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It’s a bit past 10 p.m., and I’m scrolling through my phone, telling myself I’m checking something important. But I’m not.
I’m just checking that I still exist.
This reflex—reaching for a device the moment we stop moving—has become the defining gesture of modern life. We call it staying connected, but what it really signals is something deeper: the fear that if we’re not in motion, we’re disappearing.
It’s like we’ve turned being busy into a performance. And it’s costing us everything we meant to progress toward.
Velocity as Virtue
Researchers studying productivity call it time poverty—the chronic sense of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. I hear it all the time. But there’s a paradox: We’re more efficient than any generation in history. We automate, accelerate, and optimize every task. Still, most working adults report feeling constantly behind.
The problem here isn’t time itself. It’s that we’ve confused motion with meaning.
Progress was once synonymous with direction, buoyed by a collective belief that human effort could improve the world. Somewhere along our path, progress became a bona fide compulsion. We now measure worth by velocity: how fast we respond, how many boxes we check off, how much we produce before lunch.
Every notification hijacks the same dopamine circuit that once signaled survival. So it’s easy to mistake activation for being alive.
The Hedonic Treadmill
I’ve noticed that the faster we move, the further meaning recedes.
We set a goal, chase it, achieve it—and the moment we arrive, the target moves again. A new milestone appears from nothing, and the next metric glows neon bright. The cycle restarts. And it’s not because we failed or because success wasn’t enough, but because velocity has become the point.
I have run at full speed in the wrong direction and still called it progress. I’ve tried to optimize relationships, gamify my health, “level up” my happiness until personal joy becomes just another dashboard number. Yet the faster I move, the more lost I feel. I’m not doing anything wrong, but speed itself erases orientation. Sound familiar?
Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. While it can seem like we’re just failing to savor success, in reality, we’re optimizing ourselves out of the ability to feel it.
I know firsthand that speed without direction is just glorified chaos.
The Cost of Acceleration
When motion becomes reflex, it’s easy to lose contact with our subjective experience.
Neuroscience research shows that the brain needs downtime, actual stillness, to consolidate learning and construct meaning. Without it, we operate in continuous partial attention: always on, never fully present.
Last week, my partner asked me a question while I was answering some routine emails. I responded—I’m certain I did—but I have no memory of what either of us said. Not the question. Not my answer. Nothing. Later that night, they referenced our conversation, and I just smiled and nodded as if I knew what they meant.
I didn’t.
I’d been physically present but cognitively absent, my attention fractured across 20 browser tabs and an expanding mental to-do list. I’d performed the motions of listening, the whole theater of engagement, while my brain was somewhere else entirely. The disturbing part wasn’t a failure to listen. It’s that I’d become so practiced at simulating presence that I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
That’s when I realized that continuous partial attention is more than just exhausting: It’s closer to pure erasure: I’m here, but I’m not here. I’m collecting moments I’ll never actually remember because I was too busy being “productive” to encode them in the first place.
Our calendars overflow. Our attention fractures. We plan a decade ahead yet struggle to stay present for even a single conversation.
What’s been hard for me to admit is that the things I most want—connection, community, coherence—can’t be rushed. It’s useless to try to automate empathy or optimize awe. You can attempt to accelerate understanding, but what are you missing that’s lurking between the lines?
Presence requires friction, and friction requires time. But we’ve increasingly built a world designed to eliminate both. The smoother our lives become, the less texture they hold. The more efficient we get, the less we remember why we started moving in the first place.
The way out of this trap is to redefine what movement means without abandoning values or ambition.
Three Shifts that Matter
Define a direction, not a speed. Stop asking How fast am I moving? and start asking Toward what? I work with a venture capitalist who keeps one question on a Post-It note above his monitor: “Is this doing or being?” Most days, he deletes half his to-do list based on that alone. Even if you can’t do this, progress matters only if you know what it serves. Choose something broader than performance, something that actually matters to who you want to be, and let that question slow you down before you speed up.
Reclaim the pause. I’ve been tempted to think that stillness is the absence of progress. I’m wrong. One study found that students who pause to reflect on what they’d learned performed 23 percent better than those who powered through without stopping. The brain integrates learning and makes meaning in silence. Without pause, we repeat patterns instead of evolving past them. It’s the little stuff: white space the way you schedule meetings; take a walk without your phone; sit without solving for anything. Let your mind do what it evolved to do—make sense of things.
Measure depth, not distance. Distance tells how far you’ve traveled. And it’s never enough. Depth indicates how much of you came along for the ride. At the end of each week, I’ve started to think about what I actually felt, not just what I accomplished. Try it out. What shifts in your understanding? What conversation changes how you see something? The goal is not to do less; it’s to be a little more present while doing anything.
Reframe and Liberation
Progress began as a way to push humanity forward. Then it became a way to outrun ourselves.
The real measure of our progress shouldn’t be sheer velocity. It’s congruence: Can your actions, values, and attention move in the same direction at the same time? When they align, movement feels vital and alive. When they don’t, you’re just generating a lot of heat.
Last week, I had an MBA class to teach, an important client presentation, a deadline for an agent, and nonprofit board duties. I also needed to eat. I was moving at warp speed, toggling between windows, half-present in every conversation, doing nothing well. My calendar said urgent! My body said breaking down!
And then I stopped.
I wasn’t suddenly granted more time. It’s just that I realized my emergency wasn’t anyone else’s emergency.
I taught the class like it was the only thing I had to do that day. The client got my full attention for an hour. The deadline moved. Dinner happened, very imperfectly. No, I didn’t check everything off my list. But what I did do, I did with meaning. The work was better. My sanity stayed, mostly, intact.
That’s what I mean by congruence. Not doing everything, just doing what you choose to be doing.
Now it’s 10 p.m. again. My phone is in the other room, still within reach, glowing with the same reflex promise: Stay relevant. Stay in motion. Stay afraid of stopping.
I let it sit. Three seconds. Five. Ten.
The silence doesn’t feel like disappearing anymore. It feels like I’m finally arriving.
