The cult of now and how impatience killed quality

There was a time when waiting wasn’t a flaw, it was part of the process. You waited for your favorite band to drop an album. You waited for a game’s official release, knowing it had passed through months of polish. You waited for updates, for service improvements, for creators and engineers to finish something before delivering it.

Now? We’ve become allergic to waiting, and in the process, we’ve lost something much greater: quality.

A culture addicted to speed (and not just that drug)

Our world runs on instant gratification. Same-day delivery. One-click streaming. AI chatbots answering in milliseconds. What once took weeks now takes seconds, and that shift has seeped into our expectations for everything.

We expect software to be available instantly, and forgive it for being broken. We expect artists to churn out singles, and settle for half-baked tracks with algorithm-friendly hooks. We expect “early access” games to eventually be fixed, while pre-ordering them anyway.

This is no accident. It’s not just technology enabling speed, it’s consumer culture demanding it. We've replaced patience with pressure, and craft with clickbait.

Beta by default

Open any app store or digital marketplace and you'll find them: services in "open beta", games still "under development", websites with "coming soon" features... but all of them available right now. Companies no longer wait to perfect a product. They launch first, fix later, if at all.

Even flagship titles from major studios are released in incomplete states, riddled with bugs, with the promise of patches and updates to come. It's not that these developers can't deliver better, it's that the market doesn’t wait for better. And neither do we.

We’ve normalized paying for work-in-progress.

Music, but make it disposable

Music hasn’t been spared either. Albums feel more like playlists. Tracks are short, simplistic, and engineered for TikTok virality instead of longevity. Production quality is lower. Compositions are shallower. It’s not about making timeless music, it’s about feeding the algorithm and staying visible.

Artists are under pressure to remain relevant every week. And the public, obsessed with the next, often discards yesterday’s hits like fast fashion. Even “deluxe editions” of albums drop just days after release, revealing how arbitrary the original product really was. When quantity eclipses quality, substance becomes an afterthought.

The failure of marketing-first thinking

A large part of the blame lies with marketing departments. In their obsession with positioning, trends, and appearances, they’ve shifted focus away from the core product. Entire launches are built around hype, pre-orders, teaser trailers, not working software or compelling music or tested services.

It’s all about when something drops, not whether it’s ready. Design decisions are made for aesthetics, not usability. Deadlines are dictated by social media trends, not development cycles. And in many cases, products exist not to solve a problem, but to satisfy an internal roadmap or appease investors.

The end result? A flood of beautifully branded, half-functioning experiences.

Automation without accountability

Technology was supposed to make things better, and in many ways, it has. But automation has also removed the human bottleneck that once ensured a degree of control. AI-assisted development, low-code platforms, and content automation tools now allow for rapid creation. But what gets lost in the rush is craftsmanship.

Speed has become the metric of success. And automation encourages creators to produce more, not better. This is why we get five mediocre apps instead of one polished one, or a dozen clickbait news posts instead of one good article. Automation without reflection leads to mass-produced mediocrity.

Living in a broken-by-design world

The most alarming part is not the drop in quality, it’s how comfortable we’ve become with it.

We’ve stopped demanding better. We’ve accepted bugs as normal. We laugh at how useless a new feature is, then keep using the app. We mock broken games on Reddit, then buy the next installment. We sigh when a service crashes, and reload.

This isn’t a glitch, it’s a shift in cultural values. Quality now feels like a luxury instead of a baseline. But shouldn’t it be the opposite?

Can we slow down?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with speed. Efficiency, progress, accessibility, these are good things. But when speed becomes the only thing, we sacrifice the soul of what we create.

We need to rediscover the power of patience, and the pride of a job done right, not fast. We need to reward creators, developers, artists, and teams who take the time to finish what they start. And we need to resist the urge to demand everything now, especially when we know it means settling for less.

Because if everything’s rushed, everything breaks, and in the end, so do we.