The appeal of slowness

Many of us have been brought up with concepts such as performance, efficiency, productivity and competition in mind, which is understandable because those were the parameters that served our parents well. In a world were many jobs were being created every day by virtue of the consumer economy, the goal was to pick as big a piece of the cake as possible, selling the most, moving the fastest, playing the hardest to climb up the rungs of the social ladder, which became very sparsely populated the moment you rose above blue collar jobs. The flip side of this competition is that it did not matter much what job you did as much as you were able to do it better than others and put bread on your dining table; other considerations such as the morality of the job, its ecological or social impact, or even you own affinity and satisfaction with you career took a very distant second row seat. The problem is that these rules of the game only worked one generation ago.

By the time I was done with my education my generation found that many of the jobs that had been "invented" just a few years ago, from interior designers to energy consultants, were taken by our parents and their peers, which were still mostly in their fifties or even late forties, which meant they had at least ten or fifteen more years to run before they even considered retirement. This generational block produced a division between those who turbocharged the trend and turned into even harder players to gain access to the few jobs that became available in small quantities, and those who turned around and looked for more rewarding and meaningful lines of work, even if they meant significantly less financial prosperity over their lifetimes. And this trend is even stronger among the millennials and the later Generation Z, which are becoming strongly aware of global problems such as overpopulation, social injustice and the climate crisis, and are willing to trade (some of) their comfort to give humankind a future.

Photo: Julius Dillier

The sad situation is that this kind of broader thought beyond the purely pecuniary as not reached the corporations: with their goal of serving the interests of their shareholders written in stone, there is not much wiggle room to take any social or environmental actions, because they have the bad habit to hitting the bottom line. As a consequence of this mindset, the corporations by means of their trusty messengers, the mainstream media, keep trying to instill on us a culture of "getting things done", where the effect of an action is the only thing that matters and the process is to be regarded as just an instrumental necessary evil to produce the effect, but of no real significance in its own. Tastes and personal preferences are only tolerated as a means to mitigate the hardship and because they open new possible lines of business: from the corporate point of view it does not matter how much you enjoy your food as long as you pay for it, and if they have to serve both steaks and fish to make you pay more they will be willing to cater to your tastes.

The same approach permeates the world of entertainment too. In a time where our hunger for dopamine is greater than ever, getting things done is the perfect trigger: completing a screen on Candy Crush, winning a battle on Clash of Clans or finishing in the top 10 in Fortnite will give you a sense of accomplishment, regardless of the time and pain spent to achieve it. The series in Netflix or Hulu are designed with the same goal to give you repeated jolts at carefully calculate times so that you "have to watch" the next episode. Feverish action and intricate narratives that keep our brains and our emotions under the tight control of the story are the state of the art these days. With the possible exception of Norway.

This week I have been listening to a podcast reporting the Norwegian experiment with "slow television", a genre consisting of an uninterrupted (and mostly unedited) broadcast of a largely uneventful event, such a train trip, a boat cruise or a walk in the night. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has kept coming back with this genre since 2009, typically with several installments per year each one lasting from several hours to several days. As discussed in the podcast Invisibilia, the value of this kind of programs is precisely the lack of a unified narrative, which opens the way (and provides the time) to consider the thoughts that the visuals inspire in us and the feelings that they engender. On the other hand, the program is not demanding in itself because, lacking a plot line, it does not require the spectator to have gone through any particular step (or viewed a previous section of the program) to be able to engage with the current one. It is literally open to as much mental effort as the spectator is willing to contribute: some people might try to follow the trip on a map, identify the names of the cities, look at the faces of the people on the street, spot whales or dolphins, or whatever other activity you might find interesting. As the Norwegian producer Thomas Hellum puts it, "everything is there"; you just have to choose what to look at, or nothing at all and take the program as a kind of visual meditation. Surprisingly, the slowness is only apparent, since the transmissions run in real time, but the lack of intense action makes it slow in comparison with other shows.

The presentation of the concept reminded me of a custom Karen and I have whenever we go out for dinner: we look at the people around us and comment on them, not with a malicious intent but just trying to identify remarkable features or actions. They are not more or less especial than we are, but they are, very importantly, different:  even when they definitely share a significant portion of our culture, they are very likely to have (some) different tastes and worries, their relationship will differ from our own or they might not even be a couple. But this contemplation bears obvious similarities with the Norwegian slow television: the interesting part is not what is happening, which is, in all likelihood, very mundane, but how it resonates with us, individually and as a couple.

A different kind of slowness can be found in a type of Japanese restaurants called teppanyaki, where the diners sit around three sides of an iron griddle, while the fourth is use by a cook that prepares all the dishes in real time before your own eyes. Menus in this kind of restaurant are typically composed of six or more dishes that the cook prepares in turns, so each party can witness not only their own cooking but also the dishes that other parties might have ordered. With these considerations it is understandable that a meal at there restaurants might take close to two hours depending on the complexity of the menu. It should also surprise no one that it is a rather expensive venue, where the show pumps up the price of the meal probably by a factor three or four compared to a typical steakhouse. And as in the two situations above, there is no script other than the fact that course come in a certain order and they get subsequently prepared and served, but the interest of the spectators and the appreciation of the diners is completely unscripted and we just have to interrogate ourselves about how it makes us feel.

Taking a step back, I cannot avoid to think about the similarities this kind of entertainment has with the teachings of the mindfulness movement: the latter emphasizes the need to pay attention to all elements involved in whatever we are doing, to the point that trivial exercises like the so-called raisin meditation (mindfully eating a single raisin) can extend for several minutes, while the former typically happens in real time and poses more an invitation than a demand, but in both cases the intent is that we give ourselves a chance to listen to voices that are normally suppressed or subdued in the middle of the daily turmoil. Do you find the concept of slow television (or slow food or any other kind of slowness) appealing? Is mindfulness more intriguing for you? One way or another, comments are welcome below. Have a nice weekend.