Slowness
In 2018 the american writer Ottessa Moshfegh released her book “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” — a book that follows an unnamed protagonist as she gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year. A kind of chemically induced hibernation. And although we are living in a fast paced world, slowness is always there like a parallel universe.
The slow movement advocates for a cultural shift toward slowing down life’s pace. It began with Carlo Petrini’s protest against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the slow food movement. Over time, this developed into a subculture that now include a range of areas from fashion and gardening to parenting and marketing.
Slow tech for example is a movement that means to reassess how we use technology and notice when it’s interrupting natural tendencies. The Amsterdam based studio Vouw means that they are building a new kind of business: a slowtech business, and they define slowtech as “Using tech to slow down the world around us”. One recent project is the Chairwave, Chairwave is an interactive row of chairs that only opens seats next to others. As soon as you sit down on the Chairwave, the chairs next to you unfold. Making people sit only next to each other, it lowers the barrier to start a conversation which makes people stop looking at their phone.
Another example is slow content. Slow living content made its way in 2020 as a response to the lifestyle that was born through quarantine life. A sub category to this lifestyle is Silent vloggers, vloggers that are really trying to catch the moment and appreciate the small things — a bed with fresh linen or a branch moving in the wind. Most influential are south korean vloggers, and the most popular vlogger is Nyangsooop that has around 300 000 followers, most of them see her video to dampen their anxieties, but maybe some watch the videos just to slow down for a bit.
