In Praise of Slow Read online

  Though some hold up Shuji as a cautionary tale, the work-till-you-drop culture still runs deep in Japan. In 2001, the government reported a record 143 victims of karoshi. Critics put Japan’s annual death toll from overwork in the thousands.

  Long before karoshi kicks in, though, a burned-out workforce is bad for the bottom line. The National Safety Council estimates that job stress causes a million Americans to miss work every day, costing the economy over $150 billion annually. In 2003, stress replaced backache as the leading cause of absenteeism in Britain.

  Overwork is a health hazard in other ways, too. It leaves less time and energy for exercise, and makes us more likely to drink too much alcohol or reach for convenience foods. It is no coincidence that the fastest nations are also often the fattest. Up to a third of Americans and a fifth of Britons are now clinically obese. Even Japan is piling on the pounds. In 2002, a national nutrition survey found that a third of Japanese men over thirty were overweight.

  To keep pace with the modern world, to get up to speed, many people are looking beyond coffee to more potent stimulants. Cocaine remains the booster of choice among white-collar professionals, but amphetamines, otherwise known as “speed,” are catching up fast. Use of the drug in the American workplace has jumped by 70% since 1998. Many employees favour crystal methamphetamine, which delivers a surge of euphoria and alertness that lasts for most of the workday. It also spares the user the embarrassing garrulousness that is often a side effect of snorting coke. The catch is that the more potent forms of speed are more addictive than heroin, and coming down from a hit can trigger depression, agitation and violent behaviour.

  One reason we need stimulants is that many of us are not sleeping enough. With so much to do, and so little time to do it, the average American now gets ninety minutes less shut-eye per night than she did a century ago. In southern Europe, spiritual home of la dolce vita, the afternoon siesta has gone the way of the traditional nine-to-five job: only 7% of Spaniards still have time for a post-prandial snooze. Not sleeping enough can damage the cardiovascular and immune systems, bring on diabetes and heart disease, and trigger indigestion, irritability and depression. Getting less than six hours of kip a night can impair motor coordination, speech, reflexes and judgment. Fatigue has played a part in some of the worst disasters of the modern era: Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide and the space shuttle Challenger.

  Drowsiness causes more car crashes than alcohol. In a recent Gallup poll, 11% of British drivers admitted to falling asleep at the wheel. A study by the US National Commission on Sleep Disorders blamed half of all traffic accidents on tiredness. Put that together with our penchant for speeding, and the result is carnage on the roads. Annual traffic fatalities now stand at 1.3 million worldwide, more than double the figure for 1990. Though better safety norms have cut the death toll in developed countries, the UN predicts that traffic will be the third leading cause of death in the world by 2020. Even now, more than forty thousand people die and 1.6 million are injured on European roads every year.

  Our impatience makes even leisure more dangerous. Every year, millions of people around the world suffer sports- and gym-related injuries. Many are caused by pushing the body too hard, too fast, too soon. Even yoga is not immune. A friend of mine recently strained her neck by attempting a yogic headstand before her body was ready for it. Others suffer worse mishaps. In Boston, Massachusetts, an impatient teacher broke a pupil’s pelvic bone by forcing her into the splits position. A man in his thirties now has a permanent numb patch in his right thigh after tearing a sensory nerve during a yoga session at a fashionable studio in Manhattan.

  Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial. When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people. As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella Slowness, “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” All the things that bind us together and make life worth living—community, family, friendship—thrive on the one thing we never have enough of: time. In a recent ICM poll, half of British adults said their hectic schedules had caused them to lose touch with friends.

  Consider the damage that living in the fast lane can inflict on family life. With everyone coming and going, Post-it stickers on the fridge door are now the main form of communication in many homes. According to figures released by the British government, the average working parent spends twice as long dealing with email as playing with her children. In Japan, parents now book their kids into twenty-four-hour child-minding centres. All over the industrial world, children come home from school to empty houses where there is no one to listen to their stories, problems, triumphs or fears. In a Newsweek poll of American adolescents carried out in 2000, 73% said parents spend too little time with their teenagers.

  Perhaps kids suffer most from the orgy of acceleration. They are growing up faster than ever before. Many children are now as busy as their parents, juggling diaries packed with everything from after-school tutoring to piano lessons and football practice. A recent cartoon said it all: two little girls are standing at the school bus stop, each clutching a personal planner. One says to the other, “Okay, I’ll move ballet back an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano … you shift your violin lesson to Thursday and skip soccer practice … that gives us from 3:15 to 3:45 on Wednesday the 16th to play.”

