The Speed of Change vs. the Speed of Being Human
There was a time when the rate of change in software felt intense, but still manageable. During the framework wars, it was exhausting, yes, but it was also periodic. You picked a framework. You lived with it. You dealt with the consequences. Sometimes you inherited technical debt. Sometimes you got lucky. Either way, you had time to absorb the choice. And eventually, things stabilized. APIs matured. Ecosystems settled. The noise quieted. We got to build instead of constantly choosing.
That stabilization mattered. It gave our brains room to breathe. It gave organizations something solid to stand on.
Now we’re back in acceleration, but this time it feels different.
This isn’t quarterly change or even monthly change. It feels like continuous change. Every day something shifts. New models. New capabilities. New workflows. New expectations. Sometimes it feels like it’s happening faster than we can even form opinions about it.
And this isn’t just a developer problem. It’s happening to everyone. Designers. Writers. Marketers. Product managers. Researchers. Doctors. Lawyers. Engineers. Scientists. Anyone whose work depends on thinking, judgment, and synthesis. It feels like we are all collectively in a phase where external systems are moving faster than our internal processing speed.
Not because we’re slow. But because the systems we’ve built are fast in a way humans were never designed for.
We’re built for change that comes in waves, not change that never turns off. When something new is always happening, it stops feeling exciting or hopeful and starts feeling heavy. It doesn’t feel like progress anymore. It just feels like pressure to keep up.
It’s a little like being in a car that’s been accelerating so smoothly you don’t notice how fast you’re going. Everything feels steady. Normal, even. You only realize the speed when the car suddenly slows down, swerves, or stops. That’s when the force shows up. That’s when you feel how much momentum you were actually carrying. Right now, we’re still in the part where the car is speeding up. Our bodies and minds are moving at the velocity of the systems around us, even if we haven’t fully felt what that speed really means yet.
There’s a term from biology that comes close to what this feels like: autocatalysis. It describes a system that accelerates because its outputs become its inputs. The more it exists, the faster it grows. Another way to describe it is a positive feedback loop. The system feeds itself.
With AI, we’re seeing something even stranger. Models helping build models. Tools accelerating the creation of better tools. Claude writing Claude.
That’s not just evolution. That’s recursion.
Progress isn’t just moving forward. It’s folding back into itself.
Which is probably why this moment feels so disorienting. We’re not just adopting new tools. We’re watching intelligence bootstrap itself, in real time, inside organizations that still run on human energy, quarterly planning cycles, and limited emotional bandwidth.
In physics and biology, rapid expansion almost always leads to some of these outcomes:
Reorganization
Stabilization
Or collapse into a new structure
Not because something failed, but because the old form can’t hold the new scale.
That’s what this moment feels like. Not linear progress, but a system approaching a phase change.
I don’t actually know if AI progress will stabilize in the way past technology waves did. Right now AI feels like it is a multiplier on every layer. It builds on itself. It compounds. It changes how change itself happens.
So the exhaustion makes sense. The anxiety makes sense. The feeling of “I can’t keep up” makes sense.
It’s collective overload.
We are living inside a moment where external systems are moving faster than our nervous systems. Where expectations are scaling faster than human processing. Where productivity myths collide with biological limits.
We may have to learn how to live inside acceleration without letting it flatten our sense of self, our worth, or our humanity.