#22 Will you slow down for a while ...
I think its time to finally write this piece
There are 3 traffic lights on the way when we cycle from our home to my son’s school. I used to note the time taken by us to reach the school. It’s a good 2.6 km distance and with my sons often daydreamy ride, it takes 15-18 mins. Each day I used to tell him how much time we took and where we could improve.
One day he asked “Can we go through the “fox way ?”, a route that I saw a fox once.
“That will take more time, and we may be late for school”
“But I like that route, it has more trees and we don’t need to wait for one traffic light.” He said.
The next day we started 5 minutes early and took the longer route. We both enjoyed the ride and it barely took 1 more minute than usual. Later I thought, why not take it to the next level? There is a 5 km route to the school along the riverside. During the ride, we could spot people rowing, swans and beautiful landscapes of Cambridge. Now if the day is sunny and if we get ready early, we started preferring the river way.
Three years ago, when I transitioned from Singapore to Cambridge, one of the cultural shocks was how slow things were in the UK. For example, I can’t call an estate agent after 5 pm or at weekends. We need to plan our travel since the bus frequency is once every 20 or 30 minutes.
Though the work culture and environment slowed down compared to Singapore, the digital life took a ticket for a high-speed train that ran in random directions. Many influencers convinced me that I was doing things so inefficiently.
If you are taking one week to read a book you are not a good reader,
no pomodoro? you are inefficient
You need to type 100 words per minute or you will look like a looser
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It’s now or never for productivity
Master these AI tools now.
A millennial cry?
As a kid, I grew up in a household where there was no TV. This was not that typical for a kid in the 90s, but somehow my parents were a bit hesitant to buy one. At the age of 4 or so, I loved a poem called “poothappattu”. It is a legendary folk tale about a kid and a demon (not the best translation for the word “pootham”). Unfortunately, the book was not there in our library. My father remembered that my great-uncle had a copy. He wrote a letter to him asking to bring the book next month to a function at another relative’s house. I started counting on the days for the function. During the function, my father copied the entire poem (which is 4-5 pages long, as I remember). Every night, he used to recite the poem from the handwritten copy.
Are we better off with speed and the internet? Yes! A thousand times yes. The story I mentioned is just nostalgia. There is no value in inaccessibility and my son is better off with books which are available online or in a library or one Amazon click away. But the connection I had with the poem was deep due to the slow anticipation and feeling of some kind of achievement when you finally get it.
I am not making a millennial cry that kids these days have everything at their fingertips. I am not worried about the Gen Alpha or even Gen Z, for that matter. But my millennial generation is now on a treadmill and getting nowhere. Like many millennials, I have replaced my source of entertainment from reading to social media. Why spend weeks on a book when you can watch a summary of the same explained by a YouTuber? But in the last couple of years, I engaged with hundreds of incoherent ideas and none of them seemed to make any meaningful impact on my overall understanding of the particular subject they spoke about.
We have plenty of choices for entertainment, but somehow the optimization for speed makes us choose shallow short-term engagement. In my case, these are some common occurring scenarios.
Any new productivity tool in the market? Yes, I want to jump to that!
New email or text received? I need to respond right away.
Learned or experienced something new? I can’t wait to share it with people whom I don’t know or talk to.
Need to be on insta else I will miss out on the newest trend or meme.
Though I am engaging with many things, due to its shallow nature, nothing sticks. Nothing is making my life better than how it was one year ago.
The Bear and beloved Olivia
The Bear is one of the most discussed comedy series in the last couple of years, at least in my bubble indulgence. The messy, anxiety-inducing show is centred around the dysfunctional kitchen of a sandwich shop.
The whole show is fast-paced with swearing and shouting and the troubles of people who are running on a clock to make the kitchen work. In one of its episodes named Forks, Ritchie, a troubled middle-aged person with an existential crisis goes to a busy 5-star restaurant as a service person. There he finds out his flow state by focussing on things with minute detail (such as arranging forks). He meets this legendary chef Terry played by Olivia Colman. If you have not seen her movies, you are missing out. I have never seen an actor whose smile can fill you up instantly. In the scene, as you can see below, she asks Ritchie to peel mushrooms.
Why am I telling you all this? I don’t know, it just came to my mind.
Thehrav ठहराव of Pankaj Tripathi
Have you noticed how many dialogues by Pankaj Tripathi are stuck with you? There is something in the way he talks that makes you smile from inside. Ironically I got this interview piece from a reel! He uses the word ठहराव (Thehrav) which badly translates to a state of slowness.
To enjoy or even internalize things, you need to spend some time, without hurrying.
Last week I stumbled upon a talk by Rory Sutherland. His point was that optimization for the fastest solution is often not in the best interest of humans. Services, be it transport or communication, are trying to optimize for the fastest delivery. Even if we want to prioritize something else, often it will not be given to you as a solution by Google or any other platforms.
There are things in life where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. - Rory Sutherland
We need to reclaim the boredom
We are too afraid to be bored. Everyone seeks out new content since the silences, the natural pauses we have in day-to-day life, are getting unbearable. But these little fillers of boredom in your life may be what you finally need.
“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
―Bertrand Russell
As much as I love the podcast and audio content, they ruined my silence and natural ambience. What’s the point of going to the gym or running if the Bluetooth earpieces are out of charge? But the engagement is often very shallow and we have a false sense of validation that we are reading more.
To fight back, we need to reclaim the boredom. The fear of boredom and fear of missing out are spinning the hamster wheel of our digital life. If we start embracing the boredom, then we can probably slow down and eventually, it may lead to deeper and more meaningful engagement with the content that is relevant.
So my proposition is, will you take a moment and slow down? Get comfortable reading an article from start to end rather than bullet points, engaging with a book for weeks, taking the fox way or river way even if it takes longer to arrive, and embracing the boring pauses that life craves.
Nice one! Relaly enjoyed reading it :)
Olivia Colman is so good. And her special appearance in The Bear elevates the show.
Agree with you on slowing down and taking the Fox Way or the River Way. :)