The Art of Slow Living and How it Can Help You Live a Fuller Life

Slow living prioritizes quality over quantity.Harli Marten/Unsplash

Could you sit contentedly for an hour and watch a recording of someone chopping wood or fishing?

In Norway, people do. It’s called “slow TV.” A friend of mine who spent time in Norway told me about it, along with her experience trying to learn traditional Norwegian folk dance. The old-timers there told her she needed to approach the dance “with a little bit of peace” or she would never be able to do it. Her attempts to rigidly rush her way through the dance actually inhibited her ability to successfully learn it. Such dances—like life—cannot be rushed through, if one hopes to do it well. You must learn to relax and sway with the beats of the music, just as the dance of life requires us to sway with the rhythms of time.

This is the mantra of a movement called “slow living.” Slow living may be defined as an approach to life that prioritizes quality over quantity. More is not always better, and a fulfilled life requires the ability to live in the moment, appreciate the little things in life, and make time for the things of lasting value, such as human relationships, leisure activities, and connection to nature.

The website Slow Living LDN, founded in 2018 by Beth Crane, defines the lifestyle in this way: “Slow living is a mindset whereby you curate a more meaningful and conscious lifestyle that’s in line with what you value most in life.” Often, we blaze through our days on autopilot, following the herd in its mad dash, assuming that what contemporary society at large seems to value most—money, productivity, efficiency, and achievement—must be the most important things. Slow living asks us to pause and examine where the rat race is headed and whether we want to even be a part of it.

Slow Living LDN writes that, “To adopt a slower mindset is to switch off autopilot and make space for reflection and self-awareness.” Doing so prompts questions like: Where am I headed and why? If I value family and relationships above money, why do I spend more time advancing my career than spending time with loved ones? What are all of my possessions for if I do not have the time to savor and enjoy them?

Where Did Slow Living Come From?

The Europeans seem more adept at understanding the slow living principle than those of us on this side of the Atlantic, and, unsurprisingly, the slow living movement originated in Italy. In the 1980s, a group of Italians led by Carlo Petrini campaigned to forestall the opening of McDonalds in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. As an alternative to fast food—with its tendency to diminish the health and quality of food, reduce the richness and diversity of local culinary practices, and to stultify the cultural and communal aspects of eating—they proposed “slow food.”

Slow food activists champion clean food that promotes cultural and biological diversity and wholesome eating and agricultural practices. Something as important to human life as food could never fittingly be “fast” or a matter of mere efficiency. By 1989, the movement had become international and boasted its own manifesto, signed by representatives of 14 countries.

Europeans like those in the slow food movement weren’t creating something new; they were defending something old: the long-cherished tradition of leisurely, multi-course meals under the gilded candlelight, bedewed with good wine and fostering real conversation, laughter, and human connection. They understood that such a sacred activity as eating, so foundational to flourishing human bodies and human societies, must be protected from the sterilizing advances of consumerism, industrialization, and the cult of efficiency. To eat fast is to defeat the purpose of eating.

The principles of the Slow Food movement seeped into other areas of life. Another Carl, Carl Honoré, helped to popularize the ideas of slow living in general through his 2005 book “In Praise of Slowness.” This book helped launch awareness of the importance of doing less, but better, and the movement has branched into various forms including slow travel, slow gardening, slow interiors, slow design, slow fashion, slow parenting, slow news, and slow working.

Why Live Life in the Slow Lane?

In a 2005 TED Talk, Carl Honoré details the value of deliberate, measured action in a range of areas, including food, medicine, work, and school. He describes the ways that productivity can actually increase when we work fewer hours or how students can sometimes score better on exams when not overburdened with homework.

Other benefits attested by the slow-moving crowd include:

• Reducing stress and improving health
• Experiencing deeper connection with nature
• Increasing creativity
• Embracing more time by cutting out distractions
• Building stronger relationships

The bird’s-eye view of slow living benefits is summed up by Mr. Honoré in “In Praise of Slowness,” where he writes: “The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections–with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds.”

Why Are We Obsessed With Speed and Efficiency?

As the website Pretty Slow notes, slow living used to be ubiquitous. For centuries, people lived a slower-paced life as a matter of course. With limited technology, much of the speed we have achieved was simply impossible for them. On the one hand, they lived much harder lives and in harsher environments, but on the other, they lived more according to the slow rhythms of the agricultural seasons, they were not faced with the distraction of high-speed, constant information barrages in the form of social media or TV, most work tasks took longer and required deeper concentration, and they savored little pleasures, perhaps because there were fewer pleasures to be had.

Today, life often moves at pulsing, pounding, frantic pace, leaving us dizzy and wondering what monster devours all of our time. What changed? To fully answer that question would likely take many volumes. But a few observations can be made.

One reason, maybe, is our growing distractibility. Psychologist Gloria Mark has found in her research that people’s attention spans have steadily declined—from 2.5 minutes on average in 2004, to 75 seconds in 2012, to 47 seconds in the last few years. Dr. Mark also notes that as attention spans drop and multitasking becomes more prevalent, stress levels spike. Our constant drive to be productive—in a monetary or otherwise pragmatic sense—tempts us to multitask, which ultimately increases our stress. But as Slow Living LDN states, “Slow living denies that being busy equates to being successful or important. It means being present and in the moment, it celebrates quality over quantity, living with intent, being conscious and considered.”

Much of modern civilization is predicated on the unexamined assumption that faster and more efficient is always better. This industrial, technophilic mindset undergirds much of how our economy and lifestyles work. We’re always producing faster computers, trying to gather information more quickly (AI), flying through fast-food drive-throughs at quicker speeds, on the way to the next errand or extracurricular activity.

Where does this mindset come from? I would suggest that the prevailing materialism may be one source of origin. A culture that denies the spiritual dimension will always be tempted to value things according to their quantity—their measurable material aspect. We can quantify things when we say, “I made X dollars or accomplished X tasks.” Spiritual growth, deepening relationships, or improved contemplation of reality is, by contrast, far harder to measure. It has no obvious material output. And thus a scientific, materialist mindset will not value it.

Mr. Honoré proposes that our addiction to speed may derive from the Western view of time, which looks at it linearly, as a limited resource, slowly slipping away. He contrasts this with cultures that view time cyclically, as a recurring pattern, subsisting in a calm, continual pattern that wells over with abundance. While I think he’s on to something here, it’s worth pointing out that, even in the West, our relationship to time has evolved over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, for example, writers like Dante viewed time as an echo and reflection of eternity, with the ceaseless cycle of the liturgical year mirroring the endless ages of the afterlife.

If one’s eyes were fixed on eternity, one would be more concerned with living well than rushing through activities as though death were the end of everything. Really, we might go so far as to say that our attitude toward death will determine our attitude toward time.

In his TED Talk on the value of slowness, Mr. Honoré also reflects on the philosophical, spiritual, and psychological facet of the question. “There’s a kind of metaphysical dimension. Speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. We fill our heads with distraction, with busyness, so that we don’t have to ask, Am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf?”

The truth is, slowing down is hard. Even as a high-speed lifestyle may degrade our body, mind, and soul, we cling to it because it’s just easier. Silence, space, and quiet give us space to contemplate matters beyond the immediate practicality of the moment, whether that be our past experiences, our future dreams, or the nature of the universe itself. But many of us would rather not confront those realities, even if that confrontation leads to a more whole, human existence.

As Aristotle says, “All men by nature desire to know.” Busyness can divert us from that high, challenging, though fulfilling vocation: to know one another, to know the truth, to consider important questions, and ultimately find meaning in life.