The speed of light has nothing to do with light itself. It is the speed of causality. It is the rate at which one event can lead to another. In other words, it is the universal clock ticking.
Light, because it has no mass, travels at this speed because it experiences no forces opposing it. A particle with mass requires more and more energy to accelerate as it speeds up, and in order to reach the speed of light, it would require infinite energy. As this is not possible, massive particles can never reach that speed.
But time, space, and causality are all functions of the universe, and are not concepts outside of it. Or, to put it more simply, the universe created these concepts. Outside of the universe, these things do not exist. This is the reason there is one thing faster than the speed of light.
The only thing faster than the speed of light was the expansion of the universe in the moments after the Big Bang. The universe went from a quantum scale to something on the scale of the current universe in a fraction of a second, which is faster than light. But within that universe, all causality happens at C (which is the constant referencing the speed of light/causality).
The idea that this is “incredibly slow” as you stated isn’t really accurate.
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