Speed Freak Planet: How Humanity’s Global Addiction to Velocity Is Outrunning Common Sense

The world, it seems, has overdosed on espresso and is now sprinting in twelve directions at once, each one convinced it’s late for a meeting that was cancelled last quarter. From the bullet-train commuters of Tokyo who can nap with their eyes open at 320 km/h, to the Lagos okada riders threading traffic like caffeinated hornets, speed has become the planet’s unofficial religion—complete with indulgences sold in the form of “priority boarding.”

Consider the global supply chain: a Rube Goldberg contraption stretched across oceans, now running so fast that a single sneeze in the Suez Canal sends birthday cards arriving in June instead of March. Amazon has promised Indians in Kerala they can have a nose-hair trimmer by breakfast tomorrow, and somehow—through sorcery, indentured drones, or sheer managerial spite—it usually appears. Economists cheer this as “efficiency,” while the Indian Ocean quietly fills with yet another container of unwanted fidget spinners, drifting like plastic jellyfish toward immortality.

Meanwhile, the markets have evolved from Gordon Gekko’s cocaine-fueled 1980s trading floor to algorithms dueling in microsecond skirmishes. A hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut can bankrupt a pension fund in Vilnius before a Lithuanian pensioner finishes buttering toast. Regulators draft rules at the stately pace of democratic bureaucracy; the code simply mutates, a financial COVID that learns faster than we can quarantine it. Somewhere, a quant is teaching a machine to front-run itself, just to shave off another nanosecond of human hesitation. The investors call it “progress”; the rest of us call it Tuesday.

Europe, ever the moral older sibling, tries to slow things down with 30 km/h city-center limits and “right to disconnect” laws. The French even flirt with banning ultra-fast fashion, lest the planet be buried under last season’s polyester crop tops. Admirable, but the moment their 5G networks hiccup, Parisians riot as if the guillotine had been replaced by lagging TikTok videos. Slowness, it turns out, is a luxury good—marketed to the same people who can afford week-long silent retreats and $12 sourdough. For refugees paddling into Greece, speed is still measured in the difference between a smuggler’s Zodiac and the Hellenic Coast Guard’s wake.

Climate change itself has hit the accelerator, proving that nature, too, can binge on stimulants. Siberian permafrost is melting so quickly that Russian scientists—previously occupied with vodka and existential dread—now race to exhale methane before it exhales them. Wildfires sprint across Australia, California, and the Mediterranean like Olympic torch relays nobody asked to host. The planet’s fever curve is now steeper than a crypto bubble, and still we argue over whether the thermostat should be set to “apocalypse” or merely “inconvenient.”

Of course, the human body has opinions about this collective drag race. Japanese salarymen collapse from karōshi—death by overwork—while American teenagers build “bed-rotting” into their schedules like micro-vacations from their own ambition. Silicon Valley gurus pop modafinil to outrun circadian rhythms; their counterparts in Nairobi chew khat to keep the drowsy gods of poverty at bay. The finish line keeps moving, but the paramedics remain understaffed.

And yet, for all the velocity, we still wait: three hours for a passport stamp, eight weeks for an ICU bed, seventy years for a political apology. The faster we go, the longer the queues become—a cosmic joke delivered in bullet-time. Perhaps speed was never about reaching anywhere; perhaps it’s just an expensive treadmill sold to us by the same folks who also manufacture the guilt for not keeping up.

In the end, the Earth will shrug, slow its spin by a millisecond, and politely ask us to get off. Until then, keep your tray tables stowed and your existential dread on airplane mode—our nonstop flight to who-knows-where has just been delayed… indefinitely.