fast forward

don't you dare pause.

Confession: I love waiting for things. I once sat in a waiting room for over an hour, pleasantly meandering my own mind-scape, before realizing I had probably been forgotten about and politely reminding the office of my existence. I really don’t mind standing in line at amusement parks, provided they’ve got interesting decor or other distractions along the route. As long as the promise of the premise waits for me at the end of the rainbow, I’m good to take my time getting there.

I think this is largely the result of above-standard public education, from the privilege of attending school as a young person and feeling like it was a safe haven. What my home life as a child lacked in regard to structure and organization and comprehendible outcomes, my school made up for in spades. If I never knew where I stood as a daughter, I always understood (and exceeded) the expectations my educators had for me as a student.

An example from this week: if being “a good citizen” means I stand in a jury duty line for an hour after canceling the day’s commitments, fill out the form asking about the magazines I read (none? is the internet a magazine?) and what I do for work (self employed? sometimes?) before being sat in a holding room with hundreds of strangers and no internet access before my eventual release with a pat on the back about doing my civic duty even though all I did was stand and sit, I’ll do it with relish.

I really mean that. I loved every second of my three hour jury duty experience. I was dismissed with everyone but a group of ten people who were asked to remain behind. Upon our dismissal, one of those people who had to stay, a man who had setup a full work-from-courthouse office at the front of the waiting room, rolled his eyes and muttered “of course.”

And it get it. Where there are systems, there is opportunity for inefficiency, inequality, inconvenience (in no particular order). Sure, walking a half mile labyrinth of ribboned off walkway to get to an entrance five feet from where you started is often a waste of time.

But I’d argue that some inefficiency is the cost of order, and order (when done right) can be a gift. Bureaucracy, at its best, offers structure and clarity: stand here, fill this out, wait your turn. There’s a rhythm to it, a cadence that, when respected, keeps things moving just enough to be predictable but slow enough to allow for human fallibility. I’m not perfect, so I shouldn’t expect a system designed to be used by and for me to function any differently, right?

Isn’t there comfort in knowing a system is at work, even if it’s imperfect? A process, made by and for humans, unfolding in its own time. A form will be signed, a number called, a seat assigned. This human machine moves at the pace it was built to move, and sometimes, when the right people are running it for the right reasons, it hums along exactly as it should.

But lately, more and more, I think we’re all feeling that hum being interrupted by something harsher, something more impatient. A vibration in the air, an unspoken demand: faster, leaner, more profitable. And it’s making everything worse.

You can feel it in places where time used to be something close to sacred. Doctor’s and therapist’s offices have their appointments stacked like Tetris blocks, spilling into each other until we’re forced to diagnose ourselves via WebMD (or, in the worst cases, Reddit) and medicate the issue with the closest comfort at hand. In academia, where the precious spaces designed to nurture have devolved into near-mechanistic employment factories. Even in spaces meant to be humane (public services, libraries, non-profits) there’s a creeping pressure to prove their worth in quarterly metrics, as if the mere act of existing in service to people isn’t justification enough.

At its core, it’s a kind of energy that sees structure not as a framework for sustainability, but as an obstacle to be streamlined. If a thing takes time, it must be wasting time. If a process is slow, it must be broken. Never mind that some things (most things, really) need time. Bureaucracy, in its many forms, when functioning as it should, isn’t inefficient; it’s methodical. The slowness isn’t failure. It’s deliberation.

But that’s not the world we live in anymore. Late-stage capitalism, with its fetish for speed and output, has convinced us that anything short of perpetual acceleration is stagnation. That a moment spent waiting is a moment lost. That the only systems worth having are ones that move at the breakneck pace of the market. After all, if I hadn’t spent three hours waiting around on a Monday morning, I could have been selling my labor for someone else to profit from.

But here’s the thing: the push to be faster, to do more with less, to eliminate “waste” (which, of course, usually means eliminating people) it isn’t actually making things better. It’s making them brittle.

