Name: In Praise of Slowness
Rating: 4.2 (127 reviews)
Author: Carl Honoré

What’s in it for me? Escape the dictatorship of the stopwatch.

A revolution is taking place. It’s beginnings are rather tame. But maybe you’ve noticed that hip new slow food restaurant next to your favorite bookstore? That restaurant is just a tiny part of a growing international movement. Right now, more and more intelligent people are joining the Slow Movement, and saying an emphatic NO to the continuous hurry we’re constantly in. In these blinks, you’ll find out how the new movement is quietly transforming society – and what benefits a slower lifestyle may hold for you.

You’ll also learn

what’s so good about thinking more slowly;
why our leisure time has become such a serious matter; and
how the Slow Movement can improve your sex life.

First we chopped time into pieces and now time is chopping our lives into pieces – if we let it.

What’s the first thing you do upon waking up? Do you pet your cat? Or open the blinds to check the weather? Nope. You look at the clock to check the time.

People have always tracked time in some way or another. As far back as the Ice Age, hunters counted the days between lunar phases, carving notches into sticks and bones. Moreover, all great ancient civilizations, like the Egyptians and the Chinese, had their own calendars.

After our ancestors learned to measure the years, months and days, they began to chop time into smaller units, like the hours of the day. The first instrument to divide the day into equal parts was an Egyptian sundial from 1500 BC.

Later, in the course of the Industrial Revolution, we became slaves to our schedules.

For the greater part of human history, life and work moved slowly, limited by the speed of our bodies and the animals we used in industry and agriculture. But since the Industrial Revolution, machines have enabled us to exceed such speed limits.

Since then, we have had to adapt to the speed of our machines, and our lifestyle has become determined by schedules.

That’s why many are joining the international Slow Movement and fighting the tyranny of time pressure.

Many people feel that a way of life dictated by clocks and machines is bound to dehumanize us. One example of this sentiment can be found in Chaplin’s Modern Times, which depicts hectic assembly line workers who move and act just like automatons, and a protagonist who’s swallowed up by a machine.

People today are joining forces to promote a slower lifestyle. For instance, every October the Society of the Deceleration of Time hosts a conference in the city of Wagrain to explore ways of slowing down.

But what does it matter that life is faster than ever? Read on to find out.

Time pressure hastens our thoughts and can mar our relationship with food.

In our rush to keep up with the speed of modern life, we forget about the pleasure of enjoying existence one bite at a time.

Our accelerated lifestyle has even found its way to our dinner tables. But that doesn’t mean we can’t kick this unwanted guest out of our lives.

We’re too stressed to enjoy life, but a little slowness can go a long way in changing that.

There are some simple joys no one can take away from us. Or can they?

Faced with the overwhelming demands of the fast life, we begin to see everything as a challenge, even things that were once gratifying. The need to pay the bills pushes us to plan everything around our work schedule, causing us to essentially “forget” to have fun. And then, because we’ve had no time to relax, it’s even harder to sit down and pay the bills!

Kernaussagen in In Praise of Slowness