Written by Ceylin Dogan
I wake most mornings with the sense that time has already escaped me, as though the day has moved several steps ahead before I even open my eyes. The restless drum of my mind, still soft with sleep, begins listing the lectures to attend, deadlines to complete, messages to reply to, trains to book before prices rise, and the news to catch up on to remain a socially acceptable citizen of the twenty-first century. It’s not quite panic, but an almost physical sensation, like standing on a shoreline as the water pulls away and realizing the sand beneath me is being stolen grain by grain, slipping between my toes, until balance feels like something I had borrowed.
My friends tell me they feel it too. We talk about how astonishingly fast and absurdly efficient everything is. How surreal it is that we can watch a documentary about Bruegel in bed and book a last-minute trip to Vienna for the weekend (this actually happened). Or read a book from a favorite author and decide, on impulse, to email her (this also happened, though she never responded). We are young, ambitious, full of gratitude for all this abundance.
And yet, hovering beneath this excitement is the constant suspicion that we are living inside a machine wound too tightly. A viral reference on TikTok spreads and I laugh a week too late, a guest entering a party that had already been cleaned up. A song my little cousin loved last month is now “old,” dismissed with the impatience of someone for whom time is an overstimulated creature (gen-alpha…). Restaurants and cafes boom and die with seasons, leaving my mom wondering how that one place that was impossible to book in spring now stands empty. Culture evaporates like ink in the sun. Even memory cannot settle; too hurried to root itself in any way resembling permanence.
This is what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration, a term I stumbled on through a friend and have not managed to forget since. He distinguishes between three dimensions of acceleration: the speeding-up of technological processes, the increasing rate of social change, and the intensification of the pace of life. The present contracts, a small and unstable bridge between an outdated past and an imminent future.
At first, speed was a means to freedom. Machines were meant to liberate us from labour, social change to expand our possibilities. For a brief moment, it felt as though these gains might return time to us. But somewhere in late modernity this promise crumbled. All this progress promised efficiency, but speed has mutated into an external compulsion. Deadlines, trends, connections, notifications–everything demands immediacy. And so we accelerate to keep up with the acceleration itself.
This ceaseless movement that leads nowhere is what Rosa names the “frenetic standstill”. It is the absurdity of running furiously on a carousel horse that spins but never advances, of exertion without arrival. Every device, every invention, every platform arrives with the same promise of saving time. Yet the hours do not accumulate, they vanish more quickly into more obligations and more expectations.
I feel this absurdity not only in the outer world but in the folds of my own consciousness. I notice my own attention fracture in real time as I try to multitask to keep up, my mind scattered across too many surfaces to settle on any one thing.
And yet the human body resists. As the present contracts, something in us longs for a more spacious temporality. The heart still seeks connection and rest. The mind still craves depth and duration. I feel it in the small ache that arrives when I close a book too soon, when it has barely begun to settle in me. I feel it when a conversation is cut short by the buzzing of an urgent reminder, just as something honest is about to surface. My mind and my heart desperately want to stay with things long enough for them to leave an imprint. They want a pace that allows thoughts and connections to ripen on their own time.
And because this longing grows too loud to ignore, I try to collect moments of deceleration, moments that thicken slightly, and slip them into my pocket the way children collect shells by the sea. The ritual of boiling water for my tea without touching my phone. Peeling fruit slowly and listening to the soft tear of the rind. Feeling the weight of a book in my hands after having read a chapter, allowing myself to feel its imprint before I rush. The hum of the tram windows as it curves through the city. The tourists who stop to admire the cathedral I pass by each day without looking.
Though personal slowness alone cannot undo the structural acceleration of late modernity, these small, uneven gestures still matter to me. I admire the seashells that accumulate quietly in my pocket. In a culture defined by acceleration, presence and connection–to moments and to people–become radical.
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2013.