Slowing Down For The Good Life

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Within the busy nature of our fast-paced lives, it is hard to believe that life could be anything but frantic. Long commutes, constantly contactable every moment of the day, the pressures of love lives, social lives, work lives and more. The idea that we could even dream of slowing down, is laughable at best and depressing at worst. You know it is getting bad when you look at depression era family photos, and instead of seeing the poverty and bereft sadness in their eyes, you think about how nice it must have been to parent without the constant tug of messages on your iPhone. But what if there was a way to claw back some time, just to spend being grateful to be alive another day?

The slow living movement is a phenomenon beginning to replace the over-stimulation of the modern world and return us to a pace of life that is much more enjoyable.

Slow living, part of the wider slow movement that originated in the 1980’s in Italy by activist Carlo Petrini as a response to the menacing yellow arches that threatened regional food traditions, flies in the face of the millennial ‘work until you drop dead’ attitude, instead encouraging a meaningful, slow and conscious approach to life.

Instead of buying your morning latte at the McDonald’s drive-through with sleep crust still present in your eyes, one would make a coffee at home, savouring the ritual of the grinding beans, the sunlight streaking in through the window, highlighting the steam swirling above the cup. Then perhaps a quick but quiet shower follows, with essential oils like peppermint wafting through the hot vapours to awaken your senses to give you a minute of your own time before you toss yourself out once again into the raging sea of reality.

You might take just a a moment to look out your window, at whatever view you find, and search for anything you found beautiful. Choose a song to play in the car that makes you happy. Arrange flowers on the table just because they make it look pretty. Pack yourself a homemade lunch of food that is wholesome and full of flavour, rather than a sad salad and a bag of nuts because you feel you overindulged at Christmas.

Slow living is gaining traction on social media, with trends like “trad wives” espousing the values held closest at heart; that we take the time to find ritual, and joy in the simplicity of our everyday lives. It is no wonder that these women, who represent old-world values of homemaking and self-sufficiency, have found purchase amongst those of us addicted to our phones. They present a life that is slow, measured, pleasurable. One that we consume late at night, the sides of our faces smooshed into the pillow, too tired to do anything else.

Slow living doesn’t mean doing everything slowly; don’t go driving at 40km an hour down the highway or put off cleaning the dishes to doom scroll on your phone in the name of “relaxing”. It means making considered choices for what you consume, and what you create. In today’s world more than ever, it is becoming more and more important to make actual decisions about what you choose to read, watch, devour, instead of letting the algorithum choose for you.

The rise of AI generated content is being likened to the likes of ‘fast fashion’ where cheap, synthetic content is spewed out onto the internet to be eaten like rats in a garbage bin. Readers will have to begin making conscious choices, just like their fashion and their food, to consume slower media if they wish to preserve meaningful, thought-provoking moments.

Words written by human beings who have seen sunrises and experienced grief and lay lonely in the early morning at some point like the rest of us. To slow down is to choose. To choose to not run the race of buying more houses, of instagramming every waking moment, watching our phone while watching tv while a kindle lays dormant next to us.

To slow down is to choose savouring life, rather than running through it.