Slowness

Slowness is not merely a reduced pace, but an epistemological posture—a way of inhabiting time and space that resists the systemic acceleration of modernity. In Sardinia, I encountered slowness in daily gestures, in handmade bread, in the care of plants, in shared silences. There, slowness is not inertia, but wisdom: it allows the body to listen, to connect, to learn. It is a phenomenological lens through which the world reveals itself in its full density.

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Neoliberal modernity, by contrast, promotes a cult of speed, performance, and efficiency, reducing life to a task to be completed. Longevity thus becomes a goal to be achieved quickly—perhaps by purchasing anti-aging protocols—rather than a process to be consciously traversed.

Slowness is also disobedience: to utility, to profit, to the linearity of progress.

 

As Milan Kundera writes, “slowness is memory,” whereas speed is forgetfulness. In this sense, recovering slowness also means recovering bodily, territorial, and ancestral memory. A long life is not a race, but a dwelling.