On the Cost of Going Fast The Speed Debt We Refuse to Pay

In contemporary Western societies, speed is often treated as a virtue. Hard work is measured in early mornings, quick responses and visible productivity. To perform fast, and preferably a lot, has become synonymous with value and success. Those who take their time, who work deliberately rather than urgently, are easily judged otherwise. We tend to label them as unmotivated, insufficiently passionate or simply inefficient.

And yet, that assumption is deeply paradoxical.

Speed is not the same as efficiency, nor is slowness a sign of laziness or lack of commitment. Quite often, the opposite is true. This paradox is worth lingering on, precisely because it has become so difficult to see.

A glance at the past makes this clearer. Traditional crafts were defined by care and patience. Time was not an obstacle but a shared expectation, both for the maker and the client. Large-scale projects, such as the construction of cathedrals, unfolded across generations. Duration was understood as an investment rather than a failure of planning. Quality required time, and time was allowed to take its course.

That way of thinking is almost alien to us now. How long is a complex infrastructure project allowed to take before it is deemed inefficient? How much time may be spent weighing the long-term consequences of placing electrical networks underground or above ground? In such cases, time pressure often undermines the quality of deliberation itself. What should be slow becomes rushed, not because reflection is complete, but because patience has expired.

This relationship with time changed radically during the Industrial Revolution. With mechanization and efficiency-driven production, time became an explicit economic factor. Being first to market, outpacing competitors and optimizing output began to justify acceleration. Gradually, this logic extended beyond machines and processes and settled into our understanding of human labor itself.

The human being, and by extension the human mind, came to be measured against the rhythm of machines designed for a single task. It is a false comparison, and a profoundly unfair one. Human thinking does not operate in linear cycles of input and output. It wanders, hesitates, revises and sometimes needs to stall to understand.

And yet, this shift did not merely happen once. It was not a temporary phase of industrial history that we have since outgrown. It happened, and it continues to happen.

We gradually transitioned into a model where speed and productivity became central organizing principles, and we still live with the consequences of that transition today. Contemporary sociologists often describe our current moment as a “fourth industrial revolution”, pointing to the growing risks of burnout and boreout, the alienation from work and its outcomes, and the dominance of short-term thinking.

These dynamics are frequently intensified by technological disruption and economic pressure, both of which reward acceleration while leaving little room for slowness. More broadly, they tend to undermine a sense of professional identity and self-worth, and to foster a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction.

Or, put differently, of a culture that no longer allows itself the time to think.

Learning Is Not the Output

Nowhere is this confusion between speed and value more visible than in how we understand learning.

We often behave as if the point of an essay, a report or an analysis is the finished text itself. The product becomes the measure of understanding. If something looks coherent, polished and confident, we assume learning has taken place.

But learning does not reside in the output. It resides in the process that precedes it.

Learning happens while reading and re-reading, while struggling to articulate a thought, while discovering that an argument does not hold and must be rebuilt. It happens through feedback, doubt, verification, and revision. It is slow, sometimes uncomfortable, and often inefficient by design. That inefficiency is not a flaw. It is what makes learning durable.

When that process is shortened or bypassed, something essential is lost. The person may still deliver an answer, but the internal structure that would allow them to judge, adapt or defend that answer remains underdeveloped.

Recent research has begun to hint at this risk. A study conducted at MIT’s Media Lab, discussed in TIME, suggests that frequent reliance on AI tools such as ChatGPT for writing tasks may correlate with reduced cognitive engagement in certain learning contexts. The findings are preliminary and context-dependent, but they point toward a broader concern: When tools remove too much friction from the learning process, they may also remove the conditions under which understanding is formed.

This is not only a problem in education. The same logic increasingly governs professional life. Emails are drafted quickly, analyses are summarized, reports are generated and decisions are communicated at speed. The faster something can be produced, the more competent we appear.

What disappears in that process is not only depth, but responsibility. When output becomes the goal, the question “Do I actually understand this?” fades into the background.

Speed as a Cultural Loan

Speed often feels like a gift. It saves time, reduces effort, and creates the impression of progress. But culturally speaking, speed functions more like a loan.

It allows us to move faster now, at the cost of reflection later. We postpone careful thinking, documentation, verification, and ethical scrutiny. We tell ourselves that we will revisit these questions when there is more time.

There rarely is.

The debt accumulates quietly. When it finally becomes visible, it often does so through failure: systems that break down, decisions that backfire, institutions that discover too late that they no longer understand their own workings.

In fields where failure has immediate consequences, such as aviation or healthcare, this dynamic is well understood. Procedures are slow by design. Redundancies are rehearsed. A clear “Plan B” is present: Checklists exist not because professionals lack intelligence, but because intelligence alone is unreliable under pressure.

In many digital and organizational contexts, however, we behave as if speed carries no such cost. We trust that complexity can be managed on the fly, that fixes can be improvised, and that understanding will somehow catch up with implementation.

