My Life on Fast-Forward

I am particular about the numbers on a media player. Video often runs at 3×; audio usually somewhere between 2.1× and 2.25×. Given the choice, I would rather adjust the speed in steps of 0.05 than choose between a few large jumps. Sometimes 2.15× is the setting that feels right.

I listen in the library, over meals, on walks, while collecting a delivery or doing simple chores. Dedao, Bilibili, podcasts and recorded courses supply much of the material. Unless I am speaking with someone or deliberately leaving my mind alone, I usually find something to put in the gap.

My life on fast-forward involves more than accelerating a voice. I also choose summaries over full-length material, take a course in one concentrated stretch, and look for a shorter route to whatever I want to understand. Some of these choices have made my life substantially richer. Others have made it harder to leave any part of the day unaccounted for.

1. How I moved beyond 2×

Reading gave me control

I liked self-study well before high-speed playback became a habit. In high school, I prepared for physics competitions mainly through books. On the journey home, I sometimes listened to audio or English listening material at around 1.5×. During my first year at university, I still relied heavily on reading; I had already studied some of the foundational mathematics, and preferred setting my own pace.

When my course load was lighter, I spent much of the spare time reading ebooks on WeRead. The audio platform I knew best was Ximalaya, where I tried listening to entire books. For my purposes, this often worked less well than reading them.

With a book open, I can skim a familiar passage, return to an earlier argument, stop at a difficult sentence, look something up, or decide that another book would be a better use of my time. While listening on the move, I mostly follow one sentence after another. Audio players have pause and rewind buttons, but using them repeatedly is more cumbersome when my eyes and hands are occupied. A long argument can lose its thread; an easy passage can take far longer than it needs to.

What I wanted was control over where to spend time. Reading had already given me some of that control.

Better material changed the calculation

Later, sustained reading began to feel tiring, and I found other ways of listening: Dedao, Fan Deng's book talks, more focused lectures and recorded courses. A short, conversational explanation could introduce an unfamiliar subject without asking me to follow an entire book from beginning to end. Once I found material that suited this kind of listening, speeds above 2× became much more attractive.

Around the start of my second year, coursework also became heavier and less familiar. Recordings let me study at a time and place I chose. In a quiet library, with headphones and the screen close in front of me, I often felt more comfortable and less distracted than in a classroom. I could pause without falling behind the lecturer, or move quickly through something I already knew.

The button was not new. The combination of content, circumstances and freedom was.

University supplied the gaps

At school, phone use was restricted, classes organized much of the day, and I talked with classmates more often during meals. University gave me more time to arrange for myself. A meal alone or a walk between buildings could become another listening session.

Nobody had to persuade me. I had noticed the speed setting, tried it, and kept using it. But the freedom to organize my day came with a growing expectation that I should use that freedom well. An interval that could hold a lecture began to feel like an interval that ought to hold one.

2. What happens at 2.15×

A pace I can think at

Too slow, and I get bored. Too fast, and I can still hear the words without keeping up with the thought. The useful range lies between the two. At the right speed, I can remain alert and follow an argument without feeling chased by it.

This is a description of my experience, not a scientifically established optimum. The number changes with the speaker, the density of the material and what I already know. Familiar humanities lectures and conversational interviews often tolerate a higher speed for me. A difficult philosophical argument does not become easy because it belongs to the humanities. A circuit diagram may require several minutes even if its spoken explanation lasts thirty seconds.

When something clicks, I want enough time to enjoy and develop the connection. An insight needs to arrive before I can have an aha moment. Accelerating past the part I do not understand defeats the point.

The ten seconds I will replay

I do not rewind every missed detail. Locating a sentence can take longer than hearing it, and for a minor point in a casual podcast I may decide to keep going.

Laughter changes that calculation. Sometimes a class erupts just after the lecturer says something I have missed. I will go back ten or fifteen seconds, then listen at normal speed—or even 0.75×—until I hear the line. I want to catch the joke, the surprising remark, the interaction that made the room respond.

I am not trying to finish every recording as quickly as possible. I am continually deciding which seconds deserve more of my attention. The weakness in this method is that I have to recognize their value before deciding whether to stop.

The second pass is real work

Environmental economics gave me a useful warning. I listened quickly and felt that I understood. A few days later, some of the slides no longer made sense to me. When I returned to the material before the exam, I had to work through it again.

The second pass felt easier than starting from nothing. I recognized the structure and remembered having encountered the ideas. But familiarity had not been mastery. Nor could I tell from that experience alone whether the gaps came from speed, the difficulty of the material, or insufficient practice.

