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#5 Platform - In Praise of Slow
Feb. 9th, 2011 02:23 pmI may have taken too long to read this. ^^;
Book: In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed
Author: Carl Honore
Provenance: Received from Bookmooch
No one can deny that our modern world is a very fast place. People zoom around in cars or public transport, crunch through work as fast as they can (and for as long as they can, most days), start focusing on the next thing as soon as the current event has started, rush through their food and their play and their time with their kids as if reaching the end on time - or before time is up, even better! - is the true target of these activities. Not enjoyment, not fulfillment, not even necessarily doing the job well. No, speed, speed and punctuality is the key.
I first encountered this book, In Praise of Slow, a few years ago, and it's taken me a while to get around to reading it. Part of it is that, well, I feel that advocating slowing my life down all over isn't feasible, and so I felt that reading a book like this would only make me feel bad about myself and somewhat ashamed that I can't take control of my life the way that the author suggests, even if I may want to. Thankfully, this isn't the case. The stories that the book advances resonate with me not just because I can recognize details of my own life in them, but because the morals and suggestions stemming from a lot of them seem practical and usable.
Honore details just how speed and constantly watching the clock, feeling like we're always battling against time, came to be one of the defining characteristics of our society, starting from the Industrial Revolution and moving onwards towards the present day, and the harms it has for our society - making us sicker, making us less happy, giving less time to the activities and connections we say are important to us. He then goes through a variety of different movements (which all seem to have some version of the word "slow" in them somewhere) that are trying to ameliorate things. The Slow Food movement, I'd already heard of: it consists of people who believe we should take longer to eat, enjoying better, more local food and the atmosphere and company that should go with it. And that's certainly something I can get behind.
What I hadn't connected up before, and what's the real interesting throughline of the book, were all these other ideas: Slow Cities, encouraging changing the use of cities to get more people walking, more green space, less cars, etc.; changes in how to work, including job-sharing, more flexible hours, being able to step back, etc; different movements for slowing down in education, and letting kids explore and learn at a more natural pace for them. Trends for slower, more relaxing forms of leisure, like knitting, reading, or gardening - even slowing down classical music to the way it used to be played; trends for differing approaches to medicine, to meditation, to sex. I think I'd heard of a large number of these, but having them grouped together like this really pointed up that they all stem from similar desires for things to proceed at a more reflective pace.
That's what this comes to, in the end, and that's what makes the book practical and useful: the real take-home message, reinforced regularly through the book, is that this isn't meant to be a slow-down-in-everything philosophy. Speed has its place, too. It's an argument for taking each element of one's life at the speed it's best appreciated. Rushing through things that should be savored doesn't make us happier, and not taking time to reflect and calm ourselves before rushing on leads to consistently worse results. Honore puts this before us time and again, referencing studies, giving testimonials, drawing back to point at the ways we damage ourselves and our world with too much speed, and trying to show how people can succeed more by taking things more naturally. The style is a little bit cutesy sometimes - man, he adores alliteration ad nauseam, to take a quote from somewhere I can't recall - but it's engaging and keeps you into it. I read it slowly, so it'd sink in. And I think others would probably enjoy reading it, as well. A lot of these books, I finish, and I can't see how I'll be able to keep applying it; this one, I think I can really use.
Next up: Still in Elf Love. But probably How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe.
Book: In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed
Author: Carl Honore
Provenance: Received from Bookmooch
No one can deny that our modern world is a very fast place. People zoom around in cars or public transport, crunch through work as fast as they can (and for as long as they can, most days), start focusing on the next thing as soon as the current event has started, rush through their food and their play and their time with their kids as if reaching the end on time - or before time is up, even better! - is the true target of these activities. Not enjoyment, not fulfillment, not even necessarily doing the job well. No, speed, speed and punctuality is the key.
I first encountered this book, In Praise of Slow, a few years ago, and it's taken me a while to get around to reading it. Part of it is that, well, I feel that advocating slowing my life down all over isn't feasible, and so I felt that reading a book like this would only make me feel bad about myself and somewhat ashamed that I can't take control of my life the way that the author suggests, even if I may want to. Thankfully, this isn't the case. The stories that the book advances resonate with me not just because I can recognize details of my own life in them, but because the morals and suggestions stemming from a lot of them seem practical and usable.
Honore details just how speed and constantly watching the clock, feeling like we're always battling against time, came to be one of the defining characteristics of our society, starting from the Industrial Revolution and moving onwards towards the present day, and the harms it has for our society - making us sicker, making us less happy, giving less time to the activities and connections we say are important to us. He then goes through a variety of different movements (which all seem to have some version of the word "slow" in them somewhere) that are trying to ameliorate things. The Slow Food movement, I'd already heard of: it consists of people who believe we should take longer to eat, enjoying better, more local food and the atmosphere and company that should go with it. And that's certainly something I can get behind.
What I hadn't connected up before, and what's the real interesting throughline of the book, were all these other ideas: Slow Cities, encouraging changing the use of cities to get more people walking, more green space, less cars, etc.; changes in how to work, including job-sharing, more flexible hours, being able to step back, etc; different movements for slowing down in education, and letting kids explore and learn at a more natural pace for them. Trends for slower, more relaxing forms of leisure, like knitting, reading, or gardening - even slowing down classical music to the way it used to be played; trends for differing approaches to medicine, to meditation, to sex. I think I'd heard of a large number of these, but having them grouped together like this really pointed up that they all stem from similar desires for things to proceed at a more reflective pace.
That's what this comes to, in the end, and that's what makes the book practical and useful: the real take-home message, reinforced regularly through the book, is that this isn't meant to be a slow-down-in-everything philosophy. Speed has its place, too. It's an argument for taking each element of one's life at the speed it's best appreciated. Rushing through things that should be savored doesn't make us happier, and not taking time to reflect and calm ourselves before rushing on leads to consistently worse results. Honore puts this before us time and again, referencing studies, giving testimonials, drawing back to point at the ways we damage ourselves and our world with too much speed, and trying to show how people can succeed more by taking things more naturally. The style is a little bit cutesy sometimes - man, he adores alliteration ad nauseam, to take a quote from somewhere I can't recall - but it's engaging and keeps you into it. I read it slowly, so it'd sink in. And I think others would probably enjoy reading it, as well. A lot of these books, I finish, and I can't see how I'll be able to keep applying it; this one, I think I can really use.
Next up: Still in Elf Love. But probably How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe.
