A conversation with an M&A partner. We are talking about deals, and about time.
“Closing one,” he tells me, “used to take four to six months. Now it takes four to six weeks.” I tell him that soon, maybe, it will be four to six days. He laughs. He does not tell me I am wrong.
Everything is moving fast. So fast.
It is easy to blame AI, and AI has complicated everything, no doubt about it. But AI is only one piece. What really picked up speed is everything around us at once: the data, the numbers, the information, and the rate at which all of it reaches us.
Last month I watched two films I love. The Godfather, Part One, and Apocalypse Now. Both of them felt slow. Not worse. Slow. A pace that once felt normal now feels like it belongs to another century. Music tells the same story. Put on a song from 1970, count the verses before the chorus, and notice how long it waits before the hook. We have lost our patience for the build.
Here is the part that worries me. This speed runs against our natural rhythm.
You do not need to be an expert in Chinese medicine or in Ayurveda to feel the chi, or the prana. You only need to pay attention. The rhythm of life, the rhythm of nature, the turning of the seasons: all of it keeps one pace. Unfortunately, the world we have built keeps another.
Do you want proof? Touch your wrist, or press two fingers to your neck. Feel your heartbeat for a couple of minutes. Follow your breathing while it is calm and regular. That is your pace, the one you were born with. Now hold it against the pace of your day.
Do you want a harder proof? Spend an hour praying a rosary or repeating a mantra. Smoke a long cigar from one end to the other. Chew every bite of your food thirty times before you swallow. Each of these will feel strange, almost uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. They belong to a rhythm the world no longer keeps.
And yet the only thing that seems to matter now is running. Running, running, running. Almost nobody asks where we are running. Almost nobody asks whether the law can keep up. Almost nobody asks who we become along the way.
The people who close the gap between idea and execution, and close it faster than anyone else, are the ones who win. For now. I do not believe that pace holds. Not for them, and not for the rest of us.
So what do you do with that?
One option is to walk away from all of it. What I call the “Into the Wild” option. No WhatsApp, no messages, no email, no tech, no AI. Step outside the world completely. I respect that choice, and I know people who have done it. But to me it still sounds like a choice to leave.
If you want to stay, the picture is harder. You live torn between a world that moves too fast and your own difficulty in keeping up. People have fomo. Anxiety. Some are on the edge of burnout. The lucky ones feel like they are riding the wave. But even then it is likely to be one of these three: having an extraordinary amount of energy to start with, spending an extraordinary amount of energy to stay on it, or quietly choosing not to listen to your body at all.
The first is luck, and luck runs out. The second is exhausting, and it can still work. The third is dangerous. Your body keeps a record, and sooner or later it sends you the bill. Most of the time, with interest.
I do not know how this ends. I really do not.
What I feel is that we are inside an avalanche. And an avalanche leaves you two outcomes. It takes you and carries you down. Or it breaks into many smaller pieces, and what was a single wall of force becomes something you can move through.
You know my perspective by now. It’s hard to call yourself an optimist these days. But I am Italian and faith-driven, and I have decided, on purpose, not to be a pessimist either.
So I have decided to be curious. Curious will never be the perfect word, and I know it. It still does the one thing I need most. It keeps my eyes open while everything speeds up, so I can watch the avalanche instead of only bracing for it.
I cannot slow the world down. But I can keep a hand on my own wrist, feel my own pace, and refuse to forget that I still have one.
