Is it just me, or is time accelerating?

Every subsequent year passes faster than the last. Days are shorter, weeks disappear, and "in a moment" today usually means "never." Psychology knows this phenomenon well: the more stimuli we encounter, the fewer anchors we have in our memory, and the fewer the anchors, the faster time subjectively flows.

The Era of Permanent "URGENT"

We live in an era of permanent "URGENT" status. Red banners, yellow banners, alerts, notifications. Crisis follows crisis: political, economic, climatic, military. Our brain—evolutionarily programmed to detect threats—has no moment of respite today. Advertisers, the media, and social media algorithms understand this perfectly. Fear sells best.

The result? The attention span crisis has become a mass phenomenon. It is becoming increasingly difficult to read, to think deeply, to truly be "here and now." Yet, paradoxically, as many as 74% of people declare that the next year will be better. Are we naive optimists? Or is the present simply so loud and overwhelming that the future appears as a promise of silence?

The Data vs. The Headlines

When we look away from the headlines and examine the data, the image of the world looks different:

• Life expectancy: People are living longer.

• Education: Illiteracy is systematically decreasing.

• Poverty: Extreme poverty and hunger are—in the long term—retreating.

• Economy: Global economies, even if currently struggling, continue to grow.

• Technology: It brings real relief—from medicine and communication to predicting natural disasters and providing rapid aid when they occur.

This is exactly what thinkers like Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil write and speak about: exponential progress that is barely visible in the short term but relentless in the long term. They speak of the human tendency toward pessimism in the here and now and the underestimation of trends that work slowly but consistently.

Lessons from 2025

The year 2025 was a good example of this. On one hand, there was chaos, tension, and uncertainty. On the other, there was extraordinary mobilization and concrete results.

The "Sprawdzamy" (Checking) campaign, launched at the beginning of the year, ended with a hundred changes to absurd regulations.

Entrepreneurs were able to unite within days to help flood victims. Society, despite its disputes, showed the capacity to act above divisions.

The Competence of the Future

Perhaps, then, the problem is not that the world is heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps the problem is that we live in a mode of continuous alarm that distorts our perception of reality. The real competence of the future will no longer be access to information, but the ability to manage attention, distance, and hope.

Time is accelerating. The question is: can we slow down enough to see where we are truly heading?