Lapis Magazine

In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore

Our world is obsessed with speed in almost every domain of human existence.

But what for? Where is it leading us?

Thankfully, a growing chorus demanding slowness and sanity is rising in the midst of our overstressed and overworked society.

Adapted from a talk given at the New York Open Center.

Carl Honore is a Canadian journalist based in London. He has written for The Economist, The Houston Chronicle, The Miami Herald and The National Post (Canada). He received a speeding ticket while researching this subject.

A century ago, a man by the name of John Gerdner coined the term NewYork-itis to describe a condition whose symptoms included: edginess, impulsiveness, impatience, aggressiveness and quick, fast movements. The tragedy is, hundred years later, NewYork-itis has moved to become a world-wide epidemic.

There’s never enough time, we’re always looking at the clock, in a hurry, and yet even though we can sense this is an unfulfilling and unsatisfying way to live, our answer always seems to be: more speed! Faster is always better, so instead of walking we speed-walk, instead of reading we speed-read, instead of dialing we speed-dial and instead of dating we speed-date, and what this means effectively is that we have become stuck in fast-forward.

There is some significant evidence of the drawbacks from our cult of speed: Americans now work more hours than the Japanese and Europeans; hurried parents now read one-minute bedtime stories to their children; on average Americans have much less vacation than most people, and they fail to use up to a fifth of it each year; one in five goes to work when they should be in bed or visiting a doctor; and children as young as five are suffering from stress-related illnesses.

We get pumped up into such a state of constant acceleration in this culture of speed that we almost fail to take note of the toll it takes on us—on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships—and we almost don’t have time to ask big questions about what our government is doing, what we are doing in our own lives, and how and where we are going and why, and so on…

But for many people, there comes a moment, a wake-up call, when they do realize, when they become aware in a moment often of painful clarity that their lives have become pointless and damaging, an unsatisfying race. And sometimes, that takes the form of an illness.

For me, the moment of truth came when I began reading bedtime stories to my young son. Children do not take kindly to being hurried. They have their own internal clock. They don’t like being subject to adult schedules, pushed along. But that didn’t really mean a whole lot to me at the time. So there I was working my way through, whizzing my way through The Cat In The Hat, skipping a line here, a paragraph there, sometimes a whole page. I was aware that bedtime stories weren’t as fun as I’d read they would be, but that didn’t bother me because I was in my kind of speed tunnel.

But what brought it home to me was when I was in an airport in Rome, rushing around, dashing to get a flight. I was on my cell phone, talking to an editor thousands of miles away, and I found myself at the back of a line up at the check-out counter. I reached for a paper and I came across an article about how to save time for busy professionals, and one of the items was the one-minute bedtime story. And my first reaction was Eureka!, this is what I’ve been looking for. I found another way to accelerate, to make faster, the bedtime ritual. And then my next thought was Whoah, hang on! Did I really say that, did I really think that?

And that was when I had my moment of clarity. That was when a lightbulb went on over my head and I began to ask questions, to step back and look at the pace of my life. So I tucked away the newspaper and got on the plane and for the first time in living memory I didn’t get out my laptop, I didn’t read a magazine, I just sat there and I thought about my life, about how fast it was going. And when I got off the plane back in London, I decided that the time had come to slow down.

But first, how did we get so fast?

Start with urbanization: cities attract fast people, and then they make them faster, acting like giant particle accelerators. A second reason is consumerism: the desire to have more and pack more and more into every moment. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer from the 1830’s who wrote the famous Democracy in America, said of the shopping instinct, “He who has set his heart exclusively on the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp and to enjoy it.”

The rise of consumerism is also related to technology. Since the beginning of the industrial era, we have developed machines that help us do things more quickly. But quickly, the tables get turned, because machines make us faster, and as a result we get into an kind of arms race with speed. We’ve got ourselves worked up into a state now where each new advance in technology makes things more fast.

But if you look at the deeper question, and you cut through things like urbanization, consumerism and technology, you come to what might be the kind of the nub of the problem, which is our relationship with time. Eastern cultures—Chinese, Buddhist, Hindu—think of time as circular, cyclical, so things are always coming and going, whereas in the West we have this very functional, rigid notion that time is linear, flying remorselessly from points A to B. There is no sense of renewal and rebirth, and time is always draining away.

The idea that time is linear in the modern era is perhaps best crystallized in the famous aphorism by Benjamin Franklin “Time is money”. And how do we look to make the most value for our time? By speeding up, by trying to do more and more with less and less time.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, there are an increasing number of people actively working to slow things down, people who are part of what is coming to be called the slowness movement.

The slowness movement is a catch-all term that more and more people who are decelerating in different walks of life are using to describe what they are doing. In fact, slower is often better. The European union has imposed a 48-hour maximum workweek though Europeans were already working 350 hours less a year than Americans. And they’re finding that productivity is up, and workers are happier.

But even within the long-hour-working culture in the United States, there are companies who are waking up to the idea that less is more when it comes to work. For example, SAS, based in North Carolina, offers much longer vacations than most American companies and a 35-hour workweek when the work load permits. This is intriguing because they are routinely voted one of the best companies to work for and at the same time they are one of the most profitable. Other companies have massage for workers, time when they can go away from their desks, meditation rooms, and so on.

