The psychological cost of acceleration
The hidden cost of rapid technological progress and antidotes for this acceleration.
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Welcome to edition #15 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:
Why the Acceleration Decade is not merely a technological problem, the psychological cost of acceleration on the individual/the collective and an examination of potential antidotes.
This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration and modern ambition. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.
I want to thank everyone for the response to my last essay. I have been flooded with beautiful comments and messages that I’m still getting through, please be patient with me. I hope to get back to each and every one.
Editor’s Note:
This is the second essay in a series I’ve been writing on the upcoming Acceleration Decade, the third essay goes into how we may begin to build new systems and write new stories:
My goal is to spark a discussion on how we can co-create this next decade together and it feels like that has started. I’m humbled and grateful.
We are not merely bystanders, each of our actions matter and have an influence on how the future unfolds.
This week I will try to continue that discussion, let’s get into it.
for.and.from.the.mind
For millions of years, newly hatched sea turtles would run towards the brightest horizon to find the ocean. They adapted to sense the moonlight that bounced off the ocean.
But now, on developed beaches, hotels, streetlights and homes are brighter than the reflected moonlight that is refracted off the waves.
So the turtles race the wrong way, often with dire consequences. Their evolutionary make-up has not caught up with the electrified world. This is called evolutionary mismatch.
Evolutionary mismatch (or evolutionary trap) is a concept in evolutionary biology where traits, behaviors, or physiological mechanisms that were previously adaptive in an ancestral environment become maladaptive or harmful due to a rapid change in the environment. It occurs when an organism is inadequately adapted to a new, often human-altered, setting.
I believe we are the turtles right now.
We are running towards a synthetic version of success and meaning brought on by the acceleration of technology.
Our evolutionary hard-wiring wants to remove all of our struggles. Life used to be really difficult for our species so we evolved to look for ways to maximize reward while minimizing energy expenditure.
But meaning, our moonlight, historically comes from effort, struggle and then mastery. Instead we are running away from those things to a synthetic light that promises efficiency, speed and mastery without any hardship.
And if we don’t take steps to turn around or to try to understand the change that is happening, we are likely to encounter our own set of dire circumstances. One of which will be a widespread crisis of meaning.
I use this metaphor to highlight that the main problem we face in the upcoming Acceleration Decade is not a technological one. It is a psychological and a philosophical one.
In my last essay, I wrote about how humanity has collectively hit the fast forward button and how we can all start to prepare ourselves. It hit a cultural nerve and has already been read by over 200,000 readers.
This week I want to try to begin to outline the psychological cost of acceleration on an individual and collective level. And what’s contributing to it beyond just technological advancement.
What happens when the human nervous system is pushed beyond natural integration speed?
That’s the experiment we’re running.
Why The Acceleration Decade is not just a technological problem
Humans evolved to adapt to change over generations, not months or weeks.
Our psychological system is wildly adaptable but it evolved to digest these shifts when we have gradual technological change, stable communities, predictable life paths and clear cultural narratives.
That’s not the world we live in today. And it’s left many of us feeling shell-shocked.
So how does humanity make sense of things?
Throughout history, societies developed mechanisms to metabolize change.
I’ve identified five psychological enzymes that civilization has used in the past to transmute change:
Spirituality/Religion
Philosophy
Culture
Rituals
Community
Let’s dive into each.
Religion/Spirituality helped us process change through narrative stability and by providing us with answers that explained change and suffering.
Philosophy helped us process change by giving us the ability to interpret new realities. We could borrow frameworks to help us grasp ideas and build new ones.
Culture helped us process change by slowing down behavioural change. Culture would reinforce shared beliefs/understanding and pump the brakes on change outside of those (for better or worse).
Ritual helped us process change through integration of life transitions. When we, as individuals, have a strong sense of (anti-fragile) identity then it becomes easier to navigate a changing environment. Rituals help us understand who we are.
Community helped us process change through shared meaning-making. The community helps us give meaning to the change. And we can also distribute the psychological burden of change across the group.
You likely know where I’m going with this…
Religion is on the decline. Our communities are becoming more and more fragmented. Our rituals have all but disappeared. Culture is splintering in echo chambers. Philosophy is on the fringes and not taken seriously.
All five of the enzymes that help us process change are weakening, fairly dramatically.
It’s too easy to just blame technology for the wide-spread feelings of instability but in truth, it’s much more complicated than that. We’ve let the anchors of our society erode in favor of convenience, in favor of technology.
Now it’s as if our body is being flooded with one specific food but the enzymes that our body has to metabolize that food into helpful nutrients have gone offline. It doesn’t matter whether the food is good or bad for us, eventually it will make us sick because we cannot process it.
The food is change. We are getting unfiltered change, day after day after day. And the enzymes that help us digest it are disappearing.
Examining The Personal Cost
Societal and personal development typically follow a similar pattern: we face a large change (or challenge), we reflect on that change, we integrate our reflections through the help of psychological enzymes, that then leads to conscious growth.
