Comments - The psychological cost of acceleration
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The psychological cost of acceleration
The heavy cost of rapid technological progress and the antidote for acceleration Read →
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Mar 16Edited
Liked by Scott Barker
I appreciate the honesty in your callouts; the acknowledgment of privilege and limitation doesn't diminish the conversation, it elevates it. Those of us with the luxury of reflection have a responsibility to use it beyond our own self-improvement bubble.
Your turtle analogy made me think, why is it that humans alone fight so hard against the natural arc of life and death? Every other species moves through that cycle without resistance. There's a beauty in endings that once gave existence its weight and meaning. Instead we've medicalised death, pathologised grief, and now we're funding immortality research. But our current systems don't just ignore death, they actively incentivise survival for its own sake. Economic structures, institutions, even legacy are all optimised for continuation, not meaning. Life extended without being anchored in purpose starts to feel hollow.
I wonder if the acceleration you're describing isn't a problem so much as a necessary pattern, a forced reckoning bringing us back to precisely what we abandoned. The esoteric, the ritualistic, the acceptance of impermanence. We crowded those things out and now the emptiness is loud enough that people are reaching back.
What gives me hope is agency. The difference between meaning-making systems that served us and ones that didn't comes down to whether people chose them or had them imposed. The antidote you're pointing toward only works if it's opt-in. Otherwise, we replace one compulsory system with another, which is how we ended up here. Religion was imposed, distrust followed, and we collectively ran toward science as salvation. Now, science is hitting its own ceiling of meaning.
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Author
Thanks for taking the time to jump in here with some really thoughtful reflections, Emma. There's lots of good stuff here.
I''m with you on elevating, not diminishing the convo. I feel incredibly lucky to be in a position where I have been disconnected long enough to think deeply/clearly (at least clearer than I was) during this period of noise. And because of that, I feel a sense of duty to use the privilege to try to start some longer overdue conversations. Your comment on "a responsibility to use it beyond our self-improvement bubble" really landed. Embarrassingly, for a long time, I stayed in that self-improvement bubble and it did nothing, perhaps even made me more sick.
I also like your idea about this being a necessary pattern, it's something that I've thought a lot about. It seems all this madness is heading us towards a collective wake-up call that we all need. Just like individual humans, we're usually really bad at making changes until it gets really bad. Perhaps it needs to get really bad. And that's a feature in a way, not a bug.
Lastly, we're on the same page about the next waves of stories we co-create together can not be compulsory. Everyone is on their own path but hopefully we can find some common threads together that give us a sense of collective meaning again.
Appreciate you!
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Mar 15Edited
Liked by Scott Barker
Just diving into this article now. Your last essay really was one of the most insightful pieces I’ve read on Substack.
It’s truly helping me navigate this storm with much more calm and far less of a desire for more.
Just the simple act of putting a picnic table outside so I can enjoy my meals in peace and nature is helping my soul already.
Of course making a move to an Island nearly 13 years ago was also a good move it would seem.
I had a dream about the future and decided my golden years needed this to thrive.
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Mar 15Edited
Author
Thank you for the kind words and support, DJS. It makes me happy that it had an impact on you.
The world needs more outdoor picnic dinners! Appreciate you.
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Liked by Scott Barker
Scott,
I enjoyed reading your article. To me, what you’ve described as a crisis of acceleration is, at its root, a crisis of epistemology.
We no longer agree on what real knowledge is, or what it’s for, because every medium we peer into insists that information exists primarily to stimulate, not to orient.
The five enzymes you name all share one crucial feature: they took time, demanded patience, and they were embedded in a culture that took the weight of human experience seriously.
What has replaced them is something far more insidious: an entertainment apparatus so total that even our attempts at integration must pass through its logic to reach anyone at all.
I believe what’s beneath that apparatus is something difficult to accept.
People are not simply victims of the pace, they are also quietly grateful for it.
Genuine integration means sitting alone with your guilt, your unlived life, and your unanswered moral debts.
The sea turtle metaphor you offer is exactly right, but I wonder whether some part of us already knows which light is false and runs toward it anyway.
An honest roadmap toward integration has to begin with that uncomfortable admission, before it can go anywhere meaningful.
What will reach a person who has chosen, at some level, to stay lost? I think this is a question both of us share.
P.S.
Thanks for the follow
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Author
Your comment got me thinking Austin, thanks man.
I try to be optimistic/hopeful when I write since there’s enough doom/gloom AI/future content out there but I think you raise a very valid point.
Re: turtles and knowing the false light - you’re right, we all have agency and can educate ourselves on ‘light’ to figure it out. What I will say is it’s almost as if the road to the hotel lights is paved but the road to the ocean is much rougher, wild terrain. So yes, perhaps there’s an element of convenience that we’re consciously or subconsciously choosing even against our better knowing.
