Just. Slow. Down.
Yourself, and then everything else.
Welcome to 2024! My next posts will discuss several technologies that play or should play an important role in our time. This one is about something even more important, namely the attitude with which we should take those technologies, and life in general before them.
In much of my writing, here and elsewhere, I try to connect dots, and many of the resulting lines point in one direction: one of the first things we all surely need in order to solve the real problems of our time is less speed.
More precisely, we do have slowness, but in the wrong places, phases or spheres of life. Positive social change is too slow, but destabilizing change is too fast. The same happens with personal growth and mental health where, thanks to huge pressures, harmful adultification of kids smoothly morphs in, coexists with and is mutually supported by, equally harmful childification of adults. It seems more evident every year that, as a species, we are really poorly adapted to civilizations like ours. But how and why does all this happen?
WHY you need slowness
You need slowness because technology as used today doesn't make our lives easier, just "faster, and more crammed with stuff", as well with the illusion that responsibility can be fully outsorced, together with everything boring, to apps, AI and so on. You need slowness because progress has become the steady accumulation of tools to avoid other human beings. Even fun has evolved into almost mandatory, FRENETIC, performative work for both adults and kids.
Social media are designed to make everything "FASTER, shorter, older and dumber, leaving individuals no time to FEEL deeply. Quick and easy "avoidance of the self" seems the very point of going online. How many of the people who successfully try social media abstinence and report a "reduction in positive emotions" during that period feel so because their offline lives turned out to be equally pointless, but even faster hamster wheels?
It is precisely because it collapses EVERY experience in real time, pushing everybody to treat their boss like their daughter and vice-versa, that instantaneous, always-on connectivity via social media or backward-by-design, obviously instant but RUDE messaging like WhatsApp, greatly speeds up identitarian mutual identification and makes any extreme position even more extreme.
At the social level, speed to solve in fair and human ways the huge societal problems that actually exist is obviously paramount. But speed for the sake of speed and of growth of any type, no matter how stupid it is, is just "unnatural and destructive". One important but almost ignored reason of why it is so is that, unlike price changes that just limit how much of something we consume, speed changes how we consume it, with effects that can be much more profound.
In spite of this, the current system can only run as fast as possible in one, and one direction only, using technology just to accelerate production and consumption, never to save time. Even that crucial technology that is software is too often used, or proposed, to merely accelerate and outsorce decision making about intrinsically wrong ways to do things, to artificial "intelligence" that just lacks the wisdom to get things right
If we are to believe a 2016 study, the percentage of psychopaths among corporate executives is TWENTY times higher than among the general population. But an even bigger problem, whatever that percentage is, is that too many of all those executives, not to mention "innovators" like Andreessen, negate that happiness, self-worth and so have different meanings for almost everybody else.
Deliberately or not, and I don't know which is worse, the majority of that whole "high-achieving" sub-species totally ignores that lots of men, women and everything in between benefit little or nothing from ultra-rapid but FAKE innovation and, regardless of technology, "don't have (or WANT) fast careers; they have jobs".
HOW to slow down
Prepping to become a slow-living hermit is possible only to relatively rich minorities, and in my opinion pretty short-sighted too. Truly committed but unaccelerated AND unlonely life is the only sustainable and really progressive way. But both personal action and social (not technological!) reform is necessary to get there quickly enough to make an actual difference in your lifetime.
I have NO complete solutions to share, just a few pointers to start looking from them in the right places and directions.
For yourself... First, acknowledge that your ultimate limitation is time, because you just cannot make it up, nor actually save it for future use, as you could with food or money. You can only use time well, or waste it.
Second, appreciate the difference between loneliness and solitude. The first is the painful state of not having enough good social connections or relationships: an invisible, but growing pandemic considered as deadly as smoking in the US and worth its own minister in the UK. Solitude, instead, is voluntarily taking some time (not too much!) alone for and with yourself. Regular moments of solitude can work miracles over time.
Consequently, please do WALK! Every day, obviously with your phone in airplane mode. As trivial as it may seem, this one, surely affordable trick can really help (besides the purely physical benefits) to push back and slow down the pressures around you, often with a better cost-benefits ratio than therapies or self-help courses.
My second practical suggestion is as obvious as it is powerful, maybe one of the few really revolutionary acts still possible these days: do remain online, but slowly: join the masses already "Not Posting on Social Media as Much Anymore". Even when traveling. We've got to point where if you travel, but without posting about it or pushing ahead those who do, even your destinations may thank you
Slow down everything else around you
Society-wise, we need to learn to do and demand (as quickly as possible, of course) what is really important, instead of what just is, or seems, urgent. Some of those things are in the next paragraphs, in no particular order. Please add yours in the comments.
Information: you do need to know about the world in order for your life to go well, but that is "impossible to do while running" from one neverending source of "news" to another. One of the things that made COVID19 more complicated was exactly the fact that media wanted to talk about it as quickly and continuously as possible. So, slow down your media consumption in general. Rather than "consuming all that's interesting", spend time (not much!) consuming news and commentary that really matter, slowly and directly from multiple solid but different sources. That is, boycott all news outlets that HIDE their RSS feed, replace scrolling their social media accounts with ONE RSS newsreader already, and only use that (and newsletters, of course!) to get your news.
Social media reform: Making the full space of public opinion instantaneously visible has undeniable recursive, toxic effects. Instantaneous or not, when it happens only inside one walled-garden after another "because innovation" it's even more stupid, and really wasteful too. Demand meaningful reforms that can work in the real world, instead, like "outlawing" instantness (even by Amazon) and making adversarial interoperability mandatory.
Parenting: First, slow down as much as possible the superstition that, for absolutely no valid reason ever, makes children's life harder, years before it's really needed . Next, also slow down your surely well-intentioned, but misdirected urges to "give the best to your kids", both with "education" and with the piles of frantic, prison-like "activities" that experts, not me, say "ruin childhood by taking away children's " right to roam" and making play TOO safe.
Economy and workplace: on this, we haven't learned anything valuable from COVID yet. Not at critical mass levels, for sure. If we could all work just like during COVID lockdowns, that is only do the work that is really important, we wouldn't have Great Resignations, Quiet Quittings, panic by empty offices, or COP conferences resulting in loopholes and selective blindness.
So, this year please start to systematically laugh at managers and CEO that who you to hurry for no real purpose, and tell them to get counseling instead. As I recently read, Jesus "never seemed in a hurry, never short of time". We need role models of slowness, much more than another release of (Fake) Tech or Management Archpriests in Hyperdrive.
Politics: lots of things are or seem to get worst every month, but almost nobody is really wrong on every conceivable issue, and "outrage is a finite resource" . So,
learn to get things done, one at a time, with people you only agree on that one thing, as I suggest in Part 2 of this post
if you belong to that half of the world population that will have crucial elections in 2024, DO vote! But prepare slowly to vote, and vote for slowness (some extra, partly exportable tips for USA voters are here)
Summing up... Just. Slow. Down. First yourself, then everything else. And ask everybody else to do the same.
Substack credits:
that is, Substack authors from whom I got some of the inspiration for this post:
Usual final note: to support my work even OUTSIDE Substack, please see here.
Could not agree more. Slowing down might be one of the most important skills we need at this time in history. Great essay!
Indeed, the pace of life is WAY too fast, and unnaturally so. Because speed for the sake of speed, because growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host.