The Pace Paradox

Wars declared and ended in days. Entire economies playing red-light-green-light with tariffs. Thousands laid off overnight.

As G-Eazy prophetically warned, “It ain’t safe, it ain’t safe, it ain’t safe, it ain’t safe.”

We are officially in the yin-yang era temporal whiplash: "We're so back!" followed immediately by "We're so cooked!" Rinse. Repeat. Survive if you can.

The Orange Man functions as a leading chaos agent in all timelines:

Trump declared war on the Houthis, and then ‘victory’ because he got bored. 

His administration has “announced new or revised tariff policies more than 50 times” (!!!!!), sending markets into convulsion.

Trump's approach to governance suggests clearly NO ONE in his orbit has read my “Growth is Quiet, Bad News Is Loud” post. Long-game thinking has been replaced by impulse and spectacle in this era’s WWEconomics.

But here's the thing: we're not just living fast. We’re living at different, varying speeds. What do I mean by that? The pace of modern life isn't universal; it's fragmented into multiple timelines running simultaneously. And sloppily.

Some domains operate at startup speed (AI, memes, Trump's decisions, Internet culture); others move like molasses (American infrastructure, education systems, FDA approvals). Between them lies an uncanny middle zone where things move at deceptively "normal" speeds, masking their dysfunctions.

But this Frankenstein combination of speed limits across different facets of our reality might be frying our little caveman brains.

Welcome to the pace paradox.

Redlining The Engine
(aka Insane 16-Year-Old Driver With a Lead Foot and a Death Wish)

French philosopher, Paul Virilio, once coined the term dromology, the study of speed as power. Basically, in war, politics, media, and technology, speed determines who dominates. The faster you can move troops, information, decisions, or capital, the more control you have.

So here are some domains that are moving terribly fast and should probably ease up on the gas pedal:

The Digital Blitzkrieg:

• Crypto: new tokens launch hourly. Frauds and fortunes born overnight. It’s speed-as-speculation.

• Online gambling: sports betting apps have weaponized dopamine, especially for young men, to the point of turning them into living slot machines. Fast money, faster losses, zero processing time between them. Personally, not a fan.

• Memes: I love memes so much, but we’ve reached master proficiency levels. Like a game of Inception, the purest form of speed compression — jokes about jokes about jokes.

• AI: the technology has abandoned traditional development curves for something approaching vertical ascent. Staying current requires not just attention but subscribing to the latest iterations. Yesterday's cutting-edge is today's mid. You blink, you miss the leap.

• Internet slop: fake sites, AI accounts, deepfakes, SEO sludge. The ratio of signal to noise approaches mathematical zero. The slop reproduces faster than we can shovel it into the incinerator. The 2010s internet feels like a cute little home on the prairie by comparison.

The Real-World Rush

News media: the competition to be first seems to be completely displacing the mandate to be right. Virilio warned this may happen: democracy breaks down when citizens can’t process what just happened before the next crisis on CNN or FOX lands.

Economic markets: high-frequency trading where billions are moved in microseconds by algorithms, meme stocks like GameStop are traded at the speed of Reddit vibes, faster than regulatory frameworks can adapt. Flash crashes triggered by the newest tariff announcement (or some random tweet).

Business survival: the corporate world now resembles an F1 pit crew with a gun to their head. The old adage that the strongest companies survive has been replaced: now, only the fastest do. And I think it may be that the world around businesses won’t sit still: your supply chain must reconfigure overnight when Trump announces China tariffs. Your brand must pivot instantly when TikTok trends shift. Your entire business model must transform when a competitor introduces AI capabilities that crater the value of your core asset or business.

Elon Musk brags that the only reason Tesla survived was because he made “faster decisions than anyone else.” Credit to him — he basically inspired generations to build up American manufacturing by outpacing the forces that killed traditional automakers.

This is the game now: moving fast enough to course correct in real time. You don’t have to get it right on the first try. You just need to iterate faster than the rate of change around you.

We've moved beyond "move fast and break things" to something more desperate: move fast or be broken.

Fashion: microtrends replace seasonal collections. Core aesthetic memories compress into 15-second TikToks. The half-life of style shrinks toward zero, leaving both industry and consumers in a perpetual identity crisis. Does anyone even remember what they ate for breakfast?

Speed initially feels liberating. The rush feels good. But like drinking too much coffee, it ends up carrying you past all depth and leaves you gasping for air in the shallows you mistook for the center of action.

We're not necessarily reacting more than we're choosing; in many facets of our lives, we're choosing without pacing properly. And as Virilio predicted, when phenomena move too fast to comprehend, they can eventually move too fast to govern.

Stuck In Molasses: Where Progress Goes to Die

While some domains, like digital reality, approach light speed, others stubbornly refuse to speed up. Some domains move so slowly that meaningful change feels impossible within a human lifetime.

U.S. infrastructure: the “we used to be a real country” is right on the nose when it comes to our capacity to build… really anything, especially in blue states, which theoretically value public goods:

• New housing projects stopped by one grumpy neighbor.

• Clean energy like solar, wind, and nuclear drowned in permitting processes.

• High-speed rail promised to us for decades.

• Disaster recovery: when the I-95 highway collapsed in 2023, Pennsylvania’s governor cut red tape to reopen it in just 12 days. Meanwhile, California has only issued 7 permits (!!!!) for wildfire rebuilding this year. Same country, different timelines.

Biden administration's regrets: While Trump moves with chaotic abandon, the previous administration now openly laments its caution. As Ezra Klein documented in his piece “Biden’s Team Wishes They’d Moved So Much Faster,” they recognized too late how the old processes lulled them to sleep. The contrast is rough: one administration moves too fast to think, the other moved too slow on too many key areas.

