On Pace
What this year taught me about speed
Pace is a word that comes up often in rehearsal rooms, critics’ reviews, and casual conversations about the show we just saw or the thing we just watched.
On the surface, we’re talking about speed—how quickly the story moved. But underneath, it’s really about attention. The push and pull between actors and audience. Were we bored? Checking the time? Waiting for something to happen? Or were we dropped in—alert, surprised, not sure what might come next?
Pace is strange because it often contradicts itself. The experience we’re chasing is momentum—that downhill feeling. Forward flow. But the process that gets us there almost always looks like the opposite. Slow. Methodical. Confusing. Sometimes even a little treacherous.
I’ve been thinking about pace a lot while writing The Fourth Wall. In the micro—where a piece tightens, where it breathes, when it lingers. And in the macro—what it means to return to something week after week without rushing to prove it’s working or decide where it’s headed.
And as this week marks one year (!!!) of writing and sending these dispatches, I find myself less interested in taking stock than in getting curious. Curious about what happens when we don’t push past the slow parts. Curious about what pace actually makes possible—in our work, in our thinking, and in the way meaning sneaks up on us when we give it time.
Here we goooooo 🙌🏼
Pace ≠ Speed
We tend to talk about pace as if it’s interchangeable with speed. Faster scenes. Shorter runtimes. Tighter edits. But speed is just a measurement. Pace is an experience—shaped by how the brain processes time, information, and attention.
Human attention isn’t continuous. It moves in pulses. We orient, engage, drift, re-engage. When something has “good” pacing, it works with those rhythms instead of against them. It gives the mind enough structure to stay present, and enough space to make sense of what it’s taking in. When pace is off, attention doesn’t wander so much as it slips its grip.
That’s why something can move quickly and still feel like it’s dragging. Rapid inputs without room for integration overwhelm the nervous system. Over time, that creates a low-grade sense of effort—a feeling that you’re being asked to keep up rather than come along.
This is often what people are pointing to when they say the pacing felt slow or uneven. The issue isn’t duration. It’s whether attention had time to land. Whether the experience made room for absorption, contrast, and pause. We need those conditions for a deeper understanding to form.
Pacing and momentum are byproducts of alignment—when an experience moves at the speed attention can actually travel.
The problem is that very little in our current cultural machinery is built to honor that speed.
How Speed Spun Out
Ironically, speed didn’t arrive so speedily. It crept in quietly, cloaked in efficiency.
Because I saw Ragtime last week, I’m thinking about Ford’s assembly line. The moment when the world realized it could make things faster, cheaper, and at scale—and how quickly that logic turned into a value system.Faster wasn’t just useful. It became good.
That mindset never really went away. It just…changed costumes.
The internet cranked it up a notch—or ten. TikTok is literally branded as a “short-form” video platform. Contemporary audiences say they prefer a one-act banger to a four-act epic. Clips instead of scenes. Moments instead of arcs. Slowness isn’t just unfashionable—it can feel almost rude, like it’s asking too much of us.
Speed also has a way of smoothing things over. It lets us skip the middle. The stretch where something hasn’t fully formed. Where you’re not sure how you feel. Where the work might ask you to sit in a little discomfort or ambiguity before it clicks. Moving quickly gives us a sense of progress, even when nothing has had time to land.
And because speed is so easy to track—views, minutes, frequency, turnaround—it becomes the thing our systems reward. Pace, on the other hand, is harder to see in real time. Its effects show up later. That delay makes it harder to protect, even when it’s the thing we actually want.
So we adapt. We skim. We scroll. We move on quickly. We train ourselves to expect things to hook us immediately or we bail. Over time, that expectation starts to shape not just what gets made, but how we experience it.
Which is probably why this past year, this newsletter, has felt like a wild and often uncomfortable practice in choosing to trust pace over speed.
A Practice of Pace
When I started The Fourth Wall, I mostly just knew I wanted a place to think out loud. A space to name what I was noticing without rushing to conclusions or packaging half-formed ideas into something neat and clickable.
