Website – Farnam Street – In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

I recently signed up to Farnam Street and it’s quickly becoming one of my favourite websites and sources for inspiration. I love everything about this post and I think the first paragraph is very relevant to why I started My Excerpts and the positives I see it having.

We live in a world of scarce understanding and abundant information. We complain that we never have any free time yet we seek distraction. If work can’t distract us, we distract ourselves. We crave perpetual stimulation and motion. We’re so busy that our free time comes in 20 second bursts, just long enough for us to read the gist and assume we understand. If we are to synthesize learning and understanding we need time to think.

Also the sentence before last in the following excerpt could very well be the tagline for another project I started called You Should Meet.

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, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections— with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow.

I was finding it difficult to glean the points that really struck a chord with me because there were so many. They do a great job at summarising the thinking behind Carl Honore’s book by the same title and adding relevant links to other very interesting pieces on their website. So rather than leave anything out, I recommend you read it in its entirety.

From a young age I’ve always thought of myself as being slower than others both physically but also mentally. That’s partly because of self-esteem but I also usually like to take more time with something, to think about what I’m doing rather than rush. In the past this has worried and upset me but pieces like this lift up my spirits.