WARNING

Talking about a show with a friend last week, he said he had burned through the whole season in a day at triple speed. I asked him for details. He couldn't produce any — only that "it was pretty satisfying." I laughed at him, then looked down at my own watch history: more than half of it was on fast-forward too.

Speed-watching has gone from something you’d be embarrassed to admit to the default setting. On the subway, before a nap, everyone is fast-forwarding. Older relatives sigh that this generation can’t even finish a show anymore. The usual explanation is that patience has died, time has been fragmented, and short videos have trained us into this. I buy about half of that explanation.

Here is my own take on the other half: fast-forwarding is partly a power grab. A show’s pacing is nominally the director’s call, but in practice it is often decided by padding — flashback detours, slow motion, wheels spinning in dialogue. Out of forty episodes, maybe twenty carry any real content. When a viewer hits the speed button, they are editing the show themselves, squeezing out the water and keeping only the substance. Lu Xun wrote in “Talk Outside the Door” that “wasting other people’s time for no reason is no different from robbing and murdering” — a line that fits a padded drama perfectly. Seen this way, speeding through is not disrespect; it is the audience protesting the padding, clawing back a little of the editing power from the studio. The show is theirs; the time is mine. Anyone can do that arithmetic.

But I refuse to accept the remaining half: the time we save doesn’t turn into books or walks. It turns into the next show watched at double speed. We fast-forward not to free up time for anything real, but because we don’t dare sit still. Slowing down means boredom, and boredom is the only place where thoughts are free to wander. On closer thought, what we fear is not the length of the show but our own emptiness.

There is a more important layer, too: not everything survives fast-forward. In some works, the pacing is the content. Koreeda Hirokazu often lets the camera rest on a family eating dinner and refuses to move; the life itself lives in that pause. Music makes it even clearer — tempo is part of the work, and fast-forwarding through a piece leaves you the notes but steals the breath. Speed-watching is like eating compressed biscuits: enough calories, no flavor. It is like running through an art gallery — you “see” every painting and take in not a single one. A plot can be finished at double speed; a mood cannot.

My approach now is to tier everything. Disposable, over-padded shows: speed away, I don’t flinch at 1.5x. Genuinely good work: a steady 1x, as if keeping an appointment. The standard is just one question: is it worth handing my own sense of time over to this? Fast or slow is not a matter of attitude but of bookkeeping — ration the good stuff, burn through the bad.

In the end, fast food can be eaten standing up; a good meal deserves a chair. Of the endless things on our screens, few are worth watching slowly — and precisely because they are few, when you meet one, don’t fast-forward.

卜世 撰