In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness.

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.

Workplace stress is not all bad. In limited doses, it can concentrate the mind and boost productivity. But too much of it can be a one-way ticket to physical and mental breakdown.

Fast Thinking is rational, analytical, linear, logical.

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for slowing down, no universal guide to the right speed. Each person, act, moment has its own eigenzeit.

Technology, meanwhile, has allowed work to seep into every corner of life.

In some philosophical traditions—Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three—time is cyclical.

Keibo Oiwa, the author of Slow Is Beautiful.

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, quali