The World Can Wait: A Case for Slowing Everything Down

 Instant messages, delivery riders, the entertainment machine, and our increasingly desperate need to be occupied.

There is something wrong with a world in which waiting five minutes for a reply feels like an inconvenience, waiting forty minutes for dinner feels like a customer service failure, and having absolutely nothing to do for an afternoon feels like a problem that needs solving.

We have become very good at making things happen quickly. We have become considerably less good at asking whether they need to happen quickly in the first place.

I think we need to slow down.

Not in the usual wellness-influencer sense of the phrase. I don't mean buying a scented candle, downloading a meditation app, or waking up at 4:30 in the morning to optimise the seven minutes between your cold shower and your gratitude journal. I mean actually slowing down. As a society. As consumers. As businesses. As people who seem to have developed an allergy to the idea that something might take as long as it takes.

And I have a few questions about how we got here.

The tyranny of the instant reply

Instant messaging is a wonderful invention. I can speak to someone on the other side of the world in seconds. I can send a photograph, organise a meeting, check in on a friend or find out whether my mother needs anything from the shops.

Brilliant.

But somewhere along the way, the ability to communicate instantly became an expectation that we should communicate instantly.

Send someone a message and, almost immediately, there is an unspoken countdown. Have they seen it? Why haven't they replied? They're online. They were online two minutes ago. They have posted something elsewhere. They have clearly been abducted by aliens, or they are deliberately ignoring me.

Or perhaps they are having a shower. Perhaps they are driving. Perhaps they are reading a book, having dinner, thinking about something, or simply enjoying five consecutive minutes in which nobody is asking them for anything.

We seem to have forgotten that a person can be reachable without being available.

The little blue ticks and online indicators have created an extraordinary new category of social anxiety. We can now monitor the apparent availability of other people and invent elaborate stories about what their silence means. We have technology capable of connecting billions of people, and we are using some of it to wonder why someone hasn't responded to a message about what they want for lunch.

I include myself in this. I'm not standing on a mountain dispensing wisdom to the rest of you. I am a participant in this increasingly ridiculous circus.

But I do wonder whether we've confused convenience with entitlement.

Just because I can contact you immediately doesn't mean you owe me an immediate response. Just because you can see my message doesn't mean you must stop whatever you are doing to acknowledge it.

A message is an invitation to communicate. It is not a summons.

And perhaps the next time we find ourselves getting irritated because somebody hasn't replied within a reasonable period of time, we should consider that the problem might not be their response time. It might be our expectation.

Imagine that. Being allowed to finish a cup of coffee before responding to a question about a meeting scheduled for next Thursday.

Civilisation might survive.

Your dinner is on its way. So is somebody else's problem.

Now let's bring this down to the streets of South Africa.

If you live in a South African city, you have probably seen them. Delivery riders weaving through traffic on scooters and motorcycles, carrying food, parcels and shopping. They are part of the modern urban landscape now, moving between cars, taxis, buses, pedestrians and potholes, trying to get an order from one place to another.

I don't blame the rider for wanting to earn a living. Quite the opposite. Anyone prepared to spend hours navigating South African traffic to deliver food to strangers deserves a fair amount of respect.

What I question is the system surrounding them.

We have created a business model in which convenience is a selling point, speed is a competitive advantage, and a delivery estimate can become a promise in the customer's mind. The app tells us when our food will arrive. We watch the little marker move across the map. We start calculating whether the rider is going to make it before our chips become cold.

Meanwhile, somebody is actually out there riding.

On real roads. Among real vehicles. In rain, heat, poor visibility and traffic that can be unpredictable at the best of times.

South African roads are dangerous enough without adding unnecessary pressure to the equation.

I cannot claim that every delivery platform imposes unsafe targets, or that every rider who filters through traffic is doing so because of a deadline. That would be unfair. But it seems entirely reasonable to ask whether delivery targets, performance incentives, customer ratings and competitive promises can create pressure to take risks.

If a rider believes that arriving late could cost them money, damage their rating or jeopardise future work, what choices do they feel they have?

And what exactly are we rewarding when we celebrate ever-faster delivery?

I would like to see delivery companies make safety an explicit part of the product, not just a paragraph in the terms and conditions. No incentives that reward dangerous speed. No customer promises that depend on riders taking unreasonable risks. No punishment for a delivery that takes longer because someone chose to ride safely.

