Stop! Stop the rushing, racing, elbowing to compete in a hyper-wired world whose mantra is to move fast, whatever the direction.
That is the message the “slow movement” has been gently spreading for more than two decades.
“In this roadrunner world, it can sometimes feel like there is no option but to follow the hurrying herd, but there is,” said Carl Honore, whose 2004 book on the movement, In Praise of Slowness, became an international bestseller.
It all started in Italy, with a protest against the opening of a McDonalds’ restaurant led by Carlo Petrini, who went on to launch a movement devoted to “good, clean and fair” food.
Since then Slow Food — as it became known — has spread to 130 countries and spawned countless sister trends around the world, from slow cities to slow money, slow design, slow travel and even slow sex.
There is also slow parenting — the simple art of taking time for one’s children — and slow wear, which promotes sustainable clothes, all carrying a common message into every corner of our lives, winning millions of followers around the world.
“The slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace,” Honore said in an interview. “It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow and sometimes completely still.”
When the slow guru gave a talk about the philosophy last year, a priest in the audience came up to him afterward and confessed he had just had a revelation: “Lately I have been praying too fast.”
After two decades spent watching the movement grow, Honore now believes it is only a matter of time before it hits the mainstream: “We are at a historical turning point,” he said.
Even high-tech firms — after decades spent driving the acceleration of the global economy — are now recognizing its ill-effects, leading Google, IBM and others to launch a research group into information overload.
Studies by Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, quoted by the movement, indicate modern-day office work with its constant interruptions — by e-mails, phones, text messages — can temporarily slice 10 points off a person’s IQ.
An IBM manager recently launched what he called “slow e-mail” to encourage staffers to use the medium better.
In another sign of the times, British Prime Minister David Cameron has banned cellphones — whether smart or not — from his Cabinet meetings to keep ministers focused on the task at hand.
London-based research estimated that about 20 million people in Europe were ready to give back a chunk of their wages, in exchange for a slice of extra time to relax and spend with their families.
“Speed helped the world tip into modernity two centuries ago, but now it may be driving it into the abyss,” the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa wrote in a recent book.
Slow advocates see the global economic crisis — caused in their view by an obsession with fast growth, fast consumption and fast profits — as the latest validation of their worldview.
“In India, despite the rise of unbridled capitalism, there is a real debate about the dangers of speed. People are not happy about losing their family ties, neglecting their elders,” Honore said.
Even in speed-driven Japan, where there is a word — karoshi — for death through overwork, the Sloth Club was created a few years ago to lift people out of the go-fast culture.
Each year in Austria, the meeting of the Society for the Deceleration of Time gathers scientists, artists, lawyers and experts determined to push the slow agenda.
Five years ago, the concept “Slow” turned up next to nothing when punched into an Internet search engine. Now, Honore said, it produces millions of results as the philosophy spreads around the world.
“People are changing the way they consume,” said Jean Lheritier, the French head of the Slow Food movement. “They’ve had enough of spending their lives stuck in traffic jams, pushing carts down supermarket aisles, but the transformation will take several decades.”
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers