"The world is moving faster than ever…", and all of its paraphrased clichés, have become a personal pet peeve. It shows up in business articles, podcasts, and plenty of advertising, to trigger a sense of anxiety and uncertainty about change. Just before they try to sell you something.
That's not to say the world has stayed the same. In 2026, we're inundated with geopolitical news and weekly benchmarks on AI progress. Earlier this decade, it was our once-in-a-century pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since WW2. Stretch back to the 2000s and we experienced changes from social media to the financial crisis to smartphones to 9/11 to the dot-com saga. Bill Gates's observation that
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
absolutely rings true even when examined in reverse.
Yet, history tends to fixate on the memorable—the events and trends that eventually prove their impact in subsequent years. 9/11 was a pivotal moment, because it led to a two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan that only concluded a few years ago, and because we're reminded of its bureaucratic legacy—Department of Homeland Security—regularly at the airport. Social networking came about in the early 2000s, but we're struggling with the effects of social media a quarter of a century later.
Forgotten are the bygone relics of those eras: Napster and iPods, pets.com and Webvan, Palm Pilots and Blackberries, AOL and MySpace. They also represent change in their prime, but ultimately to Darwinist ends.
Bob Iger's autobiography, The Ride of a Lifetime, is a good example of this paradox. He's the (now) two-time CEO of Disney, and presided over the company for the majority of the 21st century as a widely-revered executive. To convince the Disney board to invest in digital streaming[1], he tapped into this exact framing, that the times are moving so fast that they had to move aggressively. For all the urgency, though, Iger is still known for his long-term strategic initiatives, those that have taken decades to coalesce: the continuous expansion of theme parks, and the successful acquisitions of multiple major media companies[2].
So maybe it's less that change is happening faster, but rather, that we feel overwhelmed by all the perceived change.
It's the rapid staccato of information, shouted on every 24-hour news channel, social media feed and digital mountaintop. It's the clickbait headlines and sensationalized scripts, telling you why "this changes everything." It's the relentless optimization for attention, by preying on emotions and instinctive reactions.
Real change, of course, takes time to percolate. Whether it's technology or social dynamics, persistence over years and decades is what it takes to drive impact that survives history. For instance, the maturity of e-commerce settled over three decades' worth of improvements and adjacent-industry innovations.
Change for its own sake is just noise. The speed and frequency of these notifications informing us of change are irrelevant in the long run. They resemble what computer scientists call a random walk, repeatedly moving randomly, without direction. Understandably, most outcomes land not too far from the starting point.
The societal changes that do stick are the ones that compound upon prior changes. Of course, it takes more work to identify long-term trends, more time to let the effects of compounding reveal themselves.
Perhaps, moving at the speed of retrospection.
