In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between.

In some philosophical traditions—Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three—time is cyclical.

Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quali

Nothing reflected, or reinforced, the new mindset more than the shift towards paying workers by the hour, instead of for what they produced. Once every minute cost money, business found itself locked in a never-ending race to accelerate output. More widgets per hour equalled more profit.

Of course, Slow Thinking on its own is just indulgence without the rigours of Fast Thinking. We have to be able to seize, analyze and evaluate the ideas that surface from the subconscious—and often we must do so quickly.

balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for.

Nadolny, Sten. The Discovery of Slowness. Revised edition. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2003.

Fast Thinking is rational, analytical, linear, logical.

Keibo Oiwa, the author of Slow Is Beautiful.