  Living like high-powered grown-ups leaves little time for the stuff that childhood is all about: messing around with friends, playing without adult supervision, daydreaming. It also takes a toll on health, since kids are even less able to cope with the sleep deprivation and stress that are the price of living hurried, hectic lives. Psychologists who specialize in treating adolescents for anxiety now find their waiting rooms packed with children as young as five suffering from upset stomachs, headaches, insomnia, depression and eating disorders. In many industrial countries, teenage suicides are on the rise. And no wonder, given the burden many face at school. In 2002, Louise Kitching, a seventeen-year-old in Lincolnshire, England, fled an examination hall in tears. The star pupil was just about to write her fifth exam of the day, having had only a ten-minute break between papers.

  If we carry on at this rate, the cult of speed can only get worse. When everyone takes the fast option, the advantage of going fast vanishes, forcing us to go faster still. Eventually, what we are left with is an arms race based on speed, and we all know where arms races end up: in the grim stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction.

  Much has already been destroyed. We have forgotten how to look forward to things, and how to enjoy the moment when they arrive. Restaurants report that hurried diners increasingly pay the bill and order a taxi while eating dessert. Many fans leave sporting events early, no matter how close the score is, simply to steal a march on the traffic. Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well. Like many people, I read the paper while watching TV—and find that I get less out of both.

  In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. Boredom—the word itself hardly existed 150 years ago—is a modern invention. Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic and look for something, anything, to do to make use of the time. When did you last see someone just gazing out the window on a train? Everyone is too busy reading the paper, playing video games, listening to iPods, working on the laptop, yammering into mobile phones.

  Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach for the nearest sound bite. In modern warfare, correspondents in the field and pundits in the studio spew out instant analyses of events as they occur. Often their insights turn out to be wrong. But that hardly matters nowadays: in the land of
speed, the man with the instant response is king. With satellite feeds and twenty-four-hour news channels, the electronic media is dominated by what one French sociologist dubbed “le fast thinker”—a person who can, without skipping a beat, summon up a glib answer to any question.

  In a way, we are all fast thinkers now. Our impatience is so implacable that, as actress-author Carrie Fisher quipped, even “instant gratification takes too long.” This partly explains the chronic frustration that bubbles just below the surface of modern life. Anyone or anything that steps in our way, that slows us down, that stops us from getting exactly what we want when we want it, becomes the enemy. So the smallest setback, the slightest delay, the merest whiff of slowness, can now provoke vein-popping fury in otherwise ordinary people.

  The anecdotal evidence is everywhere. In Los Angeles, a man starts a fight at a supermarket checkout because the customer ahead of him is taking too long to pack his groceries. A woman scratches the paintwork of a car that beats her to a parking spot in London. A company executive tears into a flight attendant when his plane is forced to spend an extra twenty minutes circling Heathrow airport before landing. “I want to land now!” he shouts, like a spoiled child. “Now, now, now!”

  A delivery van stops outside my neighbour’s house, forcing the traffic behind to wait while the driver unloads a small table. Within a minute, the forty-something businesswoman in the first car begins thrashing around in her seat, flailing her arms and snapping her head back and forth. A low, guttural wail escapes from her open window. It is like a scene from The Exorcist. I decide she must be having an epileptic fit, and run downstairs to help. But when I reach the sidewalk, it turns out she is simply annoyed at being held up. She leans out the window and screams at no one in particular, “If you don’t move that fucking van, I’ll fucking kill you.” The delivery man shrugs as if he has seen it all before, slides behind the wheel and drives off. I open my mouth to tell Screaming Woman to lighten up a little, but my words are drowned out by the sound of her tires skidding on the asphalt.

  This is where our obsession with going fast and saving time leads. To road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.

  After my bedtime-story epiphany at the airport in Rome, I return to London with a mission: to investigate the price of speed and the prospects for slowing down in a world obsessed with going faster and faster. We all moan about frenzied schedules, but is anybody actually doing anything about it? Yes, it turns out. While the rest of the world roars on, a large and growing minority is choosing not to do everything at full-throttle. In every human endeavour you can think of, from sex, work and exercise to food, medicine and urban design, these rebels are doing the unthinkable—they are making room for slowness. And the good news is that decelerating works. Despite Cassandra-like mutterings from the speed merchants, slower, it turns out, often means better—better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex.