Acceleration shortens reflection, removes integration, and pushes us into growth we never consciously choose.
For the last fifteen years, and acutely in the last ten, I experienced what comes from not having enough time to integrate change on a personal level.
I believe this is why my writing may be resonating. I am not speaking through abstract theories. I am pulling directly from my lived experience.
I went through immense change from a college drop-out, to a server, to a business development rep, to a Manager, to a Director, to ultimately co-founding and running a large venture capital firm, all in fifteen years. My life was about tackling challenges and then immediately finding a new one to tackle. Very little reflection and no time for integration. This led to growth, lots of growth but not growth I ever consciously chose.
Without time to integrate, I experienced severe anxiety, addiction, depression, burnout, constant comparison, a fear of falling behind and an unstable identity.
Yes, my story was self-induced acceleration. I am not looking for any pity. I made my decisions. But I believe my story is a microcosm of the larger problem to come for everybody. It will not be a choice whether or not you participate in the upcoming Acceleration Decade.
You can see this parallel in the symptoms, everything I struggled with in my accelerated life is also on the rise globally.
The World Health Organization says that anxiety disorders are now the most common mental disorders globally. They also cite that depression has been rising rapidly since 2020. Addiction is a broader bucket including alcohol, drugs, social media, porn, gaming and gambling. The statistics here are more country dependent, with alcohol showing a slow down in North America, but all others are on the rise globally. Burnout is a tougher one to track but from what I can read in Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 and definitely anecdotally, it’s quickly becoming an epidemic. I mean you just have to look around on Substack, right?
Of course, many forces contribute to these trends. But the speed and intensity of modern change appears to be an important part of the picture.
For years, we were taught that optimization was the answer to modern life. You just need to improve yourself and then you’ll feel better. But layering on more stuff to do is the last thing we should be doing when we haven’t even processed the change in our day to day lives. The answer doesn’t lie in more optimization, it lies in integration.
Time spent processing > time spent improving
The Personal Antidote
On the individual level, I believe part of the antidote lies in expanding our time spent in conscious reflection and integration. Integration, not optimization, is the answer.
A good place to start are the ten exercises that I outlined in my last essay:
Examining The Collective Cost
I’ve outlined the cost on the individual but what is the cost for society when we go through a period of mass, unfiltered extreme change and acceleration?
We are genuinely in unprecedented territory. I don’t think anyone really knows. Against my better judgment, I’ll try to answer this by examining a historical time period that looks similar, not the same, but similar.
I’m hesitant because I’ve come to believe that using historical examples downplays the real acceleration that is to come and can actually be harmful to the discussion. AI is not just another tool. We have never had a tool that can perform cognitive tasks once reserved for humans. It needs a new category altogether (conversation for another day). That’s why, in my eyes, comparisons usually fall down under scrutiny.
That all being said, I do believe the period after the invention of the Printing Press is the closest thing we have to today’s Acceleration Decade. Although slower by immeasurably orders of magnitude.
It was the first time that information began moving faster than humanity could metabolize it which led to society fracturing before reorganizing.
Before we had the Printing Press books were copied by hand, this led to books being very expensive, new knowledge spreading slowly, low literacy rates and much of the information being filtered by churches, universities and royal courts.
The whole thing was not democratic at all but it did create a more stable environment to process change. Ideas would spread gradually which meant the collective had time to absorb them. Post invention though, this all changed.
That resulted in an increase in war (Thirty Years’s War), mass propaganda (Pamphlet Wars), idealogical manifestos (The Twelve Articles), conspiracy theories (Witch Hunts) and an explosion of more radical religious/political movements (Anabaptists).
These are all things we’re seeing today: an increase in war, an increase in propaganda, an increase in conspiracy theories and an increase in radical movements. Again, there are many factors that contribute but these are heavy, heavy speeding tickets that humanity pays for acceleration.
…well that all sounds depressing.
There is hope, the good news is what came after.
It took over a century but eventually we created new intellectual frameworks (psychological enzymes) that helped us process the change and it led to modern science, the Age of Enlightenment, journalism (checks/balances on power) and then democratic institutions.
The Collective Antidote: I believe the answer again lies in integration. We need to begin to rebuild the psychological enzymes that help society integrate change. This means we need more people focused on reimagining and re-examining spirituality, philosophy, culture, rituals and community for the modern world. This is the conversation I will attempt to start in my next essay.
Can you imagine what beautiful ideas, systems and institutions we can build if we’re able to somehow metabolize and integrate this next wave of acceleration?
That is the challenge of our time because this acceleration is not going to stop.
The pace of technological chance will continue to increase, whether we feel ready for it or not. That seems inevitable.
What is not inevitable is how we respond to it.
If we continue to play the same game, if we continue to move from challenge to challenge with no time to integrate what we’ve experienced, the result will be more of the same: more anxiety, more confusion, more fragmentation and a deeper crisis of meaning.
