021: The urgency trap
How real-time crisis and algorithmic urgency erode our capacity for stillness
What prompted this essay? Voting! Not exactly the obvious path to a reflection on stillness, but stay with me.
I had just cast my ballot when the thought arrived—not about the candidates or the issues, but about the quiet dissonance between what I was voting for and how I had come to choose. It struck me how much of our public life now feels like a private calculation. What will this mean for me, my income, my security, my family? What can I get?
And more broadly, it struck me how much of our engagement with the world has come to mirror the rhythms of crisis media…urgent, emotional, reactive. Even decisions that should emerge from slowness and care now arise out of fatigue and speed. That moment led here: to a longer reflection on what the tempo of our attention is doing to our inner lives.
To be clear, I care deeply about the world. I majored in politics because I believed then (and still do) that people’s suffering, even far away, matters. I don’t write this essay to encourage withdrawal. I write it because staying emotionally available to everything, all the time, is no longer sustainable.
This isn’t about not caring. It’s about creating the space to care better.
Urgency is the new normal
There was a time when world events arrived with a natural delay. You read the paper in the morning, watched the news at night. Catastrophe was filtered through time, format, and reflection. But the slow drip has become a firehose. Today, the world arrives unmediated, constant, and often unbearable.
Platforms designed for speed reward crisis over context. An earthquake hits, a war breaks out, a government falls…and within minutes, it becomes content. Pushed to the top of the feed, paired with reaction, filtered through algorithms built to guess what will keep you looking. There is no pause between the happening and the headline, no buffer between the story and our psyche.
News is no longer something we seek out. It seeks us, everywhere, all the time. A war in Europe, a coup in Africa, wildfires in Canada, a mass shooting in a city you’ve never been to but could imagine living in. The event matters, but just as much, so does the pace. It is the constant rhythm of emergency that disorients us. The mental equivalent of a siren that never stops.
Urgency has become our emotional baseline. And in that state, the mind loses its ability to measure, to discern, to feel anything fully. Everything starts to collapse into the same category: tragic, urgent, overwhelming.
Is there is no such thing as passive consumption? Everything we take in must live somewhere inside us.
“When everything is an emergency, nothing is sacred.”