Human achievements never come without their downsides, and those unwelcome consequences tend to have highly uneven distributions. Higher speeds and their effects have been no exception. Speed brings perils and succor: Excessive speed, in so many guises, kills—but receiving the fastest possible post-event care is the key to recovery from strokes or preventing death from internal bleeding, and the COVID-19 pandemic showed, once again, the benefits of speedy mass-scale vaccination (particularly for older people). The quest for speed causes inequalities, squalor, noise, and pollution (too many modern cities are witness to that)—but it also creates unprecedented economic opportunities, prolongs our lives, saves time, and makes quotidian life easier (from long-distance travel to near-instant interior heating and air conditioning).
But it is not difficult to make a definite case against the commonly held myth of speed as an unqualified benefit. Advocacy for and the practice of deliberately restricted “life speeds” has been a reaction to a long list of undesirable conditions and outcomes associated with speed: Social critics have charged speed with everything from the homogenization of lives and environments to depriving people of variety and texture in their lives; from causing stress, alienation, and exhaustion, to the loss of agency, feelings of powerlessness, the collapse of work/life distinctions, and mental and physical ailments.
These undesirable states are to be remedied by supervised therapies or regular practices in search of decompression, calm, and tranquility based on stillness and slowness: sitting without distractions, listening to slow music, deep breathing, interacting with friendly animals, seeking rural respite—all in the quest for stillness as a productive state. This can be done in settings ranging from expensive facilities catering to celebrities to a quiet clearing in the woods or an isolated lakeshore.
The extreme form of speed abhorrence is to prefer walking to cars. Famously, Ivan Illich, an Austrian Catholic priest and a famous social critic, made that case in 1974 in his book on energy and equity: “People on their feet are more or less equal,” but putting “more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger . . . has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity.”
Speed as status
To explain the car’s global appeal, we must add status to speed. Nobody has offered a better explanation of this fundamental reality than Kenneth Boulding, an American economist and Illich’s contemporary. He knew that a car “turns its driver into a knight with the mobility of the aristocrat . . . The pedestrian and the person who rides public transportation are, by comparison, peasants looking up with almost inevitable envy at the knights riding by in their mechanical steeds. Once having tasted the delights of a society in which almost everyone can be a knight, it is hard to go back to being peasants.”
Of course, in the long run, circumstances and incentives will change (there are already some signs of retreat from universal car ownership) but the advantages of speed and social elevation mean that this machine’s prominent place in modern society is not going to disappear soon.
The control factor
This place is even more remarkable given the (often mortal) perils of driving, but we also have a convincing explanation for this exceptional risk tolerance. Chauncey Starr, an American engineer and scientist, showed that if people think they are in control (as they think they are while driving), they will tolerate risks up to three orders of magnitude higher than when they don’t feel in control. The last pandemic showed this contrast, once again, to perfection, as so many people were horrified by the idea of mandatory vaccination, imputing to it exceptionally high risks while having no fear of speeding. Alternatively, familiarity (repetitive activity) has been proposed as the main reason for tolerating some demonstrably high risks, and the combination of the two factors may be the best explanation.
Illich, himself a very frequent flyer, was also quite wrong about the potential of global aviation. In 1974 he noted that “barely 0.2% of the entire U.S. population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year”—but by 2019 (before COVID affected the industry), airlines handled 926 million domestic international passengers (nearly three times the country’s population total) in the U.S. and 4.5 billion passengers worldwide (nearly 60% of the global population total). For Illich, “the occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped in a high-powered seat” made a traveler “an accomplice in the distortion of human space”—but billions of people are now submitting to those distortions eagerly and repeatedly, and all forecasts indicate a further large-scale expansion of global flying.
And while hundreds of millions of people are now so well off that they can choose to live a quieter, cleaner, and “limited-speed” middle- and upper-income existence working in climatized offices or in the comfort of their homes, such choices are unavailable to the hundreds of millions who are trying to move up the well-being ladder and are forced to endure the relentless demands of jobs where dangerous speed is unavoidable. Workers in meatpacking plants are but one of many categories of such exertions. The rapid “fulfillment” of Internet merchandise orders—picking the items from shelves in giant warehouses, packaging and dispatching the envelopes and boxes—has become another large-scale business where speed endangers human well-being.
Moreover, many of these jobs provide essential food and material inputs for the world’s affluent economies. The latest addition to these dangerous, speed-demanding jobs is the still-growing category of delivery services. Food delivery drivers working for major companies or for small independent outfits in the world’s largest cities are particularly vulnerable, especially when using motorcycles.
More nuanced understanding and unprejudiced evaluations of the modern quest for speed are needed if we are to provide more balanced guidance for what is to come. That must begin with more incisive looks at the role of speed, at its benefits and its undesirable consequences, and at the need for further increases as well as formulating and enforcing its limits.
From SPEED, by Vaclav Smil, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025
