In the 2000s, psychologist Richard Wiseman found worldwide walking speeds had gone up by 10%.

The pace of our lives is linked to culture. Researchers have shown society’s accelerating pace is shredding our patience. In tests, psychologists and economists have asked subjects if they would prefer a little bit of something now or a lot of it later; say, $10 today versus $100 in a year, or 2 pieces of food now versus 6 pieces in 10 seconds.

Subjects—both human and other animals—often go for the now, even when it’s not optimal. 1 study showed that exposing people to “the ultimate symbols of impatience culture”—fast-food symbols like McDonald’s golden arches—increases their reading speed and preference for time-saving products, and makes them more likely to opt for small rewards now over larger ones later.

Our rejection of slowness is especially apparent when it comes to technology. “Everything is so efficient nowadays,. We’re less and less able to wait patiently.” We now practically insist that Web pages load in a 0.25 seconds, when we had no problem with 2 seconds in 2009 and 4 seconds in 2006. As of 2012, videos that didn’t load in 2 seconds had little hope of going viral.

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