The clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible—meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts.

Of course, Slow Thinking on its own is just indulgence without the rigours of Fast Thinking. We have to be able to seize, analyze and evaluate the ideas that surface from the subconscious—and often we must do so quickly.

A surefire way to slow down is to work less.

In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term “time-sickness” to describe the obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.”

Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective,

In the war against the cult of speed, the front line is inside our heads. Acceleration will remain our default setting until attitudes change. But changing what we think is just the beginning. If the Slow movement is really to take root, we have to go deeper. We have to change the way we think.

Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation. When did you last sit in a chair, close your eyes and just relax?

What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”

The central tenet of the Slow philosophy is taking the time to do things properly, and thereby enjoy them more.