But if we learn to metabolize change, individually through reflection/stillness and collectively through stronger philosophical, cultural and spiritual frameworks then the same acceleration can unlock an entirely different future.
The technology that is being built will shape the world.
But, we must not forget, it’s the quality of our minds/nervous systems that determines whether that world is chaotic or beautiful. At least for now, we are still in control.
A lot of the narratives out there make us feel like there’s nothing we can do, like we’re on some pre-determined path and we just have to strap in. That is not true.
We can choose to step back and re-learn how to integrate change.
That work begins with the individual.
Only with clear minds can we begin to tackle the next herculean challenge of co-creating better stories/ideas and rebuilding our collective psychological enzymes.
Through strengthening those pillars, we can take the onus off the individual, come together and start to build a world that works for all of us.
I will attempt to explore some of those new stories in my next essay.
Right now we may be like the sea turtles running towards artificial light. But the task ahead is not to stop the lights from appearing. It is to learn how to re-orient and remember which horizon is the real ocean.
Editor’s note:
You can continue onto the third essay in my series on the Acceleration Decade below where I reimagine new stories and try to understand what may come next:
latest.podcast.episode
This was one of my favorite recent conversation. I sat down with my friend, Richard Banfield, co-founder of Second Harvest. Richard opens up about losing his wife to cancer and how that experience reshaped the way he approaches life, meaning, and the time we are given. We also go down a few fascinating rabbit holes, from the Cambrian explosion and human evolution to how technology is shaping the next phase of our species.
Give the episode a listen here or wherever you 🎧 to your podcasts.
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Before we wrap up, I want to address a few things.
There was some healthy push back around the fact that many people in the world do not have the luxury of following some of the practices I outlined in my last essay.
I want to acknowledge that there are still ~700-840 million people in extreme poverty who struggle to find reliable food, shelter, basic healthcare and clean water. When in pure survival mode, you do not have time to spend an afternoon in silence or worry about building an anti-fragile identity. That is valid and true. Full stop.
What I will say is I have been travelling around India for the last four months around folks who would fall under that line and many of them still prioritize some form of stillness and silence. I’ve seen the practices I shared, which are really just timeless/ancient traditions, have a profound effect regardless of where you may sit on Maslow’s hierarchy.
The other fair call out was that the world faces many problems in the upcoming decade including a climate crisis, an increase in global conflict, poverty, social safety nets collapsing, housing insecurity and global debt levels rising, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. Like you, I see them all, there are many complex problems we face and the instability caused by technological acceleration is but one of them.
Unfortunately, I am just one human. A human that, through lived experience, feels as if I have something worthwhile to share when it comes to the upcoming decade of acceleration. We need other, more qualified people, to examine solutions for the other problems we face.
I do believe that these problems are all inter-connected. By examining one problem, we start to bleed into others so who knows perhaps, with your help, we can start a discussion on the other problems down the line.
Thank you for reading this, I hope you join the discussion. I read each and every comment.
That being said, this Wednesday, I’m taking my own advice and I’ll be entering into a Vipassana retreat (10-day silent meditation retreat). I will respond to any messages/comments once I’m out on the 29th.
See you on the other side,
Scott Barker
*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)
I appreciate the honesty in your callouts; the acknowledgment of privilege and limitation doesn't diminish the conversation, it elevates it. Those of us with the luxury of reflection have a responsibility to use it beyond our own self-improvement bubble.
Your turtle analogy made me think, why is it that humans alone fight so hard against the natural arc of life and death? Every other species moves through that cycle without resistance. There's a beauty in endings that once gave existence its weight and meaning. Instead we've medicalised death, pathologised grief, and now we're funding immortality research. But our current systems don't just ignore death, they actively incentivise survival for its own sake. Economic structures, institutions, even legacy are all optimised for continuation, not meaning. Life extended without being anchored in purpose starts to feel hollow.
I wonder if the acceleration you're describing isn't a problem so much as a necessary pattern, a forced reckoning bringing us back to precisely what we abandoned. The esoteric, the ritualistic, the acceptance of impermanence. We crowded those things out and now the emptiness is loud enough that people are reaching back.
What gives me hope is agency. The difference between meaning-making systems that served us and ones that didn't comes down to whether people chose them or had them imposed. The antidote you're pointing toward only works if it's opt-in. Otherwise, we replace one compulsory system with another, which is how we ended up here. Religion was imposed, distrust followed, and we collectively ran toward science as salvation. Now, science is hitting its own ceiling of meaning.
Just diving into this article now. Your last essay really was one of the most insightful pieces I’ve read on Substack.
It’s truly helping me navigate this storm with much more calm and far less of a desire for more.
Just the simple act of putting a picnic table outside so I can enjoy my meals in peace and nature is helping my soul already.
Of course making a move to an Island nearly 13 years ago was also a good move it would seem.
I had a dream about the future and decided my golden years needed this to thrive.