The Unbearable Speed of Being: Acceleration of Modern Society & Mental Chaos

Why do we wear watches? Each morning before I leave my apartment I put on a watch; it’s become part of my daily routine and I feel incomplete without wearing one. Throughout the day, I glance at it to check how many minutes I have left before I need to go somewhere else. Our first timekeeping devices, sundials and water clocks, measured time accurately in hours, then the invention of the hourglass narrowed time down to accurate minutes. Eventually, in the 17th century, Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock and brought time measurement down to accurate seconds. Nowadays, everybody has access to sophisticated and precise timekeeping devices, whether it’s a modern watch or a smartphone, and our relationship with time has fundamentally shifted because of it.

Up until the end of the Middle Ages, our understanding of time was linked to the cycles of nature: winter, spring, summer, autumn (Rosa, 2013). Harvests were planned around these cycles, reshaping the rhythm of day-to-day life. In summer we’d work enough to sustain ourselves for the winter. Rosa (2013) argues that since the Industrial Revolution, our understanding of time has shifted from cyclical to abstract: we set our own schedules in work, we’ve conquered the night with artificial light, and transactions are so fast that stock markets can carry them out in mere microseconds. Technology plays a big part in speeding up our lives, such as the invention of computers or mere tools to help create products. This brings an intense acceleration – we can do the same actions in less time, so why not squeeze more production and action in the same time frame of a workday as before?

It’s a common thing to hear from the older generation that we, young people, are the future; that with all the new possibilities that arise because of technology, we are able to do almost anything. But have our developments led to solely positives for the younger generation? 

A notable development that has been both constructive and destructive is social media, which has bridged the time gap of communication, allowing us to connect with people from all over the world at the press of a couple buttons. Social media gives a voice to underrepresented groups, such as the LGBTQIA+ community, anti-war factions or even local knitting clubs. A drawback that has recently been the focus of many studies is the decreased attention spans of the youth: It has been found that youth attention spans have decreased by more than threefold in the past 20 years (American Psychology Association, 2023). On top of that, short-content social media like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels are important proponents of instant gratification: users scroll through short videos (5-20 seconds) that they find entertaining, leading to constant rushes of dopamine from engaging content. Becoming used to this fast rate of exposure to entertaining media could play into the causes of decreased attention spans. 

Having the world and social sphere at your fingertips does much more than just keep you in a short dopamine cycle – it has very real effects on socialization. Research indicates a bidirectional correlation between loneliness and screen-time, ultimately creating a vicious cycle of loneliness. An example of this that is on the rise in Japan and South Korea is hikikomori, which can be most aptly described as severe social withdrawal for a period exceeding 6 months (Encyclopedia Britannica). People who do live this life have reported higher levels of screen-time (Tateno et al., 2019), opting for the digital social sphere and not the real one. Evidently, increased screen-time could not only be a dopamine crisis, but also a socialization one. 

Increased competition for high paying jobs that leaves even qualified candidates unemployed, skyrocketing real estate prices that don’t match salary increases, and rather bleak hope of starting a family in the future – all of these are elements of why younger generations feel they have to speed up their lives not to try to come out on top, but to simply come up to breathe for air. It’s pretty hard to think of a future for your kids when you can barely see a future where you yourself survive. 

But why do all these elements matter for social acceleration? Decreased socialization manifests as higher susceptibility to what we see online, then as we engage with content which reinforces that above all you have to be successful, and quickly, it leads  us to internalize speed as a de facto rule. On top of that, decreasing attention spans that feed even more into the need to do things fast, constantly checking our watches to make sure we’re using our time effectively, and rising difficulty securing homes, are the nail in the coffin. Those are all components that lead to mental chaos and burnout.

What role does our brain and its capabilities play in the mental chaos and burnout caused by all those components? Let’s look at how fast our brains can actually take in information. A field breaking study, published recently by two Caltech scientists, found that the information processing for behavior is an abysmally low 10 bits per second (Zheng & Meister, 2025). To put this ridiculous number into perspective, your computer’s processor can process at about 160-320 billion bits per second – 10 billion times faster. Their study states that there is a significant difference between how fast our ‘outer brain’ (sensory systems) can process information (1 billion bits per second) and what they call the ‘inner brain’, which is what most people imagine as our brain (10 bits per second). Our sensory systems take in everything we might need, while the ‘inner brain’ actually decides what information to act on. It turns out our cognition is much slower than what we need in this fast-paced society.

This low speed of processing is only pushed to the brink with everything mentioned before – if we try to take in all the information we are bombarded by, and that we willingly bombard ourselves with, our brains become overstimulated and overwhelmed, leading to what we can only describe as mental chaos. It’s like drinking from a firehose and then being surprised our stomachs explode. 

Important to note is how this surplus of information that we are exposed to everyday, in addition to our decreased attention spans, affects the youth’s ability to think: “We’re becoming skimmers, not deep thinkers.” (Vaghela, 2024). We gloss over long texts and settle for ‘speed reading’ through them or trying to summarize them with AI. We are settling for knowing of it, rather than about it. We are settling for less than we should.

“Life is a marathon, not a sprint.” Ask anyone under 30 to look at their life and ask if they still agree with this. Our social world is accelerating, and keeping up is proving to be one of the hardest tasks. Social acceleration is making us lose the spark for life by centering our life around achievements that may not hold intrinsic value to ourselves. But there are solutions. Remember to go out of your room, feel the sunlight, laugh with friends and build your community. Don’t look at the time so much and slow down, not everything needs to be fast. Remember to take care of yourself: pressure builds diamonds, but it also breaks them. <<