EITHER YOU’RE FAST OR YOU DON’T EXIST

If you’re not fast, you get crushed in that pace. You disappear.

Anyone who falls behind the speed the city demands ends up underfoot. I don’t mean this metaphorically—I mean it literally. If you can’t keep up with the flow, you can’t manage the traffic, and you get trampled. Speed is contagious; even if you want to slow down, you can’t. In the city, slowness is not something people can accept. Newcomers are expected to adapt instantly. You’re either fast, or you’re nothing.

Files must be completed as quickly as possible. If you rush, you’ll catch the bus, the subway, or that rare parking spot. If you’re fast, you get to speak first; if you’re slow, you’re interrupted. You must say what you need to say quickly so the other person can say theirs, the conversation can end quickly, and messages on cell phones can be replied to just as quickly.

Do you have troubles? You must experience them fast and return to the expected level of cheer immediately. You mustn’t slow down the other person’s momentum or mood. Are you sick? Did you take a medical leave? Then you must recover fast—otherwise your paycheck is cut, and you’re at a loss for not healing quickly enough. Slowness affects our lives that deeply.

If your emotional transitions are not fast, you can’t be the person expected of you. You must eat quickly to make your break productive. You must get dressed fast, leave home fast, and at the same time control your speed so you don’t step into someone else’s space. You must even know that speed itself has its own speed.

The necessity of being fast, the anxiety of being late, the need to show up on time wherever you promised to be—this seems to be the most chronic condition of city dwellers. The faster we are, the more we think we’ll gain from life. If we’re not fast, we fear losing out on life’s most important moments. The reason, I think, is that we take everything too seriously—especially ourselves. We consider ourselves so important that we believe, “Time doesn’t manage us; we manage time.”

If there’s a line, it should move for us immediately. If it doesn’t, we start fidgeting. We must be at the very front of the line. And if we’re not, we raise our voices: why aren’t there more employees here? Why don’t they add more staff? After all, we are not people who can be kept waiting. We are important—why don’t institutions understand this?

Waiting in traffic is also unacceptable for us. Was there an accident? Road work? What could possibly be more important than the place we’re rushing to? So we honk, we cut ahead, we break the rules, we change lanes. Every kind of reckless move becomes the natural behavior of this “important” person.

And if we call someone and can’t reach them, if we wait for them to call back and they don’t within the time we’ve calculated—here comes the catastrophe! The high identity we’ve created for ourselves, the one too important to stand in line, takes over again: “Who do you think you are not to call me back? You didn’t return my call? Fine. Your loss. You lose.”

That phrase—“Your loss!”—is the clearest sign of the city dweller who takes themselves too seriously. The loser is always the other person, never themselves. I don’t lose—you lose. First of all, you lost me.

And once again, we circle back to that same person: the one who won’t wait in line, who honks in traffic, who can’t bear a missed call, who believes their work is the most important of all, and who must always be the fastest.

I believe the obsession with speed and the attitude of self-importance are consequences of the fashionable slogans of our time—statements like “You matter,” “Put yourself first,” “You are valuable.” No one wants to identify with pain, sadness, weakness, or emotional intensity anymore. It’s as if everyone must appear strong all the time. And when people experience injustice, they take out the revenge of that injustice on other interactions, repeating the same common mantra: “I am valuable, I am important, no one can treat me this way, no one can cut in front of me, no one can slow me down!”

As with many things, we blur and distort this core essence too. Either we don’t live it at all, or we display it in exaggerated doses, superficially at the surface.

The phrase “I am valuable” is often spoken not to affirm oneself but for others to hear. It’s like hanging up a sign that says “Look, I am valuable,” while behind the sign, there is nothing. Because the value is not given to the self, not reinforced from within, it is demanded from others in the form of commands, creating a hollow sense of worth. When the other side doesn’t provide the desired level of validation—which, in truth, can never fully be satisfied—the person sinks into endless stages of dissatisfaction, like trying to fill a bottomless well.

And when the unfulfilled person finally decides to give that value to themselves, it often turns into an excessive display of self-importance: “Me first. My desires first. My words first. My turn first. I must have the best. I deserve the finest. Who are you? I deserve better, and I will get better. The road belongs to me first, the line is mine.” We see these kinds of identities all around us, loudly declaring their entitlement.

The need to experience everything at the highest speed and consume it in the fastest dose becomes the reality these people impose. For those who maintain their sense of value in balance, such individuals create painful experiences. With every passing day, truly valuable identities are wounded and depleted by those endlessly trying to fill their emptiness. They don’t even notice their own damage, nor the heartbreak they cause. While trying to “heal” others, they open unhealable wounds within themselves. One damaged person quickly turns the undamaged into damaged.

What should happen instead is this: a person must grow into maturity by knowing themselves, by determining their own needs and taking responsibility for meeting them—especially the need to love themselves. But instead, they hand this duty over to others. And because no one else can truly fill that void, dissatisfaction persists. When the other finally says, “Enough,” both sides begin to resemble one another. The world becomes crowded with half-finished souls, uncertain of what they want.

No one notices their own wounds. And when they do, they place the blame on others—or on a time when no one is responsible: their childhood, their parents, the past. They lay the blame on the easiest and most hopeless place. They charge the bill to the years when they were most vulnerable, to the identity they never built, to the soul they never nourished, to the behaviors they never transformed. And these accusations are the very confrontations they fear most. This is where true cowardice lies: in blaming unhealable years.

Yet there is one place these people do not look:

The essence.

What does your essence expect of you? A human being must recognize their essence, focus on it, and spend time with their true self. Not by piling on external validations, but by truly knowing oneself—along with one’s wounds—and working to heal them without assigning the task to others. Not by holding others responsible, but by identifying where the cracks lie within.

When the essence is healed, the obsession with self-importance dissolves. The feeling of “I am the most important, nothing else matters” disappears. Life slows down. You begin to see the outside world more clearly. You stop assigning heavy tasks to those who love you deeply.

But the question remains: in this frantic pace of life, will you be able to slow down, to stop placing yourself above all else, to let go of “I am the most important,” and to take responsibility instead?

Zarife TARAKCI