Why Urgency Is Eating Us Alive

How the incessant rush to do, to make, and to play has been forced upon us, and how we can begin to think our way out of it.

This article was originally published in Generation Magazine on January 30, 2026 under the title “The Man In The Grey Suit”. You can read the original article here.

Although people are working the fewest number of hours per year that they have in centuries—down to around 1,800 hours per year in 2023 compared to over 3,000 in the late 19th century—my experience has been that a feeling of frantic Urgency increasingly permeates every portion of our lives. Screens are the customary target of pointed fingers, what with the seamless integration of the home and workplace they afford and the access to the social panopticon that they grant. It’s possible that phones and related digital technologies are to blame for the incursion of Urgency into our lives, but it’s more accurate to say that these new technologies have simply played a facilitative role for extant factors; long-tenured cultural understandings of work based on exploitative labor relations existed long before the ubiquity of personal computers.

It’s tempting to think that smartphones, streaming, and apps like TikTok are the source of all our Urgency-related woes. People cite the desiccated attention spans of short-form video doomscrollers as evidence that technology is to blame for our collective inability to relax, but attention companies like Meta were only able to colonize our life’s time this successfully because the social/political/economic table was set so nicely for them to begin with. In an imagined world where cities are eminently walkable and access to quality public transportation is widespread, where people have diverse and abundant opportunities for play and feel as if they have plenty of leisure time to enjoy it—not to mention they feel that their work is meaningful—a person feeling so much Urgency that their entertainment time takes the form of scrolling endlessly on an algorithmically-curated entertainment feed would be considered downright pathological. Our proclivity toward Urgency is social, not technological. Phones and personal computers have been recruited to spread Urgency, but they cannot be credited with creating Urgency itself. Taylorist¹ factory managers of the late 19th century would have fawned over the surveillance systems Amazon uses to squeeze every drop of productivity out of its workers. Post-modern entertainment, surveillance, and labor management technologies did not create Urgency ex nihilo. Advancements in technology have historically been the most accessible to those already in power, and these technologies of Urgency were devised and recruited by those who were already in a position to profit off of Urgency to begin with. For a factory manager or CEO, Urgency in the workplace means greater productivity and control over your workers. And if your workers return home and their Urgency to take their mind off of what they just experienced is satisfied by a curated feed of endless entertainment, even better.

But let’s be more specific: what do we mean by Urgency? In an experiential sense, Urgency is the feeling of racing against the clock, the feeling that time itself is an opponent to fight against, a jealous god who must be placated with offerings of timeliness and haste.

Urgency is the experience of time not on your side, a state of being against-time.

Urgency is a man in a dreary grey suit off in the corner of a room, just inside your peripheral vision, glancing between you and a pocketwatch with an eyebrow cocked and foot tap-tap-tapping.

Urgency, inside and outside this embodied representation, feels akin to being watched. And this is no surprise—our first encounters with Urgency come from someone watching and telling us to move faster. The dynamic of the teacher and the student, the taskmaster and the laborer, the timekeeper and the timed, is introduced in Kindergarten or Pre-K and deepened year upon year. The result is that we’re mostly inoculated to the inherent repellency of authoritarian relationships and, more insidiously, we’re taught to internalize them. For those who profit from Urgency, it is more efficient to embed the sense in a collective psyche than to try to impose it externally. Built-in systems of rewards and punishments for promptness and productivity in our schools and workplaces condition us from a young age to internalize the ticking clock. Though I have a supervisor at my place of employment, these days it’s mostly myself who is doing the me-watching. I become the man in the grey suit, watching my progress from over my own shoulder like some C-list god of time, checking my pocketwatch and tapping my foot impatiently.

In the presence of Urgency, the experience of time constricts and becomes bracketed between the ever-advancing present moment and an obscured but approaching wall of temporal concrete. Urgency renders life as it is meant to be lived unlivable—there can be no relaxation, no mind-wandering, no reflective unconstrained time, nor any other sine qua non requisite for human spiritual life in its presence. Entire classes of questions which demand unbracketed reflection, like the ones relating to our values as individuals or purpose as a people, are erased from responsive feasibility. Urgency’s intrusion into the most intimate areas of our lives deprives us of the growth and experiences which can only occur in the fertile zoetic soil of the unobserved and unbothered. This is, incidentally, extremely convenient for Urgency profiteers. Urgency keeps us from asking questions of our status quo. It keeps us from forming and nurturing relationships and building community. Urgency keeps us locked in a cycle of production and distraction, the fruits of which trickle upward and out of our reach.

