In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

The clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible—meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts.

Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness.

In the war against the cult of speed, the front line is inside our heads. Acceleration will remain our default setting until attitudes change. But changing what we think is just the beginning. If the Slow movement is really to take root, we have to go deeper. We have to change the way we think.

Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly and creative.

Technology, meanwhile, has allowed work to seep into every corner of life.

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.

What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”

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

In the Western tradition, time is linear, an arrow flying remorselessly from A to B. It is a finite, and therefore precious, resource.