I would also like customers to reconsider what they expect.

If my dinner arrives ten minutes later than estimated, I will probably survive. I might even discover that I am capable of making a sandwich.

The rider, however, is the person exposed to the immediate physical risk.

That difference matters.

We have become accustomed to evaluating services almost entirely from the perspective of the person paying for them. Was it fast? Was it convenient? Was it cheap? Did I get what I wanted?

But there is a person on the other side of every transaction. Sometimes there are many people. Their time, safety and dignity should count for something, too.

If the price of my convenience is an unreasonable level of risk for someone else, perhaps the convenience isn't quite the bargain I thought it was.

I don't want to abolish food delivery. I don't want to make life harder for people who rely on it, or for riders who depend on the income.

I just want us to stop treating speed as the ultimate measure of good service.

Sometimes the best service is the one that gets there safely.

Even if the chips are a little cold.

Formula One, fireworks and the entertainment treadmill

Here is where I might lose a few people.

I enjoy entertainment. I enjoy the spectacle of sport. I understand the appeal of Formula One, the atmosphere of a packed stadium, the excitement of a major event and the simple pleasure of sitting down to watch something extraordinary.

I'm not campaigning to replace every television with a vegetable patch.

But I do wonder whether we have reached a point at which the entertainment industry is expected to operate at full throttle, all the time, everywhere.

There is always another race. Another tournament. Another season. Another world championship. Another international event requiring athletes, teams, equipment, staff, sponsors and spectators to travel around the planet.

There is always something to watch, somewhere to go, something to buy, something to follow.

And if one event ends, another begins almost immediately. The sporting calendar fills up. The media cycle keeps turning. Sponsors need exposure. Broadcasters need content. Fans need something to look forward to.

The machine must be fed.

Formula One is an interesting example because it combines extraordinary engineering with an enormous global travelling operation. The cars are only one part of the picture. Freight, international travel, hospitality, event infrastructure and the movement of people and equipment all contribute to the wider environmental footprint.

The sport has been working to reduce its emissions, and that work deserves to be considered fairly. The point isn't that motorsport has no value, or that every sporting event is environmentally irresponsible.

The question is whether we have to keep doing everything at the same scale, at the same frequency, forever.

What if we didn't?

What if, for one year, we deliberately took a break from some of the most resource-intensive entertainment spectacles? What if we reduced certain international tours, reconsidered the scale of some events, and gave ourselves permission to let a few things go quiet?

I can already hear the objections. The jobs. The tourism. The economic impact. The fans who save for years to attend a race. The athletes who have dedicated their lives to their sport.

These are legitimate considerations. A sudden shutdown would have consequences for real people and businesses. Any serious proposal would have to account for them.

But I'm not proposing that we switch off the world overnight.

I'm asking why we find it so difficult even to imagine a deliberate pause.

Why must every successful thing be repeated, expanded, commercialised and optimised until there is no room left for anything else?

And why do we treat the absence of a spectacle as though it is automatically a loss?

What if the athletes tried something else?

This is the part I rather like.

Imagine a year in which we encouraged athletes to try something different.

The Formula One driver goes surfing. The rugby player learns to skateboard. The tennis champion tries mountain biking. The footballer takes up climbing. Someone who has spent a lifetime training for one discipline discovers another entirely.

And, for the record, I would absolutely watch a collection of professional athletes attempting winter sports they have no business attempting.

Give me a world-class sprinter trying to bobsled. Give me a professional surfer discovering that ice is a completely different proposition from water. Give me a group of elite athletes competing in unfamiliar disciplines, not because millions of dollars depend on the outcome, but because it is interesting to see what happens when highly capable people become beginners again.

There is something wonderfully human about that.

We could create smaller, more local events. Encourage participation rather than just consumption. Celebrate skill, curiosity, physical activity and the joy of learning something new.

We could even discover that people enjoy sport without every competition needing to be the biggest, fastest, most expensive version of itself.

Perhaps the point of sport is not simply to produce an endless sequence of commercial spectacles. Perhaps it is also to remind us what human beings can do when they practise something, commit to it and share it with others.

I'm not suggesting that professional athletes should be forced to abandon their careers for my philosophical experiment. Nor do I think every sport has the same environmental costs.

I am suggesting that a little variety, a little restraint and a little room to breathe might do us some good.