This faith in speed is not neutral. It privileges action over reflection and rewards confidence over caution. It also creates environments where admitting uncertainty feels like weakness, even when uncertainty would be the most honest response.

When Tools Accelerate the Confusion

Technological tools did not create this culture, but they amplify it.

Artificial intelligence, and particularly large language-based systems, occupy a special place in this story. They are extraordinarily good at producing fluent output. They respond instantly, confidently and often persuasively. For a culture already inclined to equate speed with competence, this is a powerful temptation.

What worries me most in current debates about large language models is not that machines will replace human thinking, but that they may encourage us to abandon it voluntarily.

When a system can generate an essay, an email, or an explanation in seconds, the temptation is not simply to save time. It is to skip the slow work of forming one’s own understanding. The danger lies not in using such tools, but in mistaking their output for comprehension.

Fluent language invites projection. We assume that coherence implies understanding, and that confidence implies knowledge. But a system can generate plausible answers without knowing what it says, and a user can forward those answers without knowing whether they are correct.

What disappears in this exchange is the thinking trace. We no longer see the steps that led to a conclusion, nor can we evaluate their quality. The result stands alone, detached from the process that would make it meaningful.

In scientific research, this would be unacceptable. A result without a method cannot be trusted. Yet in everyday communication, we increasingly accept answers without origins.

Slowness as a Condition for Responsibility

The case for slowness is often misunderstood as a plea for nostalgia or inefficiency. It is neither.

Slowness is not about rejecting technology or romanticizing the past. It is about recognizing that certain human capacities require time to function properly. Judgment, ethical awareness and understanding do not scale linearly with speed.

A society that cannot slow down struggles to take responsibility for its actions. Decisions are made quickly, but their consequences unfold slowly. By the time the effects become visible, attention has already moved on.

This dynamic affects public discourse as well. News cycles reward immediacy rather than accuracy. Corrections arrive late, if at all. The initial impression remains, even when it was wrong. Speed, though, wins the moment and truth is left to catch up, often never arriving there. In such an environment, slowness becomes a prerequisite for responsible public judgment. It creates space for verification, for hesitation and for the uncomfortable admission that not everything can or should be answered immediately.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered a painful illustration of this pattern. Early reports, provisional findings and incomplete data circulated at great speed, often presented with unwarranted certainty. As scientific understanding evolved, corrections and nuances followed, but they rarely travelled as far or as fast as the initial claims. For many people, the first message stuck, even when it was later revised or withdrawn. The problem was not that knowledge changed, that is how science works, but that public communication lacked the slowness required to convey uncertainty honestly.

Similar dynamics recur whenever incidents demand both urgency and accuracy: violent events, public health scares or complex institutional failures. In such moments, the pressure to be first often outweighs the obligation to be careful. By the time facts are established, attention has shifted, and the corrected account struggles to regain ground. What remains is not truth, but residue: impressions formed under speed, rarely undone.

The same pattern can be observed in other domains. Consider the fashion industry, where brands release new collections at ever shorter intervals. This logic of so-called fast fashion prioritizes speed and turnover over durability and care. Its consequences, from waste and environmental strain to invisible labor conditions, rarely register at the moment of consumption. Here, too, acceleration makes responsibility easier to postpone.

Fast fashion is not the core problem discussed here, but it offers a tangible illustration of a broader tendency: When systems are optimized for speed, the moral and material costs are displaced in time, and often out of sight.

A Question of Balance

Revaluing slowness in our work and in our lives is not merely a matter of well-being. It is a question of sustainable quality and long-term stability. Slowness creates space for reflection, depth and more careful forms of decision-making. Paradoxically, it is precisely that slowness which makes it possible to act quickly when it truly matters.

A well-considered and well-rehearsed “Plan B” is a good example of this. It takes time to think through alternatives, to test assumptions, and to prepare for failure. But once that work has been done, responses in moments of crisis can be both swift and effective. Speed, in such cases, is not improvised. It is practiced, learned, earned.

The balance between speed and slowness does not need to always be perfectly even. There are moments when urgency is unavoidable, when action must precede reflection. But when periods of haste stretch on too long, reflection becomes not a luxury, but a necessity. Slowness then serves as a counterweight, creating the conditions in which understanding can catch up with action.

This is what slowness offers: time deliberately set aside so that reflection can lead to insight, analysis and care. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical condition for doing things well.

None of this is an argument against speed as such. It is, rather, a reminder of the importance of building quiet and unhurried moments into our systems and routines. We have all accumulated a kind of time credit in our professional and personal lives alike. Periodic repayment is unavoidable. Most people can readily think of examples where the cost of going too fast only became visible later.

In some sectors, this lesson has already been learned. Slowness is embedded in procedures, checks and redundancies, not because those fields reject efficiency, but because they understand its limits. There is something to be learned there, not only for how we design our technologies and organizations, but for how we inhabit our own lives.

The question that remains is not how fast we can go, but whether we still know when to slow down.