How long did you wait for your last food delivery before you got annoyed and didn’t tip the delivery guy? Hunger makes us nervous on a psychological level, but it’s not the only trigger. Our society has become so rapid that we often hear how we live in a fast-paced world, and it’s true.
Slow-cooked meals have become a luxury, shopping for clothes a hobby, while online gaming satisfies our entertainment appetite without having to move a muscle. We traded the luxury of velvet casino floors and fancy dresses for comfortable sweatpants and playing at the najszybciej wypłacalne kasyna, because in the end, we can earn the same rewards!
Let’s find out what else speed has ruined or improved in our daily lives.
Drive-Thru Dining: Fast Food for a Fast Life
Fast food was one of the first industries to realize that speed sells. Dating as far back as the 1940s, restaurants like McDonald’s re-engineered their kitchens into assembly lines to churn out meals in minutes. Before long, grabbing a burger became an exercise in efficiency, as drive-thrus allowed people to pick up food without ever leaving the car. Naturally, every major chain raced to cut service times.
Kuba Nowakowski, an online entertainment expert at KasynaOnlinePolskie, points out that speed isn’t just a perk, but was set as an expectation long ago: “People don’t want to wait for anything anymore, whether it’s their lunch salad or an online platform. Our fast-food mentality — the desire to get what we want right now — has spilled into all aspects of life. If dinner can be ready in minutes, why shouldn’t everything else be just as swift?”
Blazing Connections: Internet and Instant Communication
It wasn’t long ago that even sending an e-mail over dial-up took minutes (and a lot of financial credit), just to avoid communicating the slower way — by sending a letter, which might’ve taken weeks. Now, those days are history. We live in an era of fiber-optic and 5G internet, where information travels at lightning speeds.
Sending a message across the globe is nearly instantaneous, and waiting more than a few seconds for a website to load feels like forever. In fact, over half of mobile website visitors will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Obviously, our patience for sluggish connections has essentially evaporated; we’ve been trained to expect instant access.
Texting, instant messaging, and video calls have largely replaced snail mail and even traditional phone calls. We expect friends to reply within moments. If they don’t, we half-jokingly wonder if they got lost somewhere without WiFi — or get annoyed for being ignored.
Social media delivers real-time updates on everything, from world news to the mundane details of our acquaintances’ lives. In this hyper-connected atmosphere, fast communication isn’t just convenient, but expected. A slow response these days can feel like a broken promise, a testament to how deeply speed is ingrained in our everyday expectations.
On-Demand Entertainment: Play, Stream, and Binge Now
Entertainment has hopped on the speed train, too, and it’s not slowing down. Remember when we had to wait a week for the next episode of a popular TV show? Now, entire seasons drop at once to serve our binge-watching needs.
Streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify offer vast libraries of shows, movies, and music on demand, so you don’t have to wait for a download or a song to buffer. We can start watching or listening whenever our mood strikes, and if one service lags even for a moment, we simply move on to the next one!
Gaming is another arena where the need for speed reigns supreme. New consoles now load games in seconds. For example, PlayStation 5 comes with a custom SSD that cuts load times of many games by 50% or more. Cloud gaming services promise play-anywhere convenience without lengthy installation. You can fire up a game on a phone or TV without downloading 100 GB first.
Online gamers, meanwhile, know that even a split-second lag stands between their team and defeat. And why would they risk their leaderboard status they worked so hard for, just to lose over such a silly thing? On average, online gamers tolerate only about 45 milliseconds of latency before losing patience, which eventually leads to abandoning their game.
“Gamers are an impatient bunch, myself included,” Nowakowski admits, laughing. “If a game or a stream doesn’t start up immediately, you better believe we’ll gripe about it.”
Instant entertainment has become the norm. Delays and wait times now feel like relics of a bygone era — any service that fails to deliver speed risks losing our attention and our subscription.
Click, Buy, Deliver: The Need for Speed in Shopping and Payments
Let’s be real: you know your clothing size and your shoe number, and that’s already enough for you to pursue your next great outfit online, right? True, brick-and-mortar shops and grand malls still get visitors — but far fewer than they used to. E-commerce is the next great thing, thanks to the Internet and the speed of banking that allows us to transfer funds in mere seconds, without any ATMs or contactless card beeps.
Nearly three-quarters of online shoppers are so used to online shopping that they expect a delivery every two days! Younger generations are one step ahead, and they’ve already become daily shoppers (no wonder so many fast delivery services have merged, becoming an entirely new industry sector).
Retailers, big and small, have responded by making instant gratification a selling point. E-commerce giants like Amazon offer same-day delivery in many cities (in Boston, an Amazon order placed by 11 a.m. can arrive the same evening for a rather small fee). The on-demand economy doesn’t stop at products — services like ride-sharing and food delivery thrive because they cater to our impatient mindset.
Paying for things online has also become seamless and swift, which is now a basic expectation. Without it, industries would not have evolved so much. Digital wallets, contactless cards, mobile payment apps, and cryptocurrencies let us check out with just a tap.
In the U.S., the number of contactless payments had grown from 3% in 2017 to 25% by 2023, reflecting just how quickly we embraced the tap-and-go payment method. One-click purchases remove even the minor hassle of entering shipping and billing info more than once.
Fast Payouts: Instant Wins and Quick Cashouts
Online gambling is one arena where the need for speed truly shines through. Fast payouts have become a major selling point for internet casinos and betting sites. In the near past, if you hit a jackpot at a casino or betting site, you might have had to wait days or weeks for the winnings to get processed. Today, players get their money instantly.
“Thanks to e-wallets and cryptocurrencies, lightning-fast withdrawals are now being processed within minutes — hours at max,” explains Kuba Nowakowski, leading expert at KasynaOnlinePolskie.com. “Platforms like PayPal, Google Pay, Bitcoin, and Skrill are the direct response to players’ demands for instant gratification in the field of online gambling.”
This is especially present and visible in the online gambling sector because, as Kuba says, “if one platform makes you wait, there’s always another one to take its place, since the sector has been booming in the past five years.”
How Fast is Fast Enough?
We live in a world where waiting has become an exception, not a rule. Fast food, fast internet, fast payouts — they’re all symptoms of a society addicted to speed. It makes you wonder, will we ever slow down, or was the future predestined to be fast? In the race of life, it seems speed is here to stay. So buckle up — the fast lane is only getting faster!