We Built A World Incompatible With Being Human

A good friend had a car accident in the middle of a busy city. Luckily, just minor injuries – yet enough to put her on sick leave for several weeks. More importantly, she was ordered to stop. To rest. To re-examine everything. The cause of the accident was a few seconds of blackout caused by extreme stress and a body on the verge of complete collapse. Two seconds of not paying attention at an intersection. Two years of daily battles as a working single mother of two. The combination exploded in that one moment.

Everything was too much, she recalled afterward. The overload of distractions, noise, dense traffic, and the relentless pressure of doing everything alone. An angry boss. An overwhelming household. Children in kindergarten and school. Debts her ex-husband had incurred and left entirely in her hands. The body, which had been sending signals for months, finally stopped sending them and simply shut down.

The therapist she was required to see after the accident forced her to pause, rest, and change. Which meant someone had to order her to. Because she hadn’t been able to do it herself.

The Machine

Why do we keep going along with it?

I felt sorry for her. And mad at her. At the same time.

Why are you always running for everyone else and not taking care of yourself? You can’t help others when you are this depleted. You didn’t listen to your body. You ignored the signals for months.

But with some distance, the anger shifted direction. Why do we go along with it? Why do we let the constant hectic and pressure of the world around us determine how we move through the day? My friend knew something was wrong. She knew for months, probably years. But she didn’t know how to escape it. There was work. There were children. There was traffic. There were debts. Demands were arriving from every direction before she’d finished responding to the last ones.

Do we actually have any control? Or are we simply at the mercy of something larger, a rhythm we got swallowed up in so gradually that we stopped noticing it wasn’t ours? There is a helplessness in that question – a feeling of being caught inside a machine we didn’t design and cannot stop.

But helplessness is only the first feeling. Underneath it, if you sit with it long enough, is something sharper.

Something built this machine. And something keeps it running.

The Descent

The real problem is this: we built a world that is systematically incompatible with being human. And then we called it progress.

In our pursuit of improving life, health, and working conditions, we accelerated innovation by consuming natural and human resources past the point of recovery. The consequences are not abstract. They are written into the places we live, the people we are becoming, and the quality of attention we can still bring to an ordinary moment.

What speed does to place.

I lived in San Francisco for fourteen years. I watched neighborhoods change – not slowly, not naturally, but with the force of greed and money that likes to move fast. Landlords evicted long-term renters to sell or re-let at four or five times the price. Technology companies, incentivized by the city itself, opened offices downtown and brought an influx of highly paid workers who needed somewhere to live. Apartments that had housed families for decades were converted to vacation rentals, cycling through a parade of short-term visitors who had no investment in the place and no reason to behave as though they did.

What disappeared was not just affordable housing. What disappeared was the neighborhood itself. The fabric of different generations living alongside each other, knowing each other, occasionally helping each other. The elderly woman who knew everyone’s name. The children who played in the street. The family who had been there for thirty years and remembered what the block used to be.

I observe something similar in the Italian Alpine region where I live now, that draws visitors for precisely what makes it extraordinary: the authentic, calm, green Alpine lifestyle. The local farms and traditions. The landscape that moves at a different pace. And yet hotels expand each season, infrastructure improves past the point of necessity, and the very qualities that attract people are being quietly consumed by the tourism economy built to serve them. The thing people come for is being destroyed by their coming.

Speed does this to places. It extracts value faster than it can be replenished. It optimizes the present at the cost of the future.

What speed does to presence.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Bologna when I noticed a group of young men at the table next to us. They were together, at least physically, at the same table. But each of them had a phone in one hand, thumb scrolling continuously, while the other hand moved the fork mechanically toward the mouth. They were not eating. They were refueling. They were not together. They were parallel. Just bodies occupying the same space while their attention was distributed across a thousand other places, none of them the room they were actually in.

I was speechless. Not because it was unusual. Because it wasn’t.

This is what speed does to presence. It makes the moment in front of you feel insufficient. There is always another stimulus available, one that is faster, more novel, more optimized for your dopamine response than the actual joy of a meal shared with friends.

What we are missing out on is not productivity, but contact. With the food, with the people, with togetherness, with the fact of being alive in a specific place at a specific moment that will not come again.

We stopped inhabiting our moments and started managing them. And we called that efficiency.

What speed does to thought.

There is a more subtle erosion that I watch happen in ordinary interactions, so common now that most people no longer notice it. I sent out a detailed communication for my project partners with dates, procedures, and information carefully organized. The questions arrive within hours. Questions whose answers are stated clearly in what I sent. Not because the people asking are careless. Because they didn’t read it. Not fully. Perhaps not at all.

This is not laziness in the traditional sense. It is the adaptation of a mind that has been trained to skim at speed. to extract the immediately useful and discard the rest, because there is always more arriving, and attending fully to any single thing feels like a luxury that cannot be afforded.

We are drowning in information and starving for understanding. Fed too much, too fast, across too many channels, by too many contributors – none of it requiring us to sit with it, question it, or allow it to change us. The result is a population that is simultaneously more informed and less capable of genuine critical thought than at any previous point in modern history.

Not dumber. Differently damaged. Trained away from depth. Rewarded for reaction. Punished by the attention economy for the slow approach of actually thinking something through.

Under this constant pressure, humans are becoming less human. More aggressive in traffic, in comment sections, in offices where the pressure has nowhere to go but sideways. More indifferent to the people around them, because indifference is an emotional response to chronic overload. Leaders have no time to listen. Workplaces where creativity is buried under deadlines. And underneath all of it, quietly, persistently: I see people who no longer know how to enjoy life. Those who have lost connection to themselves. Those who have no self-love left, not because they are broken, but because self-love requires the one resource the system is designed to extract completely: time to be still, to slow down, and to understand yourself.

We are human doings. We have forgotten how to be human beings.

And we are driving toward a cliff. But before we look over the edge, we need to ask who built the road.