You Think You Have a Time Problem. You Actually Face an Industry That Profits From You Never Finding Out.

Hi, I’m Claudia, a curator of human connections and thought-provoking ideas about hurry-culture. My message: Stop rushing through life - Get busy living.
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In May 2022, I read an article on Thrive Global titled “The Art of the Un-Rush.”

I didn’t name Un-Rush after that article. But I remember reading it and feeling something between recognition and dread, because someone had already found the phrase and used it for a listicle. Listicles!

The author described herself as a chronic rusher. A multitasker. She’d broken her foot while missing a step in a subway station while scrolling her phone. Then it happened again. And again. Four accidents before she started, in her words, trying to slow down.

She ended the piece with tips. The usual ones. But one stopped me cold.

She used to make calls while driving, or walking, or doing chores. After the accidents, she’d learned something new: maybe don’t. Her advice to the reader, verbatim, as best I recall it, was to sit down, do nothing else, and call a friend or family member. You’ll absorb more of the conversation, she wrote, than if you were driving, doing dishes, or shopping at Costco.

I couldn’t believe reading this.

We have arrived at a place where a grown woman has to be told, in a national publication, that maybe she shouldn’t have a meaningful conversation with her mother while scanning a shelf of paper towels. And she has to tell her readers the same thing, because apparently they need it too.

Another one, a few lines later: if you’re working on a presentation during a meeting, she advised, check your changes afterward – when you can focus on the material alone, instead of doing two things at once.

Seriously? What kind of meeting are you attending, I wanted to ask her, that you’re building slides through it? If it’s that dispensable, you don’t have a multitasking problem. You have a meeting problem. The advice treats the symptom and quietly agrees to leave the disease in place.

That’s when the feeling under my disbelief clarified itself. It wasn’t just How did we get here. It was:

Has hurry culture gotten so totally off the rails that we’ve lost common sense along with our time?

I kept thinking about Jaws, the White Shark movie. Not the shark, but the mayor. The beach stays open after the first attack, and the second, because closing it feels disproportionate. Extreme. Bad for business. Everyone privately knows the danger is real. Nobody’s willing to do the one thing that actually removes it. So they post a lifeguard, tell people to swim in groups, keep the beach open, and manage the deaths as they come.

That’s the tip about calling your mother sitting down. That’s the tip about editing your slides after the meeting instead of during it. Small, sensible-sounding accommodations to a danger nobody’s willing to name directly, let alone close the beach on.

Here’s what I think is actually happening underneath it.

We are living inside an optimization era. Everything needs to get optimized: our life, our mind, our body. Everything gets faster, denser, more efficient, including, now, our attention. So when the exhaustion becomes undeniable, the culture doesn’t ask what deserves our attention in the first place. It optimizes the rationing of it. Slow down a little. Multitask a little more carefully. Check your phone with a bit more intention. Small adjustments, inside a structure that was never questioned.

I’d call this Scarcity Slow: treating slowness as a rare, tightly rationed resource you dole out to yourself in five-minute increments between the things that actually run your day. Instead of a normal condition you’re allowed to live inside.

Nobody actually believes rhythm – your own, unhurried, examined pace – could be the real, structural answer. Not just a wellness feature tacked onto an unchanged life, but the whole redesign. That disbelief is telling. We don’t close the beach. We post a lifeguard and call it responsible. Nice move. Wrong direction.

And here’s the part that annoyed me, once I thought about it long enough: I don’t think this is accidental.

An economy that runs on exhausted, distracted people who never stop long enough to ask Why they’re exhausted has no interest in you discovering your own rhythm. It has every interest in selling you relief. Recovery. A slightly more careful version of the same behavior. Something that lowers the exhaustion just enough to keep you functional. And buying.

I don’t think the slow-living industry exists to wake anyone up. I think its job is Managed Unconsciousness: keep the exhaustion at a tolerable, productive level. Never let it resolve. Sell the relief, not the redesign.

The system doesn’t need to force you to burn out. It just needs you to believe the alternative – actually closing the beach – is impossible.

I saw the alternative in person a few months ago, in a lost place, a crumbling 15th-century palazzo in northern Italy, that I scouted for one of the photography workshops I curate…