Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom

Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it.

Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence).

Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience:

• An opinion dismantled by reality.
• An artifact torn apart by the real world.
• An idea destroyed by its own shortsightedness.

Experiencing these can be slow and uncomfortable, but if you keep up your speed you can outrun them — never reflecting on what happened in your wake.

Speed is how you avoid reckoning. It guarantees you miss things, and you can’t learn from what you don’t notice.

Wisdom’s feedback loop is slow.

Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.

Wisdom is chasing all of us, but we’re going too fast to notice what it’s trying to teach us.