Slow Life

The volcanic ash cloud over Europe in April slowed down people’s lives for one whole week. Or at least it slowed down their traveling. Of course it was a disaster for the airlines and many travel agencies and some holiday destinations suffered losses, too, but other than that the businesses everywhere seemed to work pretty much as usual. Actually I heard many people to express a sort of relief for the slowdown of travel. There were many, who said that the ash cloud reminded them to appreciate the “forgotten” means of transportation such as trains and buses and motivated them to spend effort learning the collaborative internet tools for communication instead of initiating business travel. To be honest, some people even confessed that it was only good that the ash cloud provided an excuse to cancel useless business trips that their organization was expecting them to do…

I, too, was stuck in Germany, when the ash cloud arrived to Sweden on a thursday afternoon. My 1.5 hour flight was changed to a 12 hour train travel. But I didn’t feel too bad about it. I took a night train and didn’t loose effectively any work time. Actually, even though the flight time was only 1.5 hours, the travel to the airports had been another 30-45 mins in each direction plus the waiting time at the airport would have been at least an hour – assuming the flight had been on time. So even in the best case the air travel had taken me about 4 hours during the best work hours, and since it would have been mostly moving from one line to another, I would have only small pieces of time to do anything useful or interesting with my laptop. My mind is so slow that getting properly concentrated on any more serious issue (booting my brain to focus) takes at least 15-20 mins, so out of that 4 hours, I might have been able to use effectively only like maybe half an hour. Calculating it that way, I could claim that taking the train was actually more efficient from a productivity point of view than the original plan to use the plane.

In general I like long distance train travel. It offers an escape from unnecessary office discussions and the train takes you conveniently from one city center to another. In Europe the city structure supports train travel excellently and a train-bicyle combination can be a great way for commuting or medium distance travelling. Yet many people even in Europe seem to prefer driving to the airports in traffic jams and taking planes even when the time saving was just an hour or two. But I think the ash cloud made more and more people conscious about the alternatives.

Train and bus travel as a way for a Slow Travel is just one aspect of the Slow Life movement that has become a hot topic recently. At least in where I live you can hear about Slow life ideology more and more everywhere. Besides Slow Travel there are Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Design, Slow Art, Slow Media, Slow Parenting, Slow Architecture, Alow Reading, Slow Shopping, Slow Sex and Cittaslow…
all of which have sort of independent origins, but share the general idea that life is today getting more and more hectic, and that people will not be happy unless there is going to be more time to really think what really matters personally, in grass root level and locally and how can we promote the well being of our environment in general.

For a general motivation for the Slow Life, wikipedia entry about Slow Movement[1] cites Guttorm Fløistad, A Professor of philosophy in the Oslo Universitet: Fløistad summarizes the philosophy [of Slow Movement], stating: The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.
But what is that drives the world to become faster? In other words why does the pace of change seem to accelerate a decade after decade? Carl Honore, the writer of In Praise of Slow [2] thinks that we (in the western world) are hung up with the notion that being busy and trying to do things fast is a value in itself. He says [3]

It [Slow Movement] is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.

Also Honore says that Slow Movement is not about being “anti-speed”: I love speed. I like my Internet connection to be fast and I play two of the fastest sports around, ice-hockey and squash, in my spare time. I live in London, which is a city of volcanic energy, and I enjoy working to deadlines. Speed has its place in the modern world. Often you have to move quickly, particularly at work. The problem is that speed has become a way of life. We do everything in a rush. We are stuck in fast forward and that is unhealthy.

I have been noticing the existence of slow movements maybe a couple of years now. And for me it would be very easy to agree with the citations in the above. I feel often that the values of the professional people that I see around me are so often more about saving time, not savoring it, (like the example about air vs. train travel). I studied a little more what the different slow subcultures mean and I liked particularly Slow Design, which means [4]:
- Longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests and fine tuning.
- Design for manufacturing with local/regional materials and technologies or Design that supports local industries, workshops and craftspeople.
- Design that takes into account local/regional culture both as a source of inspiration and as an important consideration for the design outcome.
- Design that studies the concept of natural timecycles and incorporates them into design and manufacturing processes.
- Design that looks at longer cycles of human behavior and sustainability.

and Slow money [5]:
Slow Money is a movement to organize investors and donors to steer new sources of capital to small food enterprises, organic farms, and local food systems. Slow Money takes its name from the Slow Food movement. Slow Money aims to develop the relationship between capital markets and place, including social capital and soil fertility. Slow Money is supporting the grass-roots mobilization through network building, convening, publishing, and incubating intermediary strategies and structures of funding.

(….I know, I know… quoting directly from wikipedia might not make much of a blog article, but I think the summaries there were good and the wiki pages had also good references for anyone interested to study further.)

So The Slow movements looked very good and healthy ideas to at first sight. But are they really applicable everywhere? Would it be just something too far fetched to be applied in real life? Something for the middle-aged western urban well-to-do professionals to play with to think that they are doing something to improve the quality of life and environment?

There might be a little of that, who knows. For example I would wonder
- What about young people, who are just entering professional life and starting their careers. Usually they are hungry to become busy and important first, before they have any need for a slower lifestyle
- Same with retired people. Many people who retire seem to be a bit at loss, once the business goes away
- By far the most of people in development countries are not busy out of choice, but out of a clear necessity. Can the Slow Movement offer anything to them for improving the quality of life?
- In many cultures, the time and the importance of tight schedules is not perceived the same way everywhere. For example some African writers have coined a term “Africa time” to describe the disregard of punctuality. But does it lead to a greater happiness?

But even if the Slow movement would be something mainly for the upper middle classes, Honore is making the point that practically all cultural revolutions (or evolutions) have become reality only when the middle class has taken the values, represented by the change, to it’s own. I could add that in my opinion something similar would be actually true for any change in any organization. There are management theories (which my own experience strongly supports) that suggest, that any true change in a behaviour of people can happen only through the change of the cultural values of the people who are in gatekeeper positions how the work is really done. In other words the change occurs only through the change of cultural values of the middle level (class) people who define the work (lifestyle) of how things are run in an organization (society)….So if any societal change is to be pursued, it needs to offer something for the middle class, who actually concretely runs the businesses.

It is also easy to be cynical and dismiss Slow movement as something unimportant or economically marginal. On the other hand, the same was said originally about organic food movement which is related to Slow Food ideologies. Yet today over 4 % of all food production in EU is produced with highly regulated and supervised organic food principles and it’s relative share of the production is growing. In Austria over 10% of all food is already organically produced. Not economically insignificant I would say! The same is true for Fair Trade, which is already over 4 billion US$ business - quite big business for the poorest countries. Not to mention about Green technologies, such as Recycling, Sewage and waste management, renewable energies, Air and water purification….The countries all around the world are already investing over 2 trillion $ in green technologies so it would appear already to be a bigger business than the worldwide arms industry (~1.5 trillion $). Compared to the 1960s the arms industry spending was probably several tens of times bigger business than green industries, but not any more. The world has changed really radically thanks to the change of our attitudes towards environmental sustainability. Why couldn’t it change also in respect of preserving our own lives and ridding ourselves from the culture of speed?

Does that make sense? Looks good, but....
I need to ask second opinions so I hope be able post an interview or two sometime soon :-)

Cheers
Quin

[1] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement ,
[2] Honore, C. “In praise of Slow: How a Woldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed”, Orion Books, London UK, 2004
[3] Internet page on May 5th, 2010, http://www.carlhonore.com/?page_id=6
[4] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_design
[5] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Money
[6] Wikipedia, May 5th 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_time