Immediacy is the enemy of quality

For years, I've thought that I'm slow.

I'm slow to react, slow to think and slow to provide emotional responses to happenings around me. When someone around me has passed away, I've found myself not grieving until 24-48h later, which led me to think that something isn't right with me.

When I have conversations that require immediate response of something I don't have top of the mind, I freeze and can't provide immediate answers. Sometimes, I back out of them saying "let me get back to you later with this" but sometimes that isn't an option. Luckily, there are things I do have top of the mind and I'm quick to react, in these cases, so not everything is lost!

Yesterday, I read Derek Sivers' "I'm a very slow thinker", and I thought "that's me!". I posted it today on twitter and I've found more people that feel exactly the same.

I used to think this was one of my weaknesses but I'm more inclined to think that it's one of my strengths, if used properly.

Back in 2018, I burnt out because I was living in everyone else's agenda. Too many people, too many commitments and a complete misalignment in expectations and deadlines.

Despite our inherent drive to connect, there are practical limits to how many relationships we can effectively manage. Dunbar's Number serves as a guideline, suggesting that while we may have many acquaintances, only about 150 can be maintained as stable connections. This includes close friends, family, and regular contacts in our lives.

Highly-connected people, like me, who not only maintain a circle of family and friends, but multiple circles of friends, from different countries, sectors and environments (uni, middle-school, hometown vs. where you live, erasmus, gym, investment groups, stuff like Seedrocket, Startup Grind and more.), the number grows too much for most to handle.

While I don't maintain close relationships with more than, say 20-30 people, I do interact with thousands of people on a monthly basis, and that carries consecuences: forgetfulness, mental overload, stress, and a general sense of constantly deceiving people because I ask them if we've met before, or I forget their children's names and stuff like that.

This year, I've resolved to take action and understand better how my brain works, so I'm being inspected to see if I have some sort of degenerative process or there's something else. For instance, I suspected I might've been a clear case of ADHD but I might turn out to be on the autist spectrum, as research shows that slow deep thought is indeed associated with autism.

That won't change my perception of the world. In fact, for years I've been trying to circumnavigate difficult situations to avoid getting stuck where normative minds wouldn't.

But it's also given me more reasons not to pursue more hectic things in life. For instance, I don't enjoy sports of risk, or fast-paced videogames. I don't like to be on the spotlight unless I choose to do so and I resist last-minute changes breaking my mental models of what the immediate future looks like.

That might explain why I've pursued a life in programming and not in acting. Why I can't rap or pull certain tricks. Why I've decided to bootstrap a company instead of playing the more agile VC-backed route. That's why I was never a good football player, not because of skill or physical condition, but because I rarely ever took the best decisions when I had the ball.

One of the challenges I face daily is that society is engineered by and for more normative minds, while neurodivergent people like myself have to constantly adapt to everything. Similar to being left-handed (which I also happen to be), these small constant struggles force our brains to always be adapting to everyone else's reality, so we exercise mentally more than the rest of the whole - which probably go on autopilot most of the times.

Also, we're indexing for immediacy at the expense of quality, and that explains why we have so many social interactions, contacts, chats and DMs: because the cost of each interaction is virtually zero. Also the impact, and that is more worrying: we're OK with terrible answers so long as they're NOW. Inaction and blocking situations cost more money so we're forcing everyone else to function as a well-oiled machine whose wheels never stop spinning but, what if someone spins more slowly?

Being slow is exhausting, paradoxically. Who would've thought?