A city built around speed makes pausing look like a malfunction.

Where everything is arranged around movement, standing still reads as a problem. Someone stopping to look at something, an older person going slowly, a person sitting on the pavement, all register as obstructions rather than as ordinary human behaviour. The environment has made pausing look like a fault.

Give yourself permission to stop anyway, and give it to the people slowing you down. And notice how much of your irritation in a given day is really the built environment’s impatience operating through you rather than anything you actually feel about the person in front of you.