We are shaped by the speed we live at. This reflection explores how acceleration forms us, why our inner life struggles to keep pace, and how slow practices help us become whole again.
An Orpheus Formation Essay · Steven McMillan
We are living through a cultural quickening. Decisions arrive faster, expectations tighten, and the pace of digital life has quietly become the pace of ordinary life. Many people feel it not as crisis but as erosion: a thinning of attention, a rise in reactivity, a sense that we are permanently half a step behind ourselves.
The quiet truth beneath this is simple: speed forms us. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but steadily. Something is always shaping who we are becoming. The question is never whether formation is happening, but what is doing the forming.
If acceleration shapes us by default, then we need practices that shape us by design.
Acceleration doesn’t only change how we act; it changes how we are. It shortens our horizons. It shrinks our capacity for presence. It makes depth feel like a luxury and reflection feel like inefficiency.
Acceleration thins our humanity. Formation thickens it.
Attention is formative. What we attend to shapes who we become.
Pace is chosen speed — the alignment of outer action with inner life.
Trust is slow capital. It grows through consistency and integrity.
These practices don’t remove pressure, but they redistribute it. They anchor us. They make it possible to lead without brittleness, to care without burning out, to imagine without becoming cynical.
Perhaps formation in an accelerated age is not about escaping speed, but choosing what shapes us within it.
Published by Orpheus Books — Formation in an Age of Acceleration.