QUICK: SLOW DOWN. TRY TO DISENGAGE FROM THE WORLD and do absolutely nothing, just for a second.
Difficult, isn’t it? Our faith that faster equals better has buried our speedometer and made us relate to time like a lab rat relates to cocaine. Surrounded by a blitzkrieg of cell phones, microprocessor upon microprocessor, four hours of TV a day, always-on internet, eight-lane highways, 50-hour work weeks, drive-thru culture and “just-in-time” economies, it’s little wonder we crave time more than anything else. We think we never have any.
There’s a trick involved. While we have 24 hours a day, a cultural needle injects us with anxiety about time. The side-effect is evident whenever we fretfully wait for someone stalling in line at the grocery store, or as we simmer rage in a traffic jam, or when we buy yet another product promising convenience (read: more time).
So, what’s in that needle? Is it consumerism, advertising, capitalism, technology? Perhaps “progress”? Try all of the above. We call it a lifestyle but it’s really a go-fast cocktail, and you’re likely buzzing on it right now. But beware: our fast ways also warm our planet, destroy ecosystems, and fuel mass attention deficits, anxiety, hyperactivity, stress and a desire for meaningless consumerist escapism.
Aldous Huxley wrote that speed was modernity’s only gift. The trouble is, today, we’ve got too much of a good thing. Enter the Slow movement, a needed salve for a culture with road rash. One of Slow’s messengers, Carl Honoré, argues in his new book In Praise of Slow, that the future will be a slower time. “Speed in of itself isn’t evil or bad,” he says. “What’s bad is our addiction to speed, hurry and hecticness. Time is the greatest gift we have. The trouble is we think, ‘how can we get the most value?’ and the answer is, invariably, to go faster.”
We rational number crunchers have forgotten the timeless, spiritual and universal sides of life which soothe our hearts and clear our minds. We have become, as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit write in Occidentalism, “. . . efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless at doing what is humanly important.”
Take that screaming vortex of speed and insanity in our world called capitalism. Today, we exist “to serve the economy, not the other way around,” says Honoré. Life, as your grandpa would say, wasn’t like this in the old days. But the ‘just go faster!’ circle of speed’s logic has made capitalism accelerate, and the side effects are clear. We’re headed toward human and planetary crash, so “time-poor” and “time-sick” that we neglect our friends, families and partners. “We barely know how to enjoy things any more because we are always looking ahead to the next thing,” says Honoré.
Our Fast way of life is controlling, aggressive, stressed and impatiently obsessed with quantity over quality, he writes. Slow life is the opposite, “about making real and meaningful connections – with people, culture, work, food, everything.”
Slow life is slowly spreading: in Japan, Namakemono Club or the Sloth Club members emulate the slow life of a sloth “to find a way to live in harmony with the Earth.” In the United States, the Long Now Foundation seeks to promote slower, better thinking to foster creativity “in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” And Europe’s Society for the Deceleration of Time sets ‘speed traps’ for fast walkers in cities.
But Italy is Slow’s philosophical homestead. The country has produced both Slow Food and Citta Slow, or Slow cities. As well as pure pleasure from good food, “eco-gastronomy” is Slow Food’s mantra: the belief that eating slowly prepared food sourced from local farmers puts less pressure on our world than industrial farming, high mileage produce and fast food restaurants. Citta Slow is the next step, an entire city living by pleasure before profit, slowness before speed. Honoré says there are more than 30 towns participating, and that the number is growing.
Thanks to our information-rich world hitting warp speed, Honoré believes today is the dawn of Slow’s era. We simply can’t go much faster. “I think we’ve either reached the breaking point, or we’re very close to it. We’re starting to see it in the breakdown of our health and our relationships.
We keep coming back to this feeling that somehow, something’s missing.”
Honoré says the word itself is becoming shorthand for a “better, more balanced way of living” around the world, regardless of language. There are people who swear by Slow sex, Slow thinking, Slow film, Slow exercise and Slow travel almost everywhere.
But if Slow is better, why then do we find it so hard to embrace a slower pace of life? Consider Milan Kundera’s observations in his 1995 novella, Slowness. “Our period is obsessed with the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered, that it is tired of itself, sick of itself . . .”
We are wearing an existential noose, unable or unwilling to break from the cult of speed, yet about to choke from its nastiness. Confronting speed means confronting our spiritual vacuousness. While Honoré argues we can step away from speed, perhaps his gaze is fixed on the long term. In the short term, contradictions within our lifestyle may need to be reconciled before we can re-pace our lives. Consider today: six-year-old kids with cell phones schedule after-school activities, play turbocharged video games for hour upon hour, stressed about which Ivy League school they’ll go to.
The whole generation is living beyond warp speed.
Soon they’ll hit 20 and feel like they’re 50 and see their planet struggling to keep up. Hopefully, they will completely reject speed and build balance into life. It will be a complete mindshift, but one Honoré is confident will happen. “I think that 40 or 50 years from now we’ll look back and wonder why we ever thought it was so hard to slow down.”
_Timothy Querengesser
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