For courses I need to learn properly, I use problems, slides, written explanations, questions to AI and my own derivations. Sometimes I stop listening altogether and read. I have skipped derivations because following them passively felt demanding, only to discover later that working through them was the part that helped most.

In research, the calculation can disappear. A circuit question or an economic argument catches my attention, and I stay with it without counting how many pages or problems I have completed. I want to understand this one. There is no playback setting for that work.

3. Two kinds of compression

Ten hours, thirty minutes, ten minutes

A book talk accelerates access before I touch the speed control. A narrator selects an argument, rearranges the material and gives the strongest examples more prominence. I then accelerate that already edited account.

Suppose a complete audiobook would take ten hours. A thirty-minute explanation reduces the material; playing that explanation at 3× reduces its duration to ten minutes. These are two different operations. The first leaves things out. The second makes what remains arrive faster. Together they reduce listening time enormously, but they do not deliver ten hours of understanding in ten minutes.

This is the broader sense in which I live on fast-forward. I often want a well-chosen introduction before deciding what deserves a longer commitment. On some days, I have listened to around ten book explanations and picked one or two books to pursue. Others have left only a few ideas, or little I can recall. Even then, a brief encounter can tell me that a subject exists and that I might care about it.

Why the concentrated version can be powerful

One account began with a sick young soldier who insisted on fighting at Lepanto. Only later did it give his name: Miguel de Cervantes. Knowing the author of Don Quixote and then encountering him as a person taking a risk for his convictions made idealism feel less like a literary label. Cervantes's participation despite illness is recorded in biographical material; the interpretation that moved me was my own.

Another account connected Henry Stimson's visit to Kyoto in 1926 with his later opposition to its use as an atomic-bomb target. The narrative brought a vast historical decision down to the scale of a remembered city. I was moved by the possibility that an ordinary visit could matter years later. The historical record does establish the visit and his intervention, but not the neat claim that a holiday alone saved Kyoto.

The stories were not memorable because I played them quickly. They were memorable because of what they revealed and how they were told. Speed let me encounter more such explanations; the narrator's selection brought their strongest moments within reach. That distinction matters. I value the concentration without needing to claim that acceleration improves memory.

An interview with Volodymyr Zelensky left a different kind of impression. I no longer remember every sentence, but I remember the emotional force I felt as he spoke about war, his country and its people. Being affected by a speaker does not require endorsing all his positions. Sometimes what survives a recording is less a proposition than a sense of the person speaking.

A book is not a collection of climaxes

After hearing a condensed account of The Crimean War , I read the book and found much more waiting, attrition and diplomacy than the concentrated version had prepared me for. The memorable scenes were there, but so were the long stretches between them.

A run of compelling summaries can make books seem as though they should consist entirely of revelations. Then the original feels slow. I had to notice what was happening: I was comparing an extended account with someone else's selection of its most gripping moments.

It resembles the difference between an ordinary day and the photographs chosen to represent it. Selection can make something easier to enter. It can also change my expectations of what the unedited experience should feel like. If I learn to tolerate only the highlights, I will find a great deal of worthwhile reading—and ordinary life—unreasonably slow.

4. Following an interest until it runs out

The course I did not want to put down

Sun Naishu's Western Art Appreciation was a course I had wanted to hear for a long time. Once I began, one painting led to another, one question opened the next. I listened from morning into the evening. The following morning, I wanted to continue before doing anything else.

The sequence had the pull of a story: each installment left something unresolved. I was not forcing myself through a checklist. I wanted to stay inside the subject while it had that hold on me.

This is one of the real benefits of concentrated listening. When a subject captures my attention, I may want to cover a fifteen-hour course over a day or two rather than stretch it across weeks. On some mornings, completing three or four long class sessions feels intensely satisfying. The benefit is not merely time saved; it is being able to follow a live interest without waiting for the timetable to catch up.

The interest does not last forever. After the art course, I wanted to learn much more about painting and art history. I pursued some of it, then the initial intensity faded. That does not make the interest false. It does mean I should not mistake one enthusiastic afternoon for a permanent commitment to an entire field.

The Rome I did not want to leave

Chen Wenjie's History of Western Ancient Architectural Art gave me a different experience, especially the lecture introducing Rome.

What moved me was the scale of the historical imagination. I could picture myself above the city, looking at buildings that held traces of different ages. The lecture connected architecture with the beginnings of a civilization, its cultural memory and the lives that had accumulated around it. I wanted the pictures to remain on the screen while I followed those connections.

