Gone in seconds

We used to lose ourselves in long stories for hours. Now we can barely sit through a

30 second video, thumb already hovering over 2x.

By Hansika Kohli

'15 second feels long now, and that says a lot about how we consume things today'; image- Google, illustration- Hansika Kohli

Open Instagram. Start watching a reel. Now be honest, did your thumb already move toward the right side of the screen? Maybe to skip ahead. Maybe to speed it up. Maybe to just move on to the next one. Not long ago, watching a full video felt normal. You could sit through the intro, the

awkward “hey guys welcome back to my channel,” the unnecessary story before the

actual point, and somehow it was fine. Now? Even 30 second feels long. Our attention span is shrinking faster than we realise. And the internet has adjusted perfectly to that. Think about how we watch content now. A “Get Ready With Me” video starts and we immediately skip to the final look. Cooking reels? Straight to the plating. Tutorials? Jump to the result.

Almost every video now has timestamps, like chapters in a book, guiding viewers

directly to the “important” part. We’re no longer watching stories. We are

forwarding to the highlights. And somewhere between al of this, we have become

the fast-forward generation.

If there were a skip button to real life, most of us would probably press it.Aishwarya Bhatia, 18, a class 12th standard student, at Doon International School, Dehradun

Recently, Instagram introduced a 2x playback option for reels, meaning users can

literally watch already short videos at double speed. Think about that for a second.

People are now rushing through content that lasts less than a minute. Sneha Verma, 19, a corporate law student, studying at UPES, Dehradun, recalls the exact moment she realised her attention span was hijacked by the internet. She says laughing, “There was a pooja at my house. Everyone was sitting quietly through the rituals, but the whole time I could think about only one thing. ‘When is this going to end?’ I literally wished there was a 2x button like Instagram has, so that the ceremony could speed up. Imagine the pandit chanting everything at double speed.” That was a very Gen Z thought to have crossed her mind. Ridiculous? Maybe. Relatable? Absolutely. This says a lot about how our brains are adjusting to constant speed. Waiting, it seems, has become uncomfortable. Aishwarya Bhatia, 18, a class 12th standard student, at Doon International School, Dehradun , says,

“I love this feature. I watch a lot of 'get ready with me' reels and I'm just not here for the slow parts. I wanna see the final look.”

Even the hands creating something real now pause to scroll.; GIF made by- Hansika Kohli

But when asked whether it's a little wild to speed up a video that's already under a

minute, she pauses,

“When you put it like that, yes it’s crazy to do so. But somecontent is just similar, so it becomes easier to watch. And some transition reels make you want to skip to the good part anyway.” Aditya Chauhan, 19, a BTech student, studying at Bennett Universit, Noida, says, “I initially used it to rewatch study material that I had already gone through. Now I just want every clip to go faster. It's become a habit. Like a reflex. I actually get irritated when something plays at normal speed. This also helps me skip to the part of the audio that is my favourite. Listening to the entire audio just becomes a hassle.”

Normal speed. Irritating. Somewhere along the way, we have evolved into a species

that cannot tolerate content at 1x speed. His watch history is probably full of videos,

he’ll never even think about.This whole thing started pretty reasonably, around 2010. Speed controls were introduced so that students could rewatch lectures without losing their minds.

Practical and humane. But slowly, without anyone noticing, the feature became a

habit, and then the habit turned into a need.

Every platform has designed it’s algorithm to keep us in motion, like some hamsters

on a wheel. Even voice notes aren’t safe anymore. A lot of messaging apps, like

WhatsApp, now allow people to listen to voice recordings at double speed. Meaning

the entire conversation can be converted to half the time. Which is great. Until you

forget to switch it back and your friend sounds like Theodore from ‘Alvin and the

chipmunks,’ hosting a podcast of squirrels.

The uncomfortable part is how normal this all has become. If there were a skip

button to real life, most of us would probably press it. Long meetings? Skip. Traffic

jam? Scroll. That awkward moment when the teacher asks for an answer and the

whole class suddenly becomes fascinated with their notebooks and desks? Definitely

skip and scroll. Because somewhere between reels, autoplay, and endless scrolling, we didn’t just speed up our videos.We sped up our patience too.