And if the world really cannot survive twelve months without quite so much entertainment, that might tell us something interesting about the world we have built.

The world needs a pause. Not another pandemic.

I have jokingly found myself thinking that the world needs a COVID 3.

Let me be clear. I do not want another pandemic. COVID brought illness, grief, isolation, financial hardship and loss to millions of people. There was nothing romantic about that, and the people who suffered should not be reduced to a metaphor for a lifestyle experiment.

What I mean is that the pandemic forced a pause in many people's lives, whether they wanted one or not. It disrupted routines, industries, travel and the assumption that tomorrow would look much like yesterday.

For all the terrible things it brought, it also exposed how much of modern life we had come to regard as non-negotiable.

We had to reconsider how we worked, how we travelled, how we spent time with family, what we bought and what we actually needed.

Some people discovered that they had been living at a pace they could barely sustain. Others experienced profound hardship, and many were desperate to return to ordinary life. Both things can be true.

The lesson should not be that we need another crisis to make us slow down.

The lesson should be that we ought to be capable of choosing to slow down before a crisis makes the decision for us.

So what would a voluntary global pause look like?

Not a lockdown. Not a prohibition on having fun. Not a government deciding which hobbies we are allowed to enjoy.

A conscious, collective decision to do a little less.

A year in which businesses reconsidered the pressure to make everything faster. A year in which we rewarded safe delivery rather than implausibly short delivery windows. A year in which some organisations reduced unnecessary travel and some sporting bodies experimented with smaller, more sustainable events.

A year in which we stopped treating every empty space in the calendar as a commercial opportunity.

A year in which answering a message tomorrow was sometimes perfectly acceptable.

A year in which we could be bored without immediately reaching for a screen to rescue us.

I realise this sounds idealistic. It is also inconvenient. There are businesses that profit from urgency, platforms that profit from our attention, and entire industries built around persuading us that the next thing is just around the corner.

Slowing down is not simply a matter of personal discipline. It also means questioning the incentives that keep pushing us in the opposite direction.

But we do have choices. We can choose not to demand impossible delivery times. We can choose to let people respond when they have time. We can support companies that take safety seriously. We can decide that some experiences are worth having without needing to have more of them, more often.

We can ask whether a little less might actually be enough.

The radical idea of doing nothing

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with having nothing planned.

You finish your work. The messages have been answered. There is nowhere you urgently need to be. No appointment. No delivery to track. No event to attend. No new series demanding your attention.

And then, almost instinctively, you look for something to do.

Check your phone. Open a news site. Watch a video. Read about something you were not interested in five minutes ago. Find a task. Make a plan. Fill the space.

God forbid we should simply sit there.

We have turned free time into another resource to be managed. Even rest has become an industry, complete with products, routines, subscriptions and performance metrics.

I don't think we need to become less ambitious. I don't think technology is the enemy. I don't think sport, entertainment or convenience are inherently bad.

I think we need to recover the ability to distinguish between something being possible and something being necessary.

We can communicate instantly, but we don't always need to.

We can deliver food quickly, but we shouldn't put people at risk to do it.

We can stage enormous global events, but we should occasionally question their scale and frequency.

We can fill every waking hour with content, but we don't have to.

There is a difference between making life easier and making life faster. There is a difference between progress and acceleration. And there is a difference between being entertained and being incapable of entertaining ourselves.

Perhaps we have spent so long celebrating what we can do that we have neglected the more difficult question of what we should do.

I would like to see a world in which a late reply is not a personal insult, a late delivery is not a crisis, and a year with fewer spectacles is not automatically considered a year wasted.

A world in which the person on the scooter gets home safely. The person holding the phone can put it down. The athlete can try something new. The rest of us can spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing and feel no obligation to explain ourselves.

I'm not asking for a simpler world because I think the past was perfect. It wasn't. We have made extraordinary advances, and many of them have genuinely improved our lives.

I'm asking whether we can enjoy those advances without allowing them to dictate the pace of our existence.

Because if every message is urgent, every meal is late, every moment must be filled and every year must contain another record-breaking spectacle, when exactly are we supposed to enjoy being alive?

Maybe the world doesn't need another pandemic.

Maybe it needs the courage to stop for a moment, look around, and realise that not everything has to happen right now.

And maybe, just maybe, the chips can wait.