Here, I wanted the opposite of acceleration. I wanted to stay with a sentence, look again at an image, and allow the imagined city to become more vivid. There was no separate achievement waiting at the end of the listening. Being there in thought was already what I had come for.

The painting below belongs beside that memory: Jacques-Louis David's The Intervention of the Sabine Women , painted in 1799. I chose it as an image I want to spend time looking at, not as a record of what appeared in the lecture.

Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799.

A film, a play or a concert can make me feel the same way. A pause, a look or a musical phrase is not simply delaying the next piece of information. It is the part I am there to experience. When a moment has that quality, I may replay it rather than move on.

5. Where the saved time goes

Cheaper listening, greater demand

When I finish a three-hour recording in an hour, I seldom leave the other two hours empty. I open another course. The ability to cover more material makes more material worth considering.

This reminds me of the mechanism behind Jevons's discussion of fuel efficiency: reducing the resources required for a use can expand demand enough to offset the saving. My listening is an analogy, not a measurement of the same phenomenon. But the pattern feels familiar: time per lecture falls while my total time spent listening rises.

I make much of this trade deliberately. I like learning, and discovering an unfamiliar field is a real gain. Spending more time on something because it has become more rewarding is not automatically a failure of self-control.

The harder question is what gets displaced. A further lecture has an obvious title and duration. A walk, an unplanned conversation or an hour of quiet does not arrive with a similarly legible return. When I compare them, the lecture can win before I have given the other option a fair hearing.

What my progress meter measures

For exploratory listening, I often use the quantity of material and its original duration as rough measures of progress. If I get through several long sessions in a morning and feel able to follow them, the morning feels substantial.

I know these are proxies. A test or a difficult assignment can tell me something about a formal course. A podcast has no such exam. I may want only an introduction, a useful question or an idea that will connect with something else later. Testing every incidental point would defeat that purpose.

Still, the proxy has a pull of its own. An increase in completed material is visible; a change in judgment is not. I can become satisfied with a number even when I have not asked what changed in my understanding. Feeling efficient and being effective overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

My collection of possible selves

When I began exploring Bilibili courses, my saved list grew quickly. The same happened with the WeRead bookshelf. Saving a course is pleasant: I can already imagine the knowledge I will have after finishing it.

Actually learning it may involve a long, awkward stretch of not understanding. I am more willing to start material that offers immediate rewards than material whose value comes after sustained difficulty. Sometimes I want the result of studying more than I want to study that particular subject.

AI and better tools enlarge the list further. If a task has become easier, why not add it? My ideas for what I could do begin to outpace what I actually do. During my competition years, another student's faster progress could make me anxious; now I can supply the comparison myself. Nobody needs to be sitting beside me. I imagine that somebody else is using the same hour better.

I want breadth in my general education and depth in my work. I would like to know enough across fields to make unexpected connections, and to stay with a technical question until I understand what supports the answer. These are both serious ambitions. They do not become the same task because both can be described as learning.

Tools have an entry fee

I once spent a long time trying to add subtitles to a university course recording. Speech alone seemed to impose a limit; perhaps text would help me follow at a higher speed. I did not get the setup working as intended. I suspected a platform restriction, but never established the cause.

I do not regard every failed attempt as wasted time. Some tools I have found this way remain useful. An experiment can pay off over many later uses. But that is an uncertain investment, and its setup cost belongs in the calculation. A faster player does not make the hours spent configuring it disappear.

6. When efficiency becomes a rule for other people

Fast speech is not always concise speech

People have told me since school that I speak too quickly. That predates my heavy use of playback speed; I cannot honestly blame the habit on an app. But the desire to fit more into less time is familiar in both places.

I used to think of rapid, clear expression as a courtesy. Then I would finish explaining something and hear: “What did you just say?” If the listener needs the whole explanation again, neither of us has saved time.

My family has asked me to slow down. I try, feel uncomfortable with the slower pace, and gradually speed up again. The difficulty is not knowing what would help. It is remembering to do it while I am eager to get the thought out.

The sentence I already know

On a voice call, my mother sometimes begins a sentence whose next few lines I feel I can predict. I become impatient. I interrupt, ask her to move on, or say that I already know.

Afterwards, I often wish I had been gentler. My parents spent years raising me. I live in Beijing now and return home only once or twice a term. Yet I can treat a few familiar reminders as if they were an inefficient delivery of information.

The regret is not proof that I have changed. I can recognize all this, call again, and still become impatient. Sometimes I tell my mother later that I should not have interrupted, or suggest that we talk a little more. I want the recognition to show up in the conversation, not only in my account of it afterwards.

