Speed Is Making You Worse

Antonio Stradivari aged his wood for decades before he touched it. There is a lesson in that.

The Acceleration Lie

Faster is not better.

We treat speed as proof of competence. Respond to the email in five minutes. Ship the project ahead of schedule. Have an opinion before the news cycle moves on.

The entire architecture of modern life rewards velocity. Notifications demand instant reaction. Social media promotes the first take, not the best one. AI tools promise to compress hours into minutes.

And we mistake this acceleration for progress.

The cost is invisible because it accumulates slowly. You do not notice your attention span shrinking. You do not notice your taste deteriorating. You do not notice the important projects that never got started because urgent tasks consumed every available hour.

The damage is not dramatic. It is erosive. Like a river wearing through stone, speed wears through the substrate of quality without anyone noticing until the foundation is gone.

Cal Newport calls it pseudoproductivity: the use of visible busyness as a proxy for useful effort. His recent work on slow productivity names the disease precisely. We have built a culture that measures output by volume rather than value.

The person who clears forty emails in an hour feels productive. The person who spends that hour thinking through one important decision feels lazy. But the email responder is performing availability. The thinker is performing work.

The distinction matters because availability looks like effort. It is not. Effort directed at the wrong things produces motion without progress.

Seth Godin put it blunter this month. Writing about the flood of AI-generated content, he argued that slop is not a technology problem. “It’s slop because it’s slop.”

The cause is not the machine. The cause is the decision to prioritize volume over impact, cost over value. Speed was the enabler. The real failure was a culture that stopped asking whether something was worth making at all.

Godin’s argument lands harder when you realize the same logic applies to everything, not just content. Fast relationships are shallow. Fast learning is fragile. Fast decisions are reversible because they were never considered deeply enough to be worth keeping.

The Urgency Illusion

Psychologists Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee identified something they named the mere urgency effect in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Across five experiments, they found a consistent pattern: people choose unimportant tasks with short deadlines over important tasks with larger payoffs. Not because the urgent tasks are harder. Not because the payoffs are uncertain. Simply because urgency hijacks attention.

The mechanism is revealing. Urgency creates a feeling of forward motion. Completing something quickly generates a small neurological reward.

The task is done. The inbox number dropped. The to-do list shrank. But the important work, the work with real consequences and real returns, sits untouched. It has no deadline screaming at you. So it waits. And eventually, it disappears.

This is the speed trap. It is not that you are doing things too quickly. It is that the quick things are replacing the things that matter. The faster you move, the more you select for tasks that fit the speed. And the tasks that fit the speed are almost never the tasks that change your life.

The Wood That Waited

In the late 1600s, a craftsman in Cremona, Italy began selecting wood for his violins with unusual patience. Antonio Stradivari chose Alpine spruce for his soundboards and Balkan maple for the backs, then refused to use them. The wood had to age. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades.

While other makers in Cremona built faster, Stradivari built slower. He examined grain patterns. He tested acoustic properties. He carved each scroll and shaped each f-hole with the compulsive attention of someone who understood that the instrument would outlive him.

His career spanned 71 years. He produced over 1,100 instruments. That is roughly 15 per year, not because he lacked ambition, but because each one demanded the full weight of his attention. The approximately 650 that survive are now worth millions. Some are priceless.

Three centuries later, with electron microscopes, spectral analysis, and computer modeling, no one has replicated what Stradivari built with hand tools and patience. Scientists have studied the varnish, the wood density, the thickness of the plates. They have identified every measurable variable. And still, the instruments resist reproduction.

The secret was not a formula. It was a relationship with time that we have lost.

Stradivari did not rush because he understood something we have forgotten: the conditions required for greatness cannot be compressed. You cannot age wood faster. You cannot develop taste on a deadline. You cannot force the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with a material, a problem, or an idea long enough for it to reveal what it actually is.

Speed Kills the Thing It Claims to Serve

The inversion is clean. We accelerate to produce more. But acceleration degrades the conditions that make production valuable.

Speed erodes attention. You cannot think deeply about something while racing to the next thing. Speed erodes taste. When volume is the metric, quality becomes a casualty. Speed erodes judgment. The mere urgency effect proves it: fast environments make you choose wrong, not because you are stupid, but because urgency is louder than importance.

Newport’s three principles of slow productivity read like a direct antidote: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. Every word is a rebellion against the speed culture.

“Do fewer things” is a direct attack on the idea that more output equals more value. “Work at a natural pace” rejects the performance of constant hustle. “Obsess over quality” requires exactly the kind of time that speed steals.

The person who writes one essay worth reading has done more than the person who publishes ten that no one remembers.

How to Reclaim the Pace

1. Add friction on purpose. Remove one-tap responses from your life. Write longer replies. Sit with decisions overnight before committing. Friction forces thought. Thought improves outcomes. Stradivari’s aging process was pure friction, and it produced instruments that have outlasted every shortcut ever invented.

2. Choose important over urgent. Before starting your day, identify the one task with the highest long-term payoff. Do it first. Let the urgent things scream. They will survive the wait. The important things will not survive being ignored.

3. Double your timeline. Whatever deadline you set for a meaningful project, extend it. Newport recommends this as a default practice. The reason: compressed timelines force shallow work. Extended timelines create space for the deep thinking that separates good from great. The builders of a Stradivarius did not work in sprints. They worked in seasons.

4. Measure by what lasts. Stop counting how much you produced today. Start asking what you produced this year that will still matter next year. Volume is a vanity metric. Durability is the real scorecard.

The Pace That Creates

Jesus sat with Martha and Mary in Bethany. Martha was busy with preparations, moving fast, getting things done. Mary sat at his feet and listened. Martha asked Jesus to tell Mary to help. His response reframed the entire question: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed, or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42).

The frantic person looks productive. The still person looks idle. But stillness is where the durable work lives. The preparations Martha rushed through are forgotten. The words Mary sat with have been read for two thousand years.

Stradivari aged his wood for decades before he carved a single instrument.

The things that last are never the things that were rushed.