But writing every week has a way of revealing your habits. Where you want to skip ahead. Where you want to smooth things over. Where it’s tempting to publish something just to feel the relief of being done with it.
There were weeks when it would have been easier to chase whatever was trending. To collapse a complicated thought into a cleaner takeaway. To move faster and call it clarity. Choosing not to do that—choosing to stay with the messier middle—was often uncomfortable. Sometimes it felt indulgent. Sometimes inefficient. Sometimes like I was falling behind or missing the boat.
And yet, over time, something opened up. The pace began to change the work itself. There was more room for nuance. For contradiction.
What began as an observatory for theater marketing trends slowly transformed into a laboratory to examine cultural moments, personal experiences, and industry shifts. It became more about the questions than the answers.
Which is probably why, a year in, I feel more energized than ever about what comes next.
More on that below.
Putting Pace in Its Place
Pace isn’t a virtue. It’s not something to optimize or get right once and for all. It’s just a relationship—between attention and time, between effort and absorption, between what’s being offered and what’s actually being received.
Too fast, and things blur. Too slow, and they stall. What we’re usually looking for isn’t one or the other, but alignment. The feeling that something is moving at the speed it wants to move.
That alignment looks different depending on the moment. On the work. On the season you’re in. What felt sustainable once might feel rushed now. What used to feel indulgent might start to feel necessary. Pace shifts because we do.
The trick isn’t to choose slowness forever or to reject speed outright. It’s simply to pay attention to pace—and whether it’s helping or hurting our ability to be (and feel) here, right now.
What Comes Next
One thing I’ve learned this year is that pace doesn’t sustain itself automatically. It needs boundaries. Structure. Care.
Writing weekly has been a practice in choosing slowness in a world that rewards speed. Depth where we could take shortcuts. Attention where distraction is easier. And like any practice, it’s something I want to protect as this grows and evolves.
That’s part of why I’m introducing a paid tier of The Fourth Wall.
Not to make this louder or more frequent, but to make space for work that asks a little more time on both sides. Longer pieces. Looser thinking. Conversations with artists and thinkers. Deeper dives into ideas that don’t fit neatly into a weekly dispatch.
It’s also a way to keep this project independent. Unrushed. Unoptimized. Free from needing to chase clicks, trends, or scale for the sake of scale.
Nothing about the main newsletter is going away. This isn’t a gate or a pressure point. It’s an invitation for anyone who wants to step a little further into the room and help sustain the pace that made this space meaningful in the first place.
If that sounds like you, I’d love to have you there.
One last thing…
I have to be honest: this piece took me longer than usual. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because every time I tried to say it, something felt off. Like I was skipping a step. Or smoothing over something that was, in reality, still unfinished.
This could’ve been a neat one-year retrospective. A greatest-hits moment. That was tempting. I felt the pull to wrap it up cleanly and move on.
But what kept interrupting me were bigger, messier questions. About pace, yes—but also about ownership. About what it means to let something grow up a little. About what changes when a project stops being “just for fun” and starts asking to be taken a little more seriously.
It’s stirred up old stuff around worth, permission, and whether putting structure around something makes it stronger—or risks changing it entirely.
There’s excitement and pride in that. But there’s also the familiar flutter: Is this the right time? Am I ready? Will it change this thing I love?
What I do know is that this newsletter has become a place where I practice not rushing past those feelings. Where I let myself sit in the questions long enough for something new to take shape.
So this piece—and this moment—aren’t a big declaration. They’re more like a check-in. I’m still learning how to hold this. I’m still paying attention. And I’m choosing, again, to trust the pace that got me here.
Thank you for being part of that process. Truly.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt
PS: If One last thing is your favorite part of these emails, the paid subscription includes monthly Work Notes—a slower space for longer reflections, conversations with artists and thinkers, and ideas I’m still working through. Totally optional. Just an open door.