Avoiding Crashes

For some reason, society, especially in the West and increasingly in the East, has an ever increasing demand for speed or for things to be faster.

Whether it is 'fast food', fast cars, increasing internet speeds, faster delivery of products etc, we seem to be obsessed with things having to be faster but what is really driving this?

The only exception i can think of to this is aviation, where Concorde was shut down incredibly quickly for reasons, nobody in the public domain could really understand or rationalize but perhaps in the fullness of time, we may learn the truth behind that.

But everything else seems to be on an exponential demand for increased velocity. Yet, in reality, if we take a step back, surely, the only thing requiring the greatest speed is to avoid imminent injury, death or disaster. Nothing else, i can think of screams out as being quite so urgent and yet the facts are that we seem desperate to achieve what, with whatever time we may save by doing things faster?

Although, if injured, we may want to be treated asap, i doubt we would want a surgeon to go faster with an operation itself, would we?

The natural competitive instinct in human beings, explains why we may want to run, ski, skate faster than our friends or competitors but the risk is relatively low and there is a natural limitation both physically and with environments.

Is it fear of losing out in some way that drives this behaviour, eg a business may not be first to market or they may not meet demand by date x? Over the last few years, we even have the concept of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and not the original US sporting version of (Most Valuable Player), where the drive is to produce something that can be sold asap, even if it doesn't really do what customers want initially.

Obviously, 'fast food' has been developed with addictive ingredients to fuel that particular tranche but what is the addictive ingredient driving the others?

There are many examples through history, which illustrate that going at speed, often results in crashes of some kind, are we in a rush to crash?

So, my question is simple, why do we want to do this? Or are we simply pawns in the games of others?