In Praise of Slowness

When was the last time you sat still without checking your phone, hurrying through a meal, or rushing to the next item on your agenda? In In Praise of Slowness, journalist Carl Honoré argues that our modern obsession with speed is eroding happiness, creativity, and human connection. We live in a culture that equates “fast” with good—faster work, faster communication, faster results—while dismissing anything slow as weak, lazy, or outdated. Honoré contends that this belief, what he calls the “cult of speed,” is both pervasive and destructive. The antidote is a global Slow Movement, which doesn’t reject speed but seeks balance—living at the right pace, or what musicians call the tempo giusto.

Drawing on historical analysis, global examples, and stories of ordinary people who decelerate to live better, Honoré explores how slowing down transforms everything from work and sex to food and education. He moves from urban planning in Italy to yoga studios in London, revealing how reclaiming time changes the way we think, eat, love, and create. What emerges is a deeply human story about how speed, once a symbol of progress, has become a threat to the very things that make life meaningful.

The Speed Trap of Modern Life

At the heart of Honoré’s diagnosis is what physician Larry Dossey once called “time-sickness”—the pervasive feeling that time is slipping away and we must hurry to keep up. In fast-forward societies, from Tokyo to Toronto, people structure every moment around efficiency. Clocks and screens dominate our days; schedules rule our decisions. Yet the faster we go, the less time we seem to have. Honoré traces this to cultural and historical roots: the Industrial Revolution, which transformed time into labor; capitalism’s mantra that “time is money”; and our digital age, where constant connectivity blurs the lines between work and rest. The faster technology moves, the faster we believe we must live.

This speed addiction delivers declining returns. Rushed workers burn out, families grow distant, communities fragment, and creativity dries up. Honoré describes how “doing everything faster” has become the default modern answer—even when it makes things worse. Our world, he writes, has become a 24/7 treadmill that exhausts the body, mind, and planet alike.

The Philosophy of Slow

Yet the author doesn’t call for rejecting