We look around and see that everything operates at its own pace. Flowers bloom at their rhythm, the snail moves at its rhythm, apples ripen at their rhythm, and we grow at ours. It seems impossible for a child, no matter how much they rush, to suddenly become a 40-year-old man—just as no amount of prodding will make a snail move significantly faster.

I’m beginning to truly understand that the mind follows a process of construction, with its own timing. Unique to each person, as in the examples above. Yet I can’t help but return to the same questions: How much could it accelerate? Can a mind change its speed to do more? Can we demand more from a child? Can we demand it of ourselves? Where is the limit? What is the cost? Are there shortcuts?

Reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, I glimpsed certain limits we no longer consider in the human mind. The impossibility of activating a negativism (which would run counter to today’s society) as a defense against a positivism that drives us without restraint means this infinite impulse collides with the real, physical boundaries of our cognition. This, which might seem trivial, is triggering what we might call a pandemic of mental illnesses as a consequence: anxieties, paranoias, depressions… The mind’s limits are silent, and so the body activates ancestral mechanisms to sound the alarm when those cognitive boundaries are reached.

I’ve come to understand that immediacy is not the path to cognitive peace. Nor does it cultivate patience; it merely satiates a chemical impulse born from the rhythm of the modern human world. I’d like to think that immediacy is nothing more than a human strategy for competitiveness—one that simultaneously soothes its own consequences (those of competitiveness) in our minds. That is its power. It accelerates us while providing a false sense of calm through satisfaction. There! Everything in its place. Only to immediately launch into the next momentum of urgency, for whatever reason. It is infinite. It is speed.

The chain of immediacy’s miracle carries an intrinsic contaminant. The cognitive price of obtaining something instantly is not free. The personal cost could range from dopamine withdrawal to the loss of perspective and values. Remember: it’s just speed.

And so, the flood of questions arrives: Do we know what price we’ll pay in exchange for having something right now? Why must we shorten processes that require a different temporality? What is the real benefit of surrendering to non-patience—which, in light of this, practically turns patience into a superpower? How many things do you know that were born from impatience? And conversely, how many emerged from patience? What is the existential quality of one versus the other?

And yet, sensing some answers, the final question: Why is it so hard for some individuals to halt this speed-above-all?

As Byung-Chul Han pointed out, we face several conflict scenarios:

• Otherness. Difference provokes (like the human body) a reaction from the social collective against what is foreign, what is other. Thus, any form of otherness will encounter pushback from the group. As individuals, society itself pushes in the opposite direction, creating cohesion and resistance against slowness. Here, the cognitive cost is high.

• The second—pay attention here—is that the pressure to perform no longer comes from a superior being, a boss, a master, or a third party, as it once did. Now, positivism generates an illusion of infinite freedom in the individual—“I can”—when in reality, they are enslaved by their own demands and the false belief in limitlessness. Now, we are our own bosses, the ones who push ourselves, who demand more, who deny ourselves rest, who compete, who desire. This makes it incredibly difficult to build the necessary resistance to protect ourselves and stop. What are we protecting ourselves from? Ourselves? Or is it the positivism we’ve unknowingly internalized? The process of stopping is no longer obvious because there is no external figure to blame.

On top of this, time is not infinite for the human species. So the paradox unfolds on the plane of temporality: we run out of time while simultaneously exhausting ourselves cognitively through immediacy, through speed, believing we are making the most of it.

The way out, it seems, would be to understand the quality of our time. To recognize the cost of that quality and to become aware—I repeat, become aware—of the prices we pay when we yield to the aforementioned conflicts. It is, ultimately, about understanding that speed—driven by the desire to have everything without acknowledging real cognitive limits—or, to put it plainly, it is about understanding what we pay.

This is an elaborate process. I don’t believe it’s innate. And it’s difficult. I have the sense that it’s more likely we’ll pay the price and suffer the consequences than attempt to preemptively manage our awakening.

The energy-saving principle of our survival instinct clashes with the cognitive effort required to pause and analyze certain mental processes. That is, stopping to think, becoming aware, demands energy and time—and therefore requires exertion.

Our physical and mental evolution is not yet prepared to overcome those cognitive limits we presume to be infinite, limits that time drowns. The result is mental illness and chemical imbalances, born from our body’s clumsy translation of speed and acceleration as danger and urgency.

>VicenDominguez_