For many of us, it no longer feels like we have the luxury of time to figure things out. How does this impact the lives of young people today? Does the temporal carpet of time rolled out before them appear foreshortened? Does it feel like it is moving against them underfoot like a belligerent airport walkway, forcing them into a run?

The party that the man in the grey suit crashes most tragically is young people’s—the single group who is supposed to have time on their side. This great advantage of young people and children is stolen away by Urgency, which is often arbitrarily imposed. We believe, or operate as if we believe, that children must learn certain skills by certain ages. In my experience as a school psychologist, most of these markers have to do with ensuring conformity to a pre-planned trajectory and not with concern for a child’s well-being. The Urgency that we believe is necessary to get children up to speed—informed by the fear we feel regarding their wellbeing in our society should they fail—comes at the price of their childhood’s integrity, their freedom to explore and to take their time doing it. Not many people know that the word school is derived from the Greek schole, or leisure. The Greeks were one of many societies to honor the implicit understanding that learning is something that can only happen in a safe, calm, and relaxed environment; this is an understanding that we have thoroughly misplaced. Learning does not happen on a deadline basis—it cannot be rushed. Simple, short-term memorization, maybe. You can affect the steps of a choreography after a pedagogical rush job, but you will learn nothing about what it means to dance. The conditioning to adopt a sense of Urgency without protest begins in the classroom. If we are going to create an education system grounded in the values of a sustainable shared future, we cannot allow Urgency, the man in the grey suit, within 100 meters of a school.

The next time you see this man or feel yourself racing against one clock or another, I invite you to ask the simple question of Why. Why must this be urgent? When you have gathered your response, ask Why again. Why does the answer you provided necessitate Urgency? Follow the thread all the way through. Get to the root of it, find out from whom the invitation to the man in the grey suit came. When you probe deep enough, answers to the persistent Why resolve either to a congruence to some seasonal change—these nuts must be harvested before the solstice, for example—or an adherence to some arbitrary, man-made, usually bureaucratic timetable—quarterly reviews are due on November 15 and not a day later.

Is your Urgency organic, free-range, grass-fed and sun-soaked? Is your Urgency GMO, industrial monoculture, a cash crop? We must pay less attention to the synthetic variety of Urgency, and be more selective with the Urgencies we honor. Because while it is tempting to believe that a to-do list completed with Urgency will generate more “free” time than one completed at a leisurely pace, it’s more common that the Urgency employed to dispatch the list will simply beget more Urgency. When a to-do list is frantically dispatched, the same Urgency is usually applied to the leisure time that it was supposed to afford. When we spend most of our waking lives rushing from task to task, how can we be expected to treat our leisure time any differently? We are simply not used to taking our time to do things; it makes us uncomfortable in a deep way to not complete a task efficiently or to not find a speedy resolution. Thus when we are afforded time to ourselves, instant, uncomplicated, on-demand entertainment is preferred to reflection, simple perception, and quiet. Instantaneous and hyper-curated entertainment will become the dominant form of entertainment of any society that applies the principles of Urgency to leisure. This is our blood-price for giving credence to manufactured Urgency: Urgency comes to colonize our lives. There is nothing, the message goes, that all else being equal is better done slowly than quickly and efficiently. How can our relationship to time remain untainted when this message is pre-eminent?

The funny catch-22 about Urgency is that there is so much riding, ecologically speaking, on our ability to create new and rediscover old ways of living that there becomes an Urgency about non-Urgency. The death-plunge trajectory of the biosphere demands immediate action, and that action looks in a lot of ways like Doing Nothing: turning off the drill, mindfully redistributing resources, looking up. We need to slow down, and we need to do it fast. This Urgency is tremendously stressful. It is brutal to go to work day after day and to try to do my part to keep the wheels on a bus that desperately needs to change direction. However, and crucially, this anxiety does not contain even a shred of the spiritually-effacing ennui that I experience when urgently filling out paperwork before its deadline, hustling my ass into work by 7:30 a.m. on the dot, or checking off preparatory tasks for the upcoming work week on a late Sunday afternoon. In stark contrast, the former Urgency feels worthwhile because it is in service of leisure, and I will accept the anxiety that comes with that. The Urgency for change, for love, for Revolution, is organic. And to me that’s the healthy kind.

1. https://www.munich-business-school.de/en/l/business-studies-dictionary/taylorism#:~:text=Taylorism%2C%20named%20after%20the%20American,reduce%20costs%20and%20increase%20quality.