The End of Fast?

In the world of innovation and digital technologies, we often use the “need for speed” catchphrase to grab attention and create relevance.

Everyone is in a rush and everything is needed yesterday. But speed is not always a good thing, even if it starts out with good intentions.

Take fast food for example. What a great idea -- fast, cheap and convenient. Just drive-thru, get a basic meal in mere minutes for some pocket change and be back at work before you skipped a beat. How quintessentially American a concept! The perfect fuel for productivity. Until you got an obesity pandemic on your hands which requires a major shift in the choices we make and gives birth to the growing trend of healthy nutrition and the importance of exercise.

And then came fast fashion -- cheap yet fashionable. A response to decades of fashion austerity -- when fashion was a privilege reserved for the fortunate few.

With fast-fashion you could all of sudden walk out of an H&M or Zara a completely new person barely feeling a vibration in your wallet or purse. And then came eCommerce and the party was really on. A few years of this though and we started understanding that there is a hidden price tag to this endless shopping spree; a few actually.

From the planet’s perspective -- disastrous. The fashion industry being the world’s 2nd biggest polluter, with tonnes of textile ending up in landfills and toxic by-products polluting the air and water, not to mention sweatshops and the cost of shipping. From a consumer perspective, fast fashion hardly survives 2-3 washes and our closets end up housing stuff we’ve maybe worn once or twice. After the initial excitement, savvy consumers started purchasing less, but better. They became more discerning; started asking the right questions.

And last, but not least, we came to fast travel, also known as low cost travel -- a relatively new phenomenon. At first, it was a beautiful thing. Democratizing something that was traditionally out of reach for most people.

Now, travel is a great thing; it helps us broaden our horizons, meet new cultures, learn new things. But, just like fast fashion, there’s a fine line between a healthy sense of adventure and curiosity, and mindless consumerism.

For many, fast travel fueled an inner sense of restlessness, a desire to go somewhere, post something on instagram and think about the next destination. Not to mention the fact that for many premier destinations, the onslaught of tourists and digital nomads made their cities uninhabitable for many of the locals -- with rents and restaurant prices rocketing.

Unlike fast food and fast fashion, fast travel was primarily?impacted by the pandemic that curtailed freedom of movement. But perhaps, just like the shift from everything that is fast but comes with a cost, what lies ahead is a healthier alternative and a more mindful approach to consumption.