Look at the industries where hyper-efficiency has been the guiding principle for decades. The gig economy (and the self-help industry it’s in a symbiotic relationship with), where workers are algorithmically pressured into optimizing every second of their day for maximum profitability, only to burn out and be replaced by the next in line. The healthcare system, where understaffed hospitals operate at razor-thin margins of capacity, where a single surge in patients can tip them into crisis. Even film and television, where once-thriving creative spaces have been reduced to “content pipelines,” spitting out just-good-enough stories to feed an insatiable algorithm, an audience seeking a kind of connection the system has been slowly cutting us off from, minute by profitable minute.

The same logic (fist pounding, hypermasculine, efficiency at all costs, elimination of so-called waste “logic”) has crept into government institutions in ways that will leave lasting damage. Senseless firings from essential agencies, particularly those advocating for the environment, have been framed as cutting bureaucratic bloat, but in reality, they gut the very mechanisms meant to protect us.

Stripping environmental agencies of scientists, regulators, and policymakers doesn’t make things run smoother… it makes disaster inevitable. It means slower responses to climate crises, weaker protections against corporate exploitation, and an open invitation for industries to prioritize profit over the health of the land and the people who depend on it. The erosion of these systems won’t be felt all at once, but year by year, storm by storm, wildfire by wildfire, until we look around and realize we dismantled our own safety nets in the name of speed and savings. Almost as if the people doing the destruction don’t want us to have anything even resembling safety.

The irony, of course, is that this kind of efficiency isn’t actually efficient in the long run. It’s reactionary. It’s shortsighted. It maximizes profit in the moment but erodes the very foundation it stands on, hollowing out industries, institutions, and people until there’s nothing left but exhaustion.

Nature, on the other hand, understands efficiency in a way capitalism never could. Ant colonies and beehives operate with remarkable precision, but they don’t rush. Their rhythms are dictated by necessity, not artificial urgency. Flowers bloom when the conditions are right, not when a quarterly report demands it. Migration patterns stretch across thousands of miles, but they unfold in their own time, attuned to the seasons, the weather, the balance of the ecosystem.

Nothing in nature is wasted, but nothing is hurried, either. The planet has evolved to sustain itself through cycles of activity and rest, of abundance and dormancy, of motion and stillness. When those cycles are disrupted, when we push too hard, extract too much, demand too quickly? Systems collapse. What we call inefficiency is often just nature working at the pace it was meant to, resisting the artificial acceleration we try to impose.

What if we measured efficiency differently? What if we designed systems that prioritized longevity over speed, sustainability over output? I’ve asked these questions here before, and I’m still asking them today.

The systems around us may be built for speed, but we don’t have to move at their pace. For the everyday person, I believe resisting this parody-level machismo, ravenously capitalistic drive for relentless speed can start small. Taking the longer route. Letting an email sit before responding. Prioritizing rest as a non-negotiable part of productivity, rather than its enemy. Setting boundaries around work and consumption, unsubscribing from the urgency of “always on” culture. Reclaiming (truly, deeply) hobbies that serve no market purpose, that exist solely for joy.

When we introduce ourselves to new friends, let us not speak of what makes us profitable to the system, and instead emphasize what brings us to life. I pray we can, someday, build a world where idleness, pauses, and deep breaths are not luxury, but status quo.

I don’t think these are radical ideas (and I’d wager you don’t either). They’re practical ones. They recognize that people and the systems we build aren’t meant to function like machines. That sometimes, a little waiting, a little deliberation, a little space is exactly what’s needed to keep things moving in a way that actually works.

So no, I don’t mind waiting. I don’t mind the slowness of a well-oiled but not overloaded system, one that understands its own limits and respects the time things take. What I do mind is the encroaching belief that slowness is failure, that anything not optimized for maximum output is broken.

Because when we lose our patience for the natural rhythm of things, when we sacrifice structure for speed, sustainability for profit, we don’t become more efficient. We (and the planet we call home) just become more exhausted. And that, in the long run, is the biggest inefficiency of all.