The Tyranny of Speed. Why Faster Isn’t Better.

After having wandered around our spaces and works, let’s have a deep look at our time. We are all equal in front of times. We all have 24 hours a day. We can chose how to use them, to make them meaningful to us. This is what we will be exploring in this post and a few following ones.

A few years ago, on a spring morning, I did something that would have horrified the old me. I left the house at dawn, completely naked except for my five fingers shoes, a tiny cotton satchel holding water, a few fruits, and a house key on a piece of string. My plan was to walk an old trail that climbs behind my house and loops back after twenty-five kilometres. No phone. No clothes. No timetable. Just skin, stone, sky, and the slow certainty of footsteps.

By the time the sun was fully up I had already forgotten the concept of “making good time.” A lizard paused on a warm rock and let me watch it breathe. I stopped to taste wild thyme. I peed behind an olive tree like any other mammal. Hours slipped by unmarked. At some point I lay down in a clearing, arms spread, and felt the earth breathing with me—one long, mutual inhale and exhale. When I finally wandered home at twilight, filthy, scratched, sun-drunk and grinning, I realised I had been moving for almost eleven hours and had not once felt rushed. My body was tired the way a well-used tool is tired: satisfied, honest, complete. That single day rewrote everything I thought I knew about speed, freedom, and what it even means to “get somewhere.”

We have been lied to for two centuries, and the lie is so loud we mistake it for truth: faster is always better.

Faster planes. Faster trains. Faster food. Faster sex. Faster careers. Faster holidays. Faster lives. The entire modern economy runs on the promise that if we can just shave another twenty minutes off the journey, another five seconds off the delivery, another millisecond off the trade, we will finally arrive at happiness. Yet every time I have surrendered to that promise I have arrived depleted, irritable, and strangely lonely. The body knows the scam long before the mind catches up. The heart races, the shoulders knot, the gut clenches, and we call it “normal.”

Look at nature with clear eyes. Nature is almost never fast. A cedar tree adds two millimetres of girth per year. A glacier moves a metre a day and reshapes continents. Coral polyps build cathedrals one tiny skeleton at a time. When nature does move quickly, tornado, avalanche, flood, we do not celebrate. We call it disaster. The only time nature hurries is when something has gone terribly wrong. Simple nudity returns us to that primal calibration: when you walk bare under open sky you cannot pretend you are separate from the rhythm of the living world. Your pulse slows to match the pulse of the day. Your skin registers the exact moment the breeze turns cool. You remember, in your bones, that you were never built for 900 kilometres per hour locked inside a metal tube breathing recycled air.

Let me tell you how deep the tyranny goes.

I used to be a champion of speed. In my professional career, I wore the uniform most of the times: tailored shirts, noise-cancelling headphones, a smartwatch that scolded me if I sat still too long. I flew 150,000 kilometres some years—weekends in Lisbon, Tuesdays in Wien, red-eye back for Thursday stand-up. I bragged about it. I collected countries the way others collect fridge magnets. My carbon footprint was obscene, my memories were a slideshow, and my body was quietly falling apart: insomnia, acid reflux, a low-grade panic that hummed like tinnitus. The faster I went, the less I arrived.

Then came the collapse. Not dramatic—just a quiet unraveling. I missed a flight, then another. I started taking the train instead of planes. I began walking to the next village instead of driving. I left the clothes in the drawer more often. And something astonishing happened: time expanded. A single afternoon became spacious enough for wonder. A ten-kilometre walk became a love affair with the landscape. I started noticing that the people who moved slowly—old shepherds, barefoot children, the naked regulars at the local naturist beach—were the ones whose eyes shone with a calm I had never known.

Here is the cruelty of speed, laid bare in three movements that still break my heart when I remember them.

First movement: speed murders presence.

When you travel at 300 km/h the world becomes scenery, not relationship. You do not meet the land; you consume it. I think of the hundreds of sunsets I watched through aeroplane windows—beautiful, yes, but untouchable, like wallpaper. Now I watch the sun drop behind the same hills every evening, naked on my terrace, and each night is different: the way the light catches a single almond blossom, the exact second the bats begin their evening dance, the moment the air cools enough for goosebumps to rise like applause. Presence is not a luxury. It is the only real wealth we ever have.

Second movement: speed devours the planet and calls it progress.

Every kilometre flown burns roughly 0.15–0.25 kg of CO₂ per passenger. Multiply that by the billions of flights each year and you understand why the glaciers are crying. We have built a civilisation that treats ancient sunlight as if it were infinite, then wonders why the summers bite. Standing naked in a heatwave you feel the betrayal directly: the sun that once warmed you now scorches. The breeze that once cooled you now carries smoke from distant fires. There is no insulation, no air-conditioning unit between your skin and the consequence of collective hurry. The body becomes the measuring instrument we have ignored for too long.

Third movement: speed destroys the very connections it claims to create.

I have “friends” on four continents I have never shared a slow meal with. I have stood in famous squares surrounded by thousands of people and felt utterly alone. Speed promises proximity but delivers isolation. Slowness, on the other hand, is erotic in the truest sense: it draws you in. On long naked hikes I try to make every year, I walk 25 kilometres a day, sometimes less. I sleep in barns, share wine with strangers who become chosen family, learn the names of wildflowers in dialects. I arrive filthy, blistered, and richer than any business-class seat has ever made me. Because I have taken the time to arrive.

Philosophically, we are living through the aftermath of a 250-year delusion. The Enlightenment gave us the clock, the steam engine, the factory siren. Time stopped belonging to God or the seasons and started belonging to profit. We began to speak of “killing time,” “spending time,” “saving time,” as if time were a commodity instead of the very fabric of being alive. Henry Ford boasted he could put the world on wheels; what he actually did was put the world on a treadmill. We have been running ever since, and the finish line keeps moving.

Every ancient tradition knew better. The Desert Fathers walked into silence. The Zen monk measures a lifetime in breaths, not kilometres. The Aboriginal songlines are walked, not driven; to know a place you must let it enter your feet. Lao Tzu reminds us that the tree that bends lives longer than the one that races the wind. Even the Stoics—those supposed champions of discipline—praised “good rhythm,” not frantic pace. When we choose slowness we are not opting out. We are opting back in—to sanity, to ecology, to joy.

So here is my confession and my invitation.

Most days I move no faster than a thoughtful walking pace, often naked when the land allows it. My life is smaller on a map and infinitely larger in depth. I know the exact spot where the wild asparagus pushes through in March. I know which oak drops the sweetest acorns and which spring tastes of iron on Tuesdays after rain. I know the names of my neighbours’ dogs and the precise hour the swallows return. These are not trivial details. They are the curriculum of a life reclaimed.

And the miracle is this: the slower I go, the more time I have. Deadlines soften. Creativity returns. Sleep deepens. Sex lasts longer and means more. Conversations unfold instead of concluding. The body, unhurried, begins to heal itself.

If you are exhausted by velocity, start small. Leave the watch at home tomorrow. Walk to the bakery naked under a long coat if you must, then shed the coat on the way home. Take the long way. Pause when something beautiful asks you to. Feel the scandalous luxury of having nowhere urgent to be. Let the day touch you the way a lover touches—slowly, deliberately, with full attention.

Because the truth is this: the world is not waiting for us at the end of the highway. The world is here, now, under your bare feet, breathing with you, ready to be met at three kilometres an hour.

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