Speed has long been synonymous with efficiency, productivity, and success. Bewitched by the promises of speed, we now collectively find ourselves caught in a constant dizzying rush. No matter how much we hurry up, we never seem fast enough to catch up with our endless responsibilities and expectations. The slow movement maintains that the answer to our predicament lies not in our ability to live faster, but in learning how to live slower.
Why Do We Live at a Fast Pace?
We live at a fast pace because we perceive time as a finite resource. We try to accomplish as much as possible in a day – fitting in as many tasks to check out our to-do lists and consuming more experiences than we can digest. Living under the grip of speed is constantly running from the shadow of death, trying to escape the constraints of a finite time. Paradoxically, there is never enough time to live when we are in a constant state of rush. A speed-driven mindset values quantity over quality.
The predominant attitude towards time has turned life into one massive scheduled checklist, disregarding quality as a secondary priority. Unsurprisingly, there is a widespread sense of dissatisfaction and unfulfillment, irrespective of the extent of one’s accomplishments or range of experiences. We don’t acquire a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment from the mere content of our lives but from how we live them – their quality.
That being said, time has always been finite. Why then do we experience more pressure today than our ancestors ever had in previous centuries? In his book, In Praise of Slow, Carl Honoré, a pioneer author of the Slow movement, argued that our relationship with time has drastically changed as time-keeping strategies developed. Before the invention of clocks, people followed what anthropologists called ‘natural time’: they slept when they felt sleepy, ate when they felt hungry, and worked at their own pace.
As Honoré noted, “People did things when it felt right, not when a wristwatch told them to”. Their lives were not dissected into rigid schedules, for scheduling is only possible with accurate and accessible time-keeping devices. Natural time is best exemplified by the Biblical verse: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV). In the age of clocks, however, “all time is the same” (Honoré, 2004).
When Did Our Relationship with Time Change?
Our relationship with time significantly changed with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. In the machine age, people, raw materials, products, and information traveled unprecedently faster. Businesses that delivered faster output could not only undermine their competitors but also reinvest their profit to generate more profit and accelerate their growth. Workers started getting paid per hour, rather than by output.
This change stirred great resistance, but was repressed by the propagation of an ideology that demonized slowness and tardiness. Workers who produced the least output per hour were laid off. A few years after alarm clocks were released in the market, workers had to punch the clock at the beginning and end of their shifts. The clock became the primary operating system of modern capitalism, turning time into a monetizable resource and driving the world into unprecedented degrees of acceleration to optimize efficiency. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new global mindset: time is money – a mindset that birthed what Honoré called the ‘the cult of speed’.
The cult of speed was not limited to the workspace, but permeated every aspect of modern life. As Honoré argued, once all-time became the same, “competition, greed and fear encouraged us to apply the time-is-money principle to every single moment of the day and night” (Honoré, 2004). The standards of productivity and efficiency permeated the very fabric of our day-to-day experience. Our relationship with time became dominated by an attitude whose only concern is how to derive the most quantitative, rather than qualitative, value from our life. The slow movement is a countercurrent to the cult of speed, attempting to address the very root of the problem: our relationship with time.
How Did the Slow Movement Start?
The slow movement started with the rise of the slow food initiative. In 1986, Italian activist Carlo Petrini organized a protest against a new fast-food restaurant that opened at the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Petrini then founded the Slow Food organization to resist large-scale industrial food production, protect traditional cuisine and local farmers, and promote a mindful approach to preparing and eating food. The Manifesto of Slow Food was signed in Paris by delegates from 15 other countries.
The principles of the slow food initiative were eventually incorporated into other areas of life. In 1999, Slow Food helped found Cittaslow – a membership-based organization dedicated to reducing the pace of life in urban settings. Their ideals of slowness quickly flourished into areas such as work, travel, fashion, and ultimately, living in general.
What Is Slow Living?
Slow living is a lifestyle informed by the philosophy of the slow movement. The core of slow philosophy is quality over quantity. It aims at liberating us from the constant rush that drives us without allowing us to savor a moment for repose. Instead of striving to fit as many things as possible in every waking minute of our lives, slow living promotes living every moment as mindfully as possible and giving everything the time that it needs.
Slow living started gaining popularity after the publication of Honoré’s In Praise of Slow in 2004. Today, more people are attracted to the tenets of the slow movement thanks to the influence of social media on propagating the many benefits of slow living.
