Slow the fuck down!

Lately I feel like the proverbial lemming being swept along in an accelerationist tide. Where are we going, and why do we need to get there so fast? I am the child of a different era. (When my children want to refer to something that happened in the deep past, like corsets or cave drawings, they ask, “you mean, like, in the eighties?”). My brain is not wired to process all of my thinking through a clutter of apps, social media not least of all (I say, ironically, writing on this blog, which I unironically wrote the first draft of by hand on actual paper with an actual pencil).

In my early teens, exasperated that I had to take a computer typing class that I didn’t think I’d ever use, my mother jokingly accused me of being a Luddite (tech reactionists that went around smashing up machinery in the industrial revolution). Since then, I’ve coded with html and css, created scores of graphic design projects, done database programming, and type about 80 wpm just about all day every day writing stories, blog posts, and theoretical dissertations (the dissertation I’m theoretically writing) on my laptop. I’m as tethered to Google products as anyone. And every activity I do, or my kids do, from volunteering to Girl Scouts to school and 4H, requires its own app to track: Facebook, Band, Crew, Remind, Duo, Zoom, etc and etc and etc. As useful as these things are, the rate of their proliferation on my home screen and in my daily life is dizzifying (yes, it’s a word, look it up on urbandictionary.com).

Western culture centers around one tenet: “progress,” with its correlaries speed and novelty. Leaving aside for the moment the fraught idea that is progress, I am concerned that the ever-increasing speed with which we are expected to operate in its service is doing significant damage. In school and in workplaces, my colleagues would brag about how little sleep they were getting – award to the most caffeinated – and the amount of stress they were under from the high volume of projects they were engaged in at any one time. That is to say, the winner of the glory and awe was the person who was the closest to a complete breakdown (and I’ve seen plenty of people fall off that cliff, myself included). We glorify unhealth in this culture. We revere mania.

Because actual feelings are difficult, we pursue feeling in the form of extremism, even in our down time: extreme sports, binging on extreme home makeover and extreme cooking shows, a relentless need to always be doing something, anything, even compulsive social media checking. We crave stimulus because, yes, daily life is mundane. Instead of slowing down to appreciate what is, we speed up to get our next fix. It is addictive, and, like any drug, it will ultimately kill us, whether individually or collectively.

So I am once again channeling my inner Luddite. Posting this as a blog is not an oxymoron, it is a paradox, but the best paradoxes are productive. I am exhorting us to to slow the fuck down and make sure we are using technology as a tool that we can put down, and that we do put down, to tune our real senses in our real bodies outwards and to notice: not in the way a mountainbiker goes into the wilderness to power up a hill and fly back down, one’s own heart pounding in one’s own ears, the landscape a blur, but in the way a poet goes and sits on a rock and lets impressions come, as a filterfeeder in a tide pool might, meeting the environment on its own terms and inviting it in, whether that environment is a trail in the Vedauwoos or at your desk surrounded by paper clips and post-its.

We can’t live this way all the time, of course, we have jobs and kids and ambitions, but we can recalibrate. We can find moments to take it slow and pay attention and let things come to us rather than grasping desperately at them on our way off the cliff. Taking it slow means pausing to appreciate, looking at things and remembering with your eyes and heart instead of your phone camera, taking time not just to see, but to notice and to wonder the small and ordinary, or even sitting and doing nothing at all. (Have trouble remembering to take it slow? Set yourself a reminder. I’m sure there’s an app for that!)