Perhaps in the future we can work on putting some roadblocks up on the paved path to help others so the onus isn’t fully on the individual all the time.
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Liked by Scott Barker
Yes, caution signs at the very least.
Thanks Scott
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Liked by Scott Barker
You should write about decision stress. Also, shoutout to Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell, 1970.
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Author
Thanks for jumping in, Robert. Decision fatigue is a very real thing and plays into the feeling of collective overwhelm for sure. I just did a quick search on Future Shock and it looks like it would be right up my alley. We were really on to some things in the 70s…
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Liked by Scott Barker
It's been my salvation since the 1990s. I was fortunate to discover the book in 1976, out of my childhood fascination with futurism.
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Author
I’m excited to check it out and report back, appreciate you sharing.
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“Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster.” I think of this as our Human Moat. The value of human uniqueness. I worry that as opportunities shrink and we become more disconnected, what type of “human uniqueness” will be created? I hope it’s not more anger and isolation but instead people lean back into connection — which was wonderfully called out in this piece.
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Your are correct. Most of humanity is running in survival mode. You are one man but the collective can build new systems that will adapt to the acceleration decade and come out the other side on top. Your article directly aligns with chapter 5 of the Abundance Dividend Framework. How we seperate desire from need.
Question for the audience - How do we build back spirituality in our communities?
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The sea turtles metaphor nails online discourse. Platforms are the bright hotels. They reward reaction over thought, certainty over uncertainty. The feed doesn't care if you're struggling toward mastery, it cares if you're generating engagement.
But here's what interests me: you list spirituality, ritual, philosophy, culture, community as antidotes. Yet those become performative too online. Performative spirituality. Mindfulness as productivity hack. Community as brand.
What would it look like if one of those actually resisted the template instead of just becoming another form of acceleration?
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I will admit when I first started reading this, I thought it was just going to be another piece about how the sky is falling in, but instead, it left me feeling more hopeful than I have recently about our ability to bring things into balance.
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I think having read this, your previous article will feel more rooted now 👍 For me and echoing a previous reply and your first suggestion of slowing down, being in as wild as possible nature is super important.
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Loved this and the last essay as well. Looking forward to where this leads. I’ve been coaching clients on the evolutionary mismatch between our nervous system and the world we live in today. Once you see the gap, so many things we often blame ourselves for start to feel inevitable (anxiety, burnout, depression, etc) and knowing how we can empower ourselves to run toward the moonlight instead of the streetlights is a source of hope. Coincidentally, I read this article immediately after reading a preview of Arthur C. Brooks’ next book, The Meaning of Your Life. He has long taught and written about the macronutrients of happiness (satisfaction + enjoyment + meaning) and theorizes a significant deficiency in meaning is driving the psychological epidemic of depression and hopelessness globally. Your “enzymes” framework complements his approach, and I’m left waiting for more essays and his book so we can knit together this metabolic prescription for agency in today’s world. Keep thinking. Keep writing.
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Great take. To some extent, we outsourced these enzymes to corporations. Or we sought their counterfeit offerings as alternatives.
The best brands can stand in for all 5. But a good brand executes well on at least one. Disney. Apple. Hallmark. Coca-Cola. Whole Foods.
Maybe this helps explain the rise in mega-church formulas. To take back their role as a centerpiece in people's lives, they have to compete with the colorful, nutrient-poor offerings people have become conditioned to via for-profit offerings.
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I’ve been thinking about the same concept and about to publish an essay on human infrastructure. On the privelage part of your essay…I think if we do have the privelage of the maslows hierarchy of needs, we have more of a responsibility to do some heavy lifting to create new systems. Obviously without being blind to other situations but more from the lens of lifting others up and listening with curiousity.
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Appreciate the thoughtful comment and I agree. We’ve gone down this path of hyper-individualism and I fear that’s only going to get worse unless we course correct.
“healthcare portals, subscriptions, passwords, financial platforms, constant communication channels.” - this is very real. I remember it was actually small tasks like this that would put me over the edge when I was already running at full capacity.
I do wonder how many more decisions we make on average a day vs. even fifty years ago?
Thanks for jumping in Debbie 🙏
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This comment has inspired me to read this article. I thought my mental breakdown tied directly to the constant inputs from my life. I never thought about the shift in responsibility to the individual we have now that we didn’t before. Thank you for sharing.
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We’re speaking the same language, Eduardo. Good call out. I tried to highlight that our task is to reorient/remember the real ocean but I’ll continue to go deeper there. I’ll check out Bill Plotkin’s work as well.
In your eyes, what do you think is step one in people re-connecting with the living world?
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I am just getting to know Bill Plotkin's work myself....So rich and interesting. Great recommendation for this thread.
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Really well said man. I'm up in the mountains of Dharamshala right now enjoying a lot of nature. Today I'll go out and have some 'conversations' rather than experiences. I like that shift.
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