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What do you think? Have we confused convenience with necessity, and speed with progress? Where would you draw the line between making life easier and making it needlessly frantic?

Kelsey Egan: The South African Filmmaker Building New Worlds on Screen

Kelsey Egan is a South African-American filmmaker, writer and director whose career has moved between independent cinema, international film and television, stunts, visual effects and production. From her early work on major productions to her own dystopian science-fiction films Glasshouse and The Fix, Egan has built a distinctly international filmmaking career from South Africa.

There is something fitting about a filmmaker whose career has crossed so many departments of the film industry eventually becoming known for building entire worlds of her own.

Kelsey Egan has worked as a director, screenwriter, producer, VFX producer, assistant director, stunt performer and actress. Her credits include productions such as District 9, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Crown, The Dark Tower, The Giver, Bloodshot, Warrior, Raised by Wolves and Eye in the Sky. That experience behind the camera, in front of it and inside the mechanics of production has helped shape a filmmaker with an unusually broad understanding of how films are actually made.

Today, Egan is represented as a writer and director by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Circle of Confusion, with her work spanning South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom. She is also represented in the UK following her successful 2024 application for the country's Global Talent route.

From Vassar to South Africa

Egan graduated from Vassar College in 2005 with General Honours and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Neuroscience & Behaviour and Drama. Her directing thesis received the Molly Thacher Kazan Memorial Prize for distinction in the theatre arts.

Rather than taking a conventional route into filmmaking, Egan began accumulating experience wherever she could find it. She worked on studio and independent productions in New York and Beijing before moving to South Africa in 2007.

After several years working on sets in Johannesburg, she established Crave Pictures in Cape Town, beginning a long relationship with South Africa's independent film and television industry.

That period proved important to the filmmaker she would become.

Instead of approaching directing as an isolated creative discipline, Egan developed an understanding of the many moving parts required to get a production onto the screen.

She worked as an assistant director, stunt performer, producer, VFX producer and actress, alongside her writing and directing work.

Her credits from this period include an extraordinary range of productions, from District 9 and Mad Max: Fury Road to The Crown, The Dark Tower, The Giver, Zulu, Bloodshot, Warrior and Raised by Wolves.

For an independent filmmaker, that experience is significant.

It means understanding not only the story, but the realities of making the story.

Gargoyle: The Beginning

Egan's first major directorial work was Gargoyle, a 26-minute narrative shot on Super 16mm.

The film was nominated for a 2010 South African Film & Television Award for Best Short Film and went on to screen at sixteen international film festivals, including the Rhode Island International Film Festival and Palm Springs International ShortFest.

It subsequently received worldwide distribution through Shorts International and IndieFlix.

For a filmmaker who would later make large-scale science-fiction features, Gargoyle offers an interesting glimpse at the beginning of the journey: an independently produced short film finding an audience beyond South Africa.

It also established an early pattern in Egan's career, making ambitious work within the realities of independent production.

Writing for Television

While developing her own projects, Egan also established herself as a screenwriter.

Her television credits include Gold Diggers, Exposure, Melody and Munki & Trunk, as well as the six-part adaptation of Deon Meyer's bestselling thriller Trackers. The series was commissioned by MultiChoice and German public broadcaster ZDF before being picked up by HBO's Cinemax.

Writing for television added another layer to Egan's filmmaking background.

Film directing often begins with a finished screenplay, while television requires an ability to think about characters, storylines and dramatic structure across multiple episodes.

For Egan, the combination of writing and directing would eventually become central to her feature filmmaking.

Glasshouse

In 2021, Egan made the transition to feature directing with Glasshouse, a dystopian science-fiction film written by Egan and Emma Lungiswa de Wet.

Set in a world devastated by a memory-destroying airborne toxin, Glasshouse follows a family living inside a sealed sanctuary. Their carefully maintained existence begins to unravel when an injured stranger is brought inside.

The film premiered at the 25th Fantasia International Film Festival and subsequently screened at Fantastic Fest in the United States.

The response to Glasshouse helped establish Egan internationally.

The Guardian awarded the film four stars, describing it as a striking debut, while the New York Times included it among a selection of science-fiction films to stream. Glasshouse also received multiple awards and nominations, including six South African Film & Television Award nominations in 2022 and five wins.

The film was subsequently acquired for international distribution, including by Signature Entertainment and SNR.

A Taste for Science Fiction

Glasshouse also revealed something important about Egan's creative interests.