Once I asked AI what moment people might most want to live again. I expected a milestone: a first kiss, the birth of a child, a major success. The answer that stayed with me was an ordinary afternoon with family. That was an AI response, not a survey result. It moved me because I could imagine the scene—and how easily I might hurry through it while it was still available.

A conversation is not a résumé

I do not enjoy conversations that feel like someone reading out a résumé. I want the things only this person can bring: an experience I have not had, a view I could not have predicted, the way different parts of a life have produced an unusual judgment.

In conversations I care about, I put my phone away and pay attention to the person. Expressions, pauses, gestures and tone matter. Once we get into a genuinely deep exchange, I do not want to disturb its rhythm. Surprise is part of the pleasure: for a while, I cannot write the other person's next sentence for them.

But I cannot reliably know in advance where a conversation will go. A casual remark that seems unimportant at the time may later return as a useful suggestion. I do not have a neat, dramatic example to offer; it is a recurring impression that makes me wary of pricing every minute separately.

The same reservation applies when I want AI to summarize a meeting's preliminaries. Extracting decisions may be enough for one purpose. Meeting people, learning how they think or letting a conversation develop may require being there. I can dislike empty formalities without assuming that everything outside the summary was empty.

7. Sixteen-times Dream of the Red Chamber

An efficient answer to an exam question

At school, I heard Dream of the Red Chamber discussed partly as examination material: did you know the characters and the relevant events? I remember a teacher suggesting the television adaptation as one route for students who struggled to get through the novel. I also remember hearing about students accelerating it drastically—even to 16×.

I understand the attraction. I too am inclined to consider an adaptation when the immediate task is to become familiar with a plot. The next optimization is easy to see: if the exam rewards recognizing what happened, why spend more time than necessary watching it happen?

This is an efficient response to a narrow objective. It does not follow that it is an adequate way to experience the work. The pause before a reply, an actor's expression, the atmosphere of a scene and the gradual change in how a character feels may contribute little to a plot question while constituting much of what makes the scene worth watching.

The target matters before the speed does. A person trying to answer an exam question and a person trying to inhabit a novel can use the same recording and rationally want different things from it.

What would 5× leave out?

If 5× preserved my understanding perfectly, I would be tempted to use it for some material. I am not attached to a number for its own sake.

But I would need to ask what “understanding” meant in that promise. Could I identify the argument afterwards? Could I reproduce a derivation? Would I have time to notice why a sentence moved me? A claim that preserved one of these would not automatically preserve the others.

That is why my experience of Rome matters to me. I was not failing to finish a lecture efficiently. I was doing something whose value included spending time with it. Once I admit that, I no longer have to describe every chosen delay as a sacrifice of productivity.

8. Leaving room for a thought of my own

The walk without an input

Sometimes my phone runs out of power or I leave it behind. The walk I would normally fill with audio becomes quiet. I notice the trees on campus, the people passing, the different ways they seem occupied with their own lives. A question I have been carrying may return in a less forced form.

Travel makes the change easier. Away from my ordinary routines, I am less intent on filling every gap. At home in Shanghai I can relax too, though the pace of a city can pull me back toward urgency. My speed is not entirely contained in the player; it is also in the situations I move through.

I do not need a major insight to justify these walks. But I do notice that constant input gives my own thoughts fewer uninterrupted chances to develop.

Letting the Mind Wander

I later learned that this kind of inward, wandering thought is often discussed in connection with the default mode network (DMN). The term is used for brain activity associated with things like remembering, imagining what might happen, and letting thoughts move between ideas when we are not focused on a particular task.

It gave me a useful way to think about those quiet walks: my mind is not necessarily idle just because I am not feeding it new information. It may be sorting through memories and feelings, allowing connections to form in their own time. For me, a walk or a few quiet minutes is a way to leave room for that process.

Ten minutes with nothing to prove

I want to reserve a little time—perhaps ten minutes a day, or an unhurried walk—without audio, reading or another task. Sometimes I would think; sometimes I would notice my surroundings; sometimes I would simply be tired. I do not mean a requirement to make my mind perfectly blank.

Even this proposal reveals the habit I am trying to loosen. My first justification is that a pause might produce better ideas. That may be true. But if I demand a useful idea from every pause, I have merely given rest another performance target.

I still want to work hard, learn broadly and make difficult things possible. I do not intend to give up high-speed playback. I want to retain the judgment to use it without asking every other part of life to justify itself by the same measure.

There are lectures I want to finish sooner. There are voices I want to keep hearing. I am trying to become better at telling the difference while there is still time to listen.