We turn our lives into an endless rush instead of actually living it. We live fast instead of good.
Slow Life is a lifestyle that involves a responsible attitude to everyday life. His supporters are calling for an end to the rush and start truly living each day. For example, learn to pay attention to family members, get rid of Internet addiction and regain the ability to think, and not just make spontaneous decisions. Introducing 5 concepts of slow life and finding out why it could save Western civilization.
Carl Honore: slow down, log out and shut down
Canadian journalist and writer Carl Honore published In Praise of Slowness in 2004, which quickly became a bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages. “We turn our lives into an endless rush instead of actually living it,” says Honore. - We live quickly instead of living well. Sometimes a wake-up call is needed for us to understand this. For many, such a "call" is illness, exhaustion of physical and mental strength, when our body says: "I can't do this anymore." Or relationships break down because we lack the time, patience or calmness to spend time with other people and listen to them."
According to Carl Honore, the reason for the general desire to live faster lies in the way the West perceives time. “In other cultures, time is often presented in the form of a slowly revolving wheel that renews itself on its own,” says the writer. - And in our culture, time is linear, it always runs out. It is a resource that you can either use or lose."
In order to combat the worldwide acceleration, Honoré proposes to exclude unnecessary elements from the daily routine: for example, abandon one of the sports (in Karl's case, it was tennis), reduce the time spent watching TV, turn off the phone and computer whenever possible., learn to choose what is important and say "no" so as not to overflow your own schedule both in the field of work and in the field of personal meetings.
“We are all connected, and if a person decides to change his lifestyle, making it slower, you need to consider how this will affect the people around him. You need to warn friends and coworkers by explaining why you're going to be doing less, turning off your electronic devices more often, and asking for more time to complete work assignments. At first I was afraid that Slow Life would alienate people from me, and some of them were really skeptical of my decision at first. But very soon those around me began to understand why I can no longer answer them at any time and do not agree to all proposals in a row. I soon discovered that when people saw how I began to live, they began to make the same changes in their daily routine."
Slow Food: Responsible Nutrition
The Slow Food movement, which later developed into a non-profit social organization, began in 1989 and gave birth to all of modern slow-life. Today Slow Food has offices in different countries, a foundation for the protection of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions, a publishing house, the University of Gastronomic Sciences and a community of food producers, vendors, chefs and scientists called Terra Madre, which meets annually.
The Slow Food philosophy is not only about gastronomic hedonism. The organization promotes the idea of responsible eating, the choice of organic products and support for local production, especially farmers.
The basic rules of the Slow Food proponent are: 1) Buy groceries. Cook them. Eat. 2) Avoid processed foods and foods with complex ingredients. Eat real food. 3) Grow something yourself. Even if it grows on your windowsill. 4) Whenever possible, try to find out where and under what conditions the food you buy is produced. 5) Shop for local and seasonal produce.
In order to strengthen its role in civil society and strengthen cooperation with EU authorities in the field of agricultural and industrial policy, in 2013 Slow Food opened an office in Brussels. On the territory of the European Union, the organization constantly holds events, encourages environmentally friendly fishing and the work of farms. True, in the Baltic countries, whose agriculture and food industry have been hit hard by the EU's actions in recent years, Slow Food for some reason does not hold any events at all.
Daniel Kaneman: slow thinking
American psychologist and sociologist, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is sure that a person has two systems of thinking: "slow" and "fast". He talks about them in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. According to the scientist, the "slow" system is thinking in the narrow sense of the word: the deliberate and conscious formation of thoughts. We use slow thinking, for example, when we solve equations, analyze scientific texts, make decisions about where to go on vacation or what to cook for dinner.
The “fast” system, on the other hand, is responsible for momentary knowledge of the world, cataloging instinctive sensations and natural needs, adding new data to the experience of the past and maintaining the stability of the perceived world, its continuity in time, space and in the field of cause-and-effect relationships. At the same time, the system of slow thinking consumes a lot of energy, its work exhausts a person, so that whenever possible, consciousness tends to switch to a less energy-consuming "fast" system. As a result of such leaps, we may, for example, buy more from the supermarket than we intended just because we were hungry. Daniel Kahneman's book allows us to understand why we do such irrational actions and learn how to find mistakes in decisions, judgments and choices. After all, it seems that in the end everything again rests on the fact that we are in too much of a hurry, not giving ourselves the opportunity to really think.
Long Now Foundation: a long-term mindset
The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit organization, was founded in 1996 in San Francisco. She focuses on long-term responsibility to generations who will live on Earth in 10,000 years, and the ideology of slow and high-quality life as opposed to the prevailing ideology of fast and cheap life. At the same time, the number 10,000 is a landmark for Long Now Foundarion, and within the framework of the project it is even customary to write not "1996" or "2014", but "01996" and "02014".
“Our civilization is driving itself into pathologically short-term planning,” says Steward Brand, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, American writer. - The reasons for this are the accelerating development of technologies, short-term criteria for the development of a market economy, an orientation towards electoral cycles of politicians, an insane habit of solving several problems every day … And these trends are steadily growing. To correct the general short-sighted behavior, some kind of mechanism, idea, myth is needed that encourages long-term thinking, planning, responsibility - at least on the scale of centuries."
In order to make the earthly "tomorrow" a little brighter - and a little more possible - the Long Now Foundation conducts annual long-term mindset training workshops and oversees several projects. The most significant among them is the Rosetta project, in which specialists from all over the world are creating a world language archive. This will make it possible to preserve all the languages of mankind (more than 1,500 in total), including the disappearing and extinct ones, and in the future, if necessary, restore them.
Today, the Rosetta archive exists in several media: in the form of a giant book, an online library and the so-called Rosetta disc - a small ball of nickel alloy, on the surface of which text is engraved. The diameter of the disc is only 7, 6 cm, but it can hold more than 14,000 pages with information about the origin, geography of distribution, grammar, phonetics, vocabulary and writing system of each of the 1,500 languages, as well as texts on them. All this can be read under a microscope with 650x magnification. Disk creation technology allows data to be stored for 2,000 to 12,000 years.
Fleur McGerr: vintage slowness
British writer, event manager, model and blogger Fleur McGuerr promotes a slow, vintage lifestyle. She wears dresses below the knee, regularly goes to the salon to get her hair done, prepares lunches and dinners, spends time with her friends for tea and nails, and adheres to the traditions of the past in everyday communication and lifestyle. “I love the way our grandmothers treated their bodies,” says one of Fleur's friends, Lisa, who is also into the vintage slow life. - They were not aware of the cult of thinness, they knew how to appreciate their forms. And the clothes that modern women wear are tailored to a non-existent standard."
Nevertheless, Fleur manages to successfully integrate quite modern things into her daily routine: running, yoga, cycling and dancing. McGherr's ideology is not a classic Slow Life in its purest form, but rather a story about how a slow life can be wrapped. On the blog of the writer, you can find a lot of useful advice on buying vintage shoes, choosing places for a photo shoot, walking or holding stylized events. Plus, Fleur is a great example of how to make money, not lose money, because of your pursuit of leisure in a world where everyone is in a rush.
