Slow Living Beyond the Aesthetic
When I first encountered the term Slow Living, I thought it was a joke. All I could find was an attractive Instagram Cottagecore aesthetic, with girls in pretty dresses strolling through the lilacs. But past the aesthetic of Slow Living, the actual principles remain. Slow Living, is at its heart a rejection of the fast-moving, hyper-capitalist world. It is a rejection of productivity culture and nonstop scheduling.
As Carl Honore wrote in his book In Praise of Slow, “The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry.” Our society is obsessed with multitasking and hustling. We are attempting to cram as much information and work into our days, regardless of the effect on ourselves. Even when we aren’t working, we are scrolling through social media or watching Netflix.
As a result of our non-stop distraction, we are continually “checking out” and numbing ourselves. People know instinctively that our obsession with speed and distraction is unhealthy. As Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky wrote in her book, The Age of Overwhelm, “Many of us, for very sound reasons, may lose our ability to tolerate being in our own company for a time, and we need to check out.” This is the problem. The solution isn’t as simple.
The reality is that Slow Living isn’t a panacea for all ills and systemic change is more important than personal growth. We can’t self-improve ourselves out of social ills. But Slow Living can help us develop the skills to survive in a world that tears us down. When we slow down and notice our lives, we have the strength to fight for what we believe in.
Developing healthy skills to take care of ourselves frees us to spend more time in our community. As we stop spending hours consuming information we never use and do things that lead us to endlessly worry, we have the strength to do something in the world. Slowing down prevents us from stuffing our time with meaningless activities, just to claim that we are being productive, even when it’s just busywork.
I have noticed more and more people talking about the importance of pausing and noticing. It seems as if the last year has forced us to pause and notice. Life has slowed, except where it has become frantically busy. Living on the edge of an apocalypse does that to you. Normality seems far away, even when it is near. And after all, what is normality? Is it good? Bad?
As comfortable elites post articles about not wanting normalcy and wishing that we didn’t have to return to the office, essential workers like myself bitterly laugh. (I worked through LA’s huge Covid surge until I lost my job.) For essential workers, normalcy means no longer feeling like you need to write out a will before going to work. Nevertheless, it has forced us to reexamine what is important in our lives.
For me, my life suddenly slowed as I took on the role of caretaker to my grandma with dementia. Every day I attempt to take a walk outside, noticing how the natural world looks. I try to cut back on my social media and screen time, though this is a work in progress. I try to pay attention to life as it happens.
For me, going slow forces me to learn to develop the resiliency to deal with life’s challenges and more importantly, to enjoy life as it is. We can’t change a lot about the trajectory of our lives, but in the end, I think most of us would prefer to have enjoyed the time we had on earth, instead of constantly needing it to be different. Letting go of the need to control our lives frees us to accept it.
Slow living doesn’t mean I walk around slowly or don’t have ambition. I don’t live in a rural cottage or wear flowered dresses all the time. I don’t gallop through the lilacs and I kill pretty much any plant I try to grow. I’ve lived a life of constant busyness and was left sick and depressed. The only thing left to do is learn to appreciate the small moments. A hot cup of coffee or tea. Weeds growing through the cracks on the city street. Freshly baked bread.
