The Age of Acceleration and the Return of Being Human

We keep hearing that the world is progressing. Faster systems, shorter formats, smoother experiences — everything optimised to save time. Yet strangely, all this saved time doesn’t feel like more life. We have turned convenience into a virtue, speed into a standard, and efficiency into a form of self-worth. We eliminated waiting, wandering, reflecting, and pausing. And on the way, without noticing it, we also eliminated depth.

Anthropologists remind us that meaning only emerges in slowness. Rituals, stories, and relationships take shape through repetition, patience, and presence. Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, studied cultures in which the exchange of objects was secondary to the exchange of emotions. The act of giving carried memory, obligation, and affection. That is how societies bonded. Today, the exchange happens too fast to carry meaning. We respond before we reflect. We react before we feel. We communicate without actually connecting.

We do not write letters anymore; we forward messages. We do not meet to talk; we meet to post. A shared meal has become a backdrop for photographs. Family, friendship, intimacy — things that once grew in slow, unstructured time — are now squeezed between notifications and schedules. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa explained this erosion in his book Social Acceleration, arguing that when the pace of life exceeds the pace of emotion, alienation becomes inevitable. We can adapt mentally and technically, but we cannot accelerate the nervous system. We cannot accelerate feeling.

Real-life moments make this visible. Take travel, something once associated with curiosity and discovery. Today, we experience it through screens even while standing inside it. At a viewpoint, instead of taking in the landscape, people turn their backs to it, adjusting their cameras and negotiating angles. The moment becomes proof, not memory. We travel to show we’ve travelled. We eat to show we’ve eaten. The experience is swallowed by the need to produce evidence.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai wrote about the “commercialisation of experience” — how objects and memories become items to display. Today, it isn’t the experience that matters; it’s how the experience looks. We have learned to convert life into content. But content is consumable. Memories are not.

No wonder nostalgia is having a renaissance. Film cameras, vinyl records, handwritten diaries, slow cinema, second-hand bookstores — younger generations are gravitating toward things they never grew up with. Not because they are fascinated by the past, but because they are exhausted by the present. A vinyl record forces you to listen to an entire album. A film camera offers only 36 shots. A diary pages back to your past without an algorithm deciding what to show.

These old things demand care. They demand attention.

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym called this “reflective nostalgia” — we do not want to return to the past; we are simply grieving what our present no longer allows. The revival of slow art forms is not longing for old times. It’s a protest against speed, disposability, and overstimulation.

Relationships reflect the same shift. We are all “connected,” yet private loneliness is growing. Friendship has become continuous contact without actual connection. We maintain streaks, not relationships. We send memes instead of emotions. We talk every day but say nothing real. Sherry Turkle, in Reclaiming Conversation, writes that as we moved conversations to digital spaces, we removed vulnerability. Screens make it easy to avoid emotional risk. But intimacy was always a consequence of risk.

We are forgetting how to sit with silence.

We are forgetting how to listen without planning our reply.

We are forgetting how to be present without proof of presence.

The cost of speed is not exhaustion — it is erosion.

So here is a different way of asking it:

If the world became slower tomorrow, what would you regain?

Not more time — but more self.Not more output — but more meaning.

Rituals are slow.

Affection is slow.

Understanding is slow.

And humans are built for all three.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold once said that humans understand the world through “making, not consuming.” Meaning is not in the finished object. Meaning is in the process. It’s in the draft, the retry, the patience. When everything becomes instantly available, we lose the part of ourselves that grows during the effort.