What our speed-watching at 1.5x habit says about us

It’s a subtle erosion. Not dramatic. Not dystopian. Just a slow, quiet recalibration of how we engage—with stories, with each other, and with ourselves.

But there’s another perspective worth holding. Priyanka Varma, psychologist and founder of The Thought Co., openly speed-watches podcasts and doesn’t think the habit is inherently harmful. “Time is our most valuable real estate. It’s not necessarily bad—it depends on how and why we’re doing it,” she says.

She suggests that speed-watching isn’t always a reflex to escape. It can be strategic. “Everybody is starting to value their time a lot more and wanting to do more with their time. Because, again, twenty-four hours in a day—I know I need to sleep, I know I need to work, I need to do one hour in the gym… Leave us with how much time to actually learn?”

And the intention behind it is what really matters. “It’s how you’re consuming it and why. If you’re doing it in a way that helps you lead a more balanced life, it’s not bad.”

Still, the pattern is hard to ignore. A growing number of us now consume stories like we consume emails—quickly, half-attentively, while doing something else. The impulse to optimise every pocket of our time can flatten the very experiences that once grounded us.

“We learn to equate our worth with how much we do, not how we feel,” says Manjani. That rush to be productive—even in leisure—often leaves us with a joyless kind of completion. “When we rush or skip through stories,” she adds, “it allows us to know what happened in a story, but not to feel it.”

The result is a kind of emotional malnourishment. We lose the breath between moments. The slow build of intimacy. The resonance that only comes when we let something linger.

And that impatience isn’t limited to screens. It’s leaking into our conversations, our relationships and our ability to stay with discomfort. The pause feels awkward. I get awkward. Silence, once a pleasant companion, is slowly becoming something to fill, not sit with.

But if speed is the norm, slowness is starting to feel radical. All three experts note a shift—clients seeking depth, people turning back toward the long, the quiet, the emotionally resonant. The platforms may be speeding up, but parts of us are asking to slow down.