Science fiction can be expensive.

It traditionally asks filmmakers to create unfamiliar worlds, technologies, creatures, environments and societies, often with budgets far beyond those available to independent filmmakers.

Egan's work approaches the genre from another direction.

Her worlds tend to begin with recognizable human questions.

What happens when memory disappears?

What happens when the air itself becomes dangerous?

What happens when survival changes the relationships between people?

And what happens when technology, medicine or environmental catastrophe changes the boundaries of what it means to be human?

The science-fiction framework becomes a way of examining those questions.

The Fix (Watch Trailer Here)

Egan followed Glasshouse with The Fix, a considerably more ambitious action-science-fiction project set in a dystopian future Cape Town.

The film imagines a world in which Earth's atmosphere has become toxic and clean air has effectively become a commodity. A pharmaceutical corporation sells a drug promising protection from the contaminated environment, while a young woman discovers that an unexpected reaction to the drug may have consequences far beyond her own survival.

Written and directed by Egan, The Fix combines dystopian science fiction with action, body transformation and environmental themes.

The production also represented a major technical undertaking.

Egan has described the film as containing more than 600 VFX shots, alongside large-scale stunt work. In an interview about the film, she discussed the tension between the practical effects she originally wanted and the realities of producing an ambitious independent science-fiction film.

That practical experience is particularly interesting given Egan's background.

She isn't approaching action filmmaking solely from the perspective of a writer or director. She has worked as a stunt performer and VFX producer, giving her firsthand experience of the technical departments required to execute complicated sequences.

The Fix therefore becomes a natural extension of the career she had been building for more than a decade.

The film premiered internationally in 2024, opened MIP Africa in Cape Town and was released through international distribution, including a North American release in November 2024.

Cape Town as a Science-Fiction City

One of the most interesting aspects of Egan's work is the way she uses South Africa itself as part of the filmmaking landscape.

The Fix is explicitly set in Cape Town, transforming a familiar city into the setting for a dystopian science-fiction future.

South African filmmakers working in genre cinema don't necessarily need to reproduce the visual language of Los Angeles, London or New York in order to create internationally accessible stories.

Cape Town already contains a remarkable combination of landscapes, architecture, infrastructure and cultural contrasts.

Egan's films demonstrate how those environments can become the foundation for speculative worlds.

Her career also demonstrates the international potential of a filmmaker who chooses to remain deeply connected to the South African production ecosystem while working across international markets.

A Filmmaker Across Departments

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Egan's career is its breadth. Her credits aren't confined to directing and writing.

She has worked as a stunt performer, assistant director, producer, VFX producer, actress and in other production roles. Her IMDb profile lists credits across directing, writing, acting, stunts, producing, visual effects and production departments.

Understanding the pressures faced by different departments changes the way a director communicates.

Understanding stunts changes the way action is conceived.

Understanding production changes the relationship between creative ambition and budget.

And understanding acting changes the relationship between director and performer.

Egan's career has effectively allowed her to experience filmmaking from multiple sides of the camera.

From South Africa to the World

Egan's professional reach has continued to expand beyond South Africa.

In 2024, she was endorsed by PACT and obtained UK Exceptional Talent/Global Talent status, adding another international base to a career already spanning South Africa, the United States and Europe.

She has also taken projects into international development and financing markets, including events such as the European Film Market and other major industry forums.

Her project Slay was among the projects presented through the JETS Initiative in 2024, where Egan was recognised among the initiative's award recipients.

Her current representation includes Creative Artists Agency and Circle of Confusion, while Crave Pictures remains her production company.

The Future of Kelsey Egan

There is a compelling continuity running through Egan's career.

From Gargoyle to Glasshouse and The Fix, the scale has changed, but the fascination with speculative worlds remains.

She has moved from a Super 16mm short film to internationally distributed features containing hundreds of visual-effects shots.

She has worked on some of the biggest productions filmed in South Africa while simultaneously building her own independent filmmaking career.

She has written television, directed music videos and shorts, worked in VFX and stunts, produced, acted and developed original feature projects.

That combination gives Egan an unusual position within South African cinema.

She understands the machinery of large productions while maintaining the instincts of an independent filmmaker.

And perhaps that is ultimately what makes her work interesting. She isn't simply interested in making films inside existing worlds

...she is interested in building new ones.