Education: as information continues to decentralize and ancient gatekeepers can no longer hoard credentials and knowledge from AI, traditional education remains locked in century-old patterns. We're steadily seeing people opt out of the old system for something at their faster pace. AI seems promising for increasing educational gains in shorter times, yet institutional education remains suspicious of the tools for progress.

Biotech’s handcuffs: in the ultimate temporal irony, we've achieved science-fiction capabilities in genetic engineering while regressing to a sort of pre-modern vulnerability to diseases like measles. We have gene writing, AI-designed antibodies, and personalized cancer vaccines in development; technologies that should be revolutionizing medicine.

And yet, our regulatory systems are still hitting 35 in a 70. FDA approval for a new drug still takes 5 to 10 years, even though COVID showed we can warp-speed a safe vaccine rollout in months. Instead, we reverted back to business-as-usual — a turtle’s pace.

It’s a weird paradox: we’re literally printing DNA on demand while we’re letting measles (measles!!!) make a comeback, as we cut clinical research funding at the federal level.

Imagine discovering you have Superman's powers but your HOA won't let you fly because it might disturb the neighborhood aesthetic.

WHACK.

The stakes surpass mere inconvenience: faster vaccine development could mean we beat the next pandemic before it erupts. AI drug discovery could reduce the cost of discovery and development by billions and bring treatments to those with terminal diseases.

But we’re still shackled by outdated processes built for an era that no longer exists and whose processes are outdated.

Biotech doesn’t need to slow down. It’s everything else that needs to catch up!

We’ve been able to apply this speed to the digital world, perhaps to a fault, but we’ve failed to apply this same level of effort and care to accelerate progress in the physical world.

And what we’ve managed to accelerate in the physical world, like same-day Amazon delivery, is not high up on my list of priorities, like biotech.

Neutral Gear: When Normal Feels Abnormal

Not everything is hurtling toward the singularity. Not everything’s stuck in bureaucratic quicksand either.

Some things are just… cruising. Chugging along. Seemingly normal.

This middle speed (not too fast, not too slow) might be the weirdest pace. Almost like your legs and nose are growing faster than the rest of your body. It’s weird!

Here are some examples.

Warfare: military technology advancements suggest we're entering an era of hypersonic conflict: drone swarms, AI targeting and autonomous jets. What's the point of manufacturing tanks over months when Amazon-box sized drones can destroy them instantly?

Yet the Ukraine-Russia war has been going on for three years.Three years of artillery, digging trenches, and building supply lines that would look all too familiar to WWI generals from 1915.

War today exists in this liminal space between the capacity for instant escalation and the reality of grueling attrition. It's neither fully ancient nor fully futuristic, but an unsettling hybrid where centuries-old tactics coexist with cutting-edge technology.

This tug-of-war of paces between the past and present even shows up in people’s perceptions and ideologies towards warfare, like Hegseth thinking he’s restoring the American army to its ‘past glory’:

Beautiful cities: Europe may struggle economically, but its cities showcase architecture spanning centuries, even millennia. America can barely build infrastructure now but at least preserves early 20th-century masterpieces like the Empire State Building (constructed, almost inconceivably now, in just 410 days).

Then there are those newer global cities, particularly in China (a nation capable of building virtually anything), lined with soul-crushingly generic skyscrapers, as if aesthetic consideration was an unaffordable luxury.

It doesn’t feel like we build too quickly or too slowly, but as though something more fundamental has been lost. As Paul Skallas argues:

It’s like we’ve changed what we value in the building itself. Paul thinks optimization for immediate utility has crowded out consideration of multigenerational beauty and cultural continuity. It’s not all about pace.

Reputation dynamics: Warren Buffett once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” But now it’s a little more confusing. Some brands, and even people, hit what’s known as “escape velocity” — nearly scandal-proof.

Cancel culture burns hot, but rarely permanent. Celebs bounce back. CEOs transition to other companies. Influencers rebrand. It’s a waiting game. They just survive the news cycle, then people _usually forget.

Choose Your Speed: The Art of Temporal Sovereignty

The modern world presents a mosaic of mismatched speeds.

Some domains, like crypto, memes, or AI, are moving so fast they seem to blur. Others are terribly sluggish. Between these extremes lies an uncanny middle zone where familiar speeds mask unfamiliar patterns.

It's like if we're all navigating the same highway in vehicles from different centuries: horse-drawn carriages alongside Teslas, with Star Trek transporters occasionally beaming past them all.

But the main insight isn’t about going fast or slow. It’s about knowing when to go and how.

You don’t have to swing until the pitch is in the right spot for you. You win by recognizing which speeds serve which purposes.

And that’s what Hermès (of all companies, with their famous Birkin bag) might understand best.

As Trung Phan wrote in SatPost, Hermès isn’t just a luxury brand. It’s a temporal arbitrageur _(fancy):

• Founded in 1837. Still family-run six generations later.

• “What we do at Hermès is sell time.” - their CEO

• Their competitive moat is time itself. You can’t fake the lore. You can’t rush the craftsmanship. You can’t download 180 years of prestige like an app.

You either earn time, or you don't.

In a dopamine culture where immediacy holds the crown, Hermès is a quiet rebellion with finesse. A brand that wins because it chooses its own speed.

It sells the painstaking effort it takes to be patient, to let time pass — and people pay five figures for the privilege. This is the ultimate sovereignty: owning your relationship with pace.

So no, you can’t control the world’s conflicting tempos. But you can control your response to it.

And that might be the most important thing to master: when to go fast. When to go slow. And when to wait, until the pitch is right.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}