The Efficiency Trap: How Pursuing Speed Erodes Connection

The Efficiency Trap: How Pursuing Speed Erodes Connection

In this age of optimized everything, human connection is vanishing.

By Dean Melissa Perry

It started with a word—efficiency. Spoken casually by a student recounting why the university considered closing a 24-hour dining hall: It wasn’t “efficient.”

That word lodged in my chest like a stone.

Not because the logic was unfamiliar—it made perfect operational sense. But because of what it missed: the human cost. That dining hall, with its all-you-can-eat buffets and international cuisines, was where students lingered over late-night fries, swapped stories, held each other’s stress, and simply belonged. It wasn’t just a cafeteria. It was a hearth.

In our age of optimized everything, these spaces—comforting and profoundly human—are vanishing.

Technology, like a magician, keeps pulling rabbits out of hats: deliveries via robot, cleaner inboxes, five-minute workouts, AI-generated meeting notes. The applause is loud. But what’s quietly disappearing behind the curtain?

Our patience. Our presence. Our people.

If the dining hall is a hearth—a warm place to gather, collaborate, and discuss one-on-one—my Outlook inbox is a frozen tundra. A cold, disconnected place where hundreds of people talk at me at once. At an individual level, I care about each and every person, but as an aggregate it is just too much to process. In the rush to move through it efficiently, I lose the ability to respond with presence. People become tasks.

I confess: I love the feeling of seeing my calendar tightly packed. In our full-tilt world, being 100 percent scheduled is mistaken as the pinnacle of efficiency. There’s a certain pride in knowing I’m getting a lot done. But then I have to live that day. Hour after hour. Call after call. I move from moment to moment, without absorbing any of it. The very thing that signals success in the productivity command center becomes suffocating in practice.

Consider this: When we’re rushed, we don’t just move faster—we care less. The classic “Good Samaritan” study by Darley and Batson (1973) asked seminary students to prepare talks—some on the parable of the Good Samaritan itself—then randomly told some they were late. Those in a hurry were far less likely to stop and help a person slumped in distress. It wasn’t malice. It was momentum. Speed dulls empathy.

Psychologist Robert Levine, in A Geography of Time, observed that even when our workload doesn’t increase, simply moving faster gives us a sense of reward. We feel accomplished—not necessarily more fulfilled, but because speed itself delivers a kind of psychological high. More recently, authors like Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks (2021) and Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing (2019) have written compellingly about how the cult of efficiency undermines our attention, creativity, and relationships—reminding us that a well-lived life isn’t always maximized to the hilt. But it’s a dopamine trick. That buzz we get from efficiency isn’t always linked to meaning or satisfaction—it just feels good to move quickly.

But what are we rushing past? I see it in students who feel lonely in buzzing lecture halls. In the people rushing by with their AirPods cranked up. In myself, when I breeze past someone’s hesitation because I’m fixated on the next thing. We are not machines. We are not designed for constant acceleration. We are relational creatures wired for pause, for nuance, for eye contact, for noticing, for lingering around the hearth together. So what can we do in a culture spinning like a top on the altar of productivity?

Start here:

• Name your efficiency drivers. What are you optimizing today? For whom? At what cost?
• Leave white space in your calendar. That’s where breath—and breakthroughs—happen.
• Trade one text for a voice. One ping for a presence. Let someone hear the warmth in your tone.
• Walk slower. Eat slower. Listen longer. See what softens.
• Design friction back into your life. Not all shortcuts lead somewhere worth going.

Efficiency is not evil. But when it becomes our compass, it warps the map. It blinds us to the wonder of simply being with each other.

The student who advocated—successfully, alongside a group of peers—to keep that dining hall open? He wasn’t resisting progress. He was defending fellowship. A space where you could sit in sweatpants at 2 a.m. and feel less alone in the world.

That, to me, is worth being a little inefficient for.

Let’s slow down—not because we’re lazy, but because we’re alive.

References

- Burkeman, O. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.     
- Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108.     
- Levine, R. (1998). A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist. Basic Books.     
- Odell, J. (2019). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House.

This story was originally featured on Psychology Today in the Dean's recurring column The Mindful Epidemiologist.