At Oracle in Tokyo they built a meditation room and the staff were free to go in anytime they wanted. And they did—ten, fifteen minutes at a time and just meditate. And one of them said to me, “I tried it once…and then I tried it again and now I go everyday and it’s counter-intuitive but actually slower is faster.” Now he is getting his work done faster, and it’s taking him less time to do what he did before even though he’s actually taking those fifteen minutes out in the morning and maybe ten in the afternoon to go and be slow. Many of the most vigorous figures in history from Napoleon, to Kennedy, to Rockefeller, to Brahms, to Churchill were committed ‘nappers’ and NASA recently discovered that a 20-minute nap did wonders for pilots’ alertness and productivity.

In the workplace you see the same results: higher productivity, better morale, and people are happier, because they feel less rushed.

The same thing happens in medicine. Healthcare workers are now clawing back slowness to connect with patients rather than just treating them like a bag of symptoms. Medical colleges now in the US and elsewhere are putting an emphasis on taking the time to listen to patients, and they are finding that this actually allows people to heal faster, and better. There is also the influence of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which emphasize gentleness, slowness, and reconnecting body mind and spirit.

Another victim of our speed culture is food: so many of our meals are pit-stops, so much of our food is processed, spewed out by an industrial food-chain that it doesn’t even taste like food anymore. ‘Slow-food,’ which started in Italy in the late 1980’s, is based on the very sensible principle that what we eat we should take time over. It should be cooked, cultivated and consumed at a reasonable pace. ‘Slow-food’ has 80,000 members around the world in fifty countries, 8,000 of who are in the United States.

Another example is sex. We’re just saturated with sexual imagery, which emphasizes sex without connection, without intimacy, making it just about reaching the finish line, so to speak. A recent survey found that forty percent of women fall within the realm of sexual dissatisfaction or dysfunction, and I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that sex has been taken over by a kind of fast ethos. The rise in popularity of tantric sex, the kama sutra, erotic workshops, and so on can be seen as a counter to this finish-line approach to sexuality.

We also hand the culture of speed down to our children, but this doesn’t have to be the case. I remember an interesting story on a very swanky private school for kids (age 7 to 11) in Scotland where the principal abolished homework, which triggered a virtual mutiny among the parents. An assembly was hastily called and people stood up and waved their fists, saying, ‘What on earth are you doing? Our kids are going to fall behind.” He silenced them with one line, “In the last school where I was principal, which was another high achieving fee-paying school, I abolished homework and kids’ marks went up an average 20 percent within a year.” This underlines how productive and fulfilling slowing down can be. Children need unstructured time to develop their creative faculties, to learn how to interact with other children, to relax—in short, to be children.

So, despite the name, the ‘slow movement’ can be summed up really in one word—balance. It’s about striking that middle point between fast and slow: going fast when it makes sense to be fast; going slow when it makes sense to be slow; and choosing the right speed, the right time for things. And what people find is that when they have room for slowness—that they’ve got a balance between fast and slow—they begin to develop a kind of ‘inner slowness,’ which allows them to do things quickly but without that fast feeling inside of anxiety, of hecticness.

There has always been a counter-current for slowness. If you go back in time you’ve got the Romantic movement, which started in Europe and was in part a reaction against the hustle and bustle of the modern world. In the US, there were the transcendentalists. There were also unions lobbying for shorter workweeks, and then further into the twentieth century, there was in the 1960’s the counter-culture, which was so much about challenging the pace of life and considering the notion of slowing down.

So here we arrive at the early twenty-first century when speed, and the cult of speed, have reached fever pitch. But it seems to me on the other side of the fence that the yearning for slowness has reached a critical mass. And that’s where we find ourselves now with the slow movement—more powerful, more pervasive, more broadly based, more promising I think than anything that has come forth before.

I’d like to finish by talking about my own experience. I’m still in the media; I still live in London; on the surface, much of my life is very similar to what it was before. But below the surface, there’s been a profound change. I’ve shrugged off that constant itch to accelerate. I’ve got a lot more inner slowness now than I ever thought I would have. And the colors of my life are more vivid. I enjoy things more. I’m a lot happier.

I meditate more and I also watch less TV. The average American watches four hours of TV a day. And yet when you talk to most people, they say, ‘I’ve got no time, I don’t know where it goes.’ I think there might be a connection between the two phenomena. I don’t want to demonize TV—there’s a lot to be said for good television—but it seems that it can be a kind of ‘black-hole’ of time and energy. It’s so easy to come at the end of the day and sit down on the sofa. Maybe you’ve got one program you genuinely do want to watch, but there you are three-and-a-half hours later, exhausted, unfulfilled, and maybe even a little sullied. But again, it’s about balance, about moderation. I think four hours is probably too much for most people.

I’ll conclude with a Hollywood ending:

I recently flew out of London where I live and my son came down the stairs to say goodbye. He had stapled together a couple of pieces of paper and put on one of his special stickers to make me a card. He stuck it on the front of the book we’ve been reading and he wrote for Daddy.

“Benjamin,” I said, “what is this for?”

“It’s for being the best story reader in the world.”

And I thought, “Yeah, this works.”