The Rising Tide of Slowness
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In recent years, in the realms of self-improvement literature, Instagram influencers, and wellness gurus, an idea has taken hold: that in a non-stop world, the act of slowing down offers a path to better living. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the rise of “slowness culture”—from Carl Honoré’s 2004 manifesto to pandemic-era trends of mass resignations and so-called quiet quitting. The hosts discuss the work of Jenny Odell, whose books “How to Do Nothing” and “Saving Time” frame reclaiming one’s time as a life-style choice with radical roots and revolutionary political potential. But how much does an individual’s commitment to leisure pay off on the level of the collective? Is too much being laid at the feet of slowness? “For me, it’s about reclaiming an aspect of humanness, just the experience of not having to make the most with everything we have all the time,” Schwartz says. “There can be a degree of self-defeating critique where you say, ‘Oh, well, this is only accessible to the privileged few.’ And I think the better framing is, how can more people access that kind of sitting with humanness?”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed)
“How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” by Jenny Odell
“Improving Ourselves to Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” by Carl Honoré
“The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture,” by Jenny Odell
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” by Kohei Saito
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This episode originally aired on January 11, 2024.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Nomi Fry. |
| 0:04.8 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 0:05.9 | And I'm Alex Schwartz. |
| 0:07.3 | And this is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. |
| 0:11.4 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. |
| 0:16.9 | Hello. |
| 0:17.9 | Hi, guys. |
| 0:31.2 | Thank you. Hello. Hi, guys. Hey. Today, we're dipping into the archives and resurfacing an episode from a few months back that's one of my personal favorites. |
| 0:37.7 | It's about slowness and the culture of slowness that has become a really big thing in the world of self-improvement recently, but also just in the culture at large. |
| 0:39.8 | It's this idea that maybe we don't always have to go at a breakneck pace all the time. |
| 0:48.6 | And so, with summer right around the corner, it felt like the perfect time to revisit this episode |
| 0:53.6 | about kicking back, relaxing, and taking it slow. I hope you like it. |
| 1:01.9 | I recently started to think about a particular trend that I keep noticing everywhere that I think has become very big in the self-improvement sphere. |
| 1:16.7 | Maybe in the last five to seven years or so, it's certainly been around longer, but it's really taken off. |
| 1:21.0 | And it's what I'm going to call slowness culture. |
| 1:23.9 | And what I mean by slowness culture is the idea that in opposition to the rush of modern |
| 1:30.6 | life, the bustle, the hustle, we should, the hustle, we should really be taking it slow, |
| 1:38.4 | slowing down, doing things more deliberately, not packing our time full of various activities and tasks, you know, not working |
| 1:46.8 | with every second that we have. And, you know, have you guys noticed that kind of thing, too, |
| 1:53.1 | that this is, this idea is really more and more part of the culture of self-improvement, |
| 1:58.8 | that we can be better and our culture can be better if we slow down. |
| 2:02.7 | Yeah, definitely. |
... |
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