They invite doubt.

I’ve come to believe that we need to embrace this friction. We need to build room for grace in how we learn, teach, and lead. Not every question is an attack. Not every pause is laziness. Sometimes, asking “why” is the most radical thing you can do.

Education should not be about producing fast answers. It should be about nurturing the capacity to sit with complexity. To let things unfold. To allow for nuance. That takes time. That takes care.

You have to become who you want to be & not what the world expects

Speed also shapes identity. It creates pressure to be the kind of person who is easily understood. Easily marketed. Easily labelled. But who you are becoming should not be reduced to who the world needs you to be right now.

There is value in becoming slowly. In not rushing to declare your brand, your path, your tribe. Sometimes, the work is not in defining yourself, but in allowing yourself to be redefined through honest living and continuous questioning.

Many people talk about changing the world. Few are willing to change the way the world works. That takes slowness. That takes a commitment to ask uncomfortable questions and listen deeply for the answers.

In Conclusion

What I’m learning is that slowness is not the opposite of ambition. Instead, it is the foundation of meaningful ambition. The kind that is rooted in care, in insight and in truth.

To slow down is not to fall behind. It is to reenter the present. It is to reclaim your ability to notice, to choose, and to understand.

So today, I invite you to resist the pull of speed, not out of fear, but out of intention.

Take the time to unlearn, become and most importat of all, to ask why.

Cheers