  We have been here before. In the nineteenth century, people resisted the pressure to accelerate in ways familiar to us today. Unions pushed for more leisure time. Stressed-out urbanites sought refuge and restoration in the countryside. Painters and poets, writers and craftsmen looked for ways to preserve the aesthetics of slowness in the machine age. Today, though, the backlash against speed is moving into the mainstream with more urgency than ever before. Down at the grass roots, in kitchens, offices, concert halls, factories, gyms, bedrooms, neighbourhoods, art galleries, hospitals, leisure centres and schools near you, more and more people are refusing to accept the diktat that faster is always better. And in their many and diverse acts of deceleration lie the seeds of a global Slow movement.

  Now is the moment to define our terms. In this book, Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. As we shall see, performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results. It is also possible to do things quickly while maintaining a Slow frame of mind. A century after Rudyard Kipling wrote of keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs, people are learning how to keep their cool, how to remain Slow inside, even as they rush to meet a deadline at work or to get the children to school on time. One aim of this book is to show how they do it.

  Despite what some critics say, the Slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. On the contrary, the movement is made up of people like you and me, people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. That is why the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed.

  One leading proponent of deceleration is Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of Slow Food, the international movement dedicated to the very civilized notion that what we eat should be cultivated, cooked and consumed at a relaxed pace. Though the dinner table is its chief battlefront, Slow Food is much more than an excuse for long lunches. The group’s manifesto is a call to arms against the cult of speed in all its forms: “Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food.”

  On a baking summer afternoon in Bra, the small Piedmontese city that is home to the headquarters of Slow Food, I meet Petrini for a chat. His recipe for life has a reassuringly modern twang. “If you are always slow, then you are stupid—and that is not at all what we are aiming for,” he tells me. “Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”

  That very simple philosophy is gaining ground in many arenas. In the workplace, millions are pushing for—and winning—a better balance between work and life. In the bedroom, people are discovering the joy of slow sex, through Tantra and other forms of erotic deceleration. The notion that slower is better underlies the boom in exercise regimes—from yoga to Tai Chi—and alternative medicines—from herbalism to homeopathy—that take a gentle, holistic approach to the body. Cities everywhere are revamping the urban landscape to encourage people to drive less and walk more. Many children are moving out of the fast lane, too, as parents lighten their schedules.

  Inevitably, the Slow movement overlaps with the anti-globalization crusade. Proponents of both believe that turbo-capitalism offers a one-way ticket to burnout, for the planet and the people living on it. They claim we can live better if we consume, manufacture and work at a more reasonable pace. In common with moderate anti-globalizers, however, Slow activists are not out to destroy the capitalist system. Rather, they seek to give it a human face. Petrini himself talks of “virtuous globalization.” But the Slow movement goes much deeper and wider than mere economic reform. By taking aim at the false god of speed, it strikes at the heart of what it is to be human in the era of the silicon chip. The Slow creed can pay dividends when applied in a piecemeal fashion. But to get full benefit from the Slow movement, we need to go further and rethink our approach to everything. A genuinely Slow world implies nothing less than a lifestyle revolution.

  The Slow movement is still taking shape. It has no central
headquarters or website, no single leader, no political party to carry its message. Many people decide to slow down without ever feeling part of a cultural trend, let alone a global crusade. What matters, though, is that a growing minority is choosing slowness over speed. Every act of deceleration gives another push to the Slow movement.

  Like the anti-globalization crowd, Slow activists are forging links, building momentum and honing their philosophy through international conferences, the Internet and the media. Pro-Slow groups are springing up all over the place. Some, such as Slow Food, focus mainly on one sphere of life. Others make a broader case for the Slow philosophy. Among these are Japan’s Sloth Club, the US-based Long Now Foundation and Europe’s Society for the Deceleration of Time. Much of the Slow movement’s growth will come from cross-pollination. Slow Food has already given rise to spinoff groups. Under the Slow Cities banner, more than sixty towns in Italy and beyond are striving to turn themselves into oases of calm. Bra is also the home of Slow Sex, a group dedicated to banishing haste from the bedroom. In the United States, the Petrini doctrine has inspired a leading educator to launch a movement for “Slow Schooling.”

  My aim in this book is to introduce the Slow movement to a wider audience, to explain what it stands for, how it is evolving, what obstacles it faces and why it has something to offer us all. My motives, however, are not entirely selfless. I am a speedaholic, and so this book is also a personal journey. By the end of it, I want to recapture some of the serenity I felt waiting for that bus in Rome. I want to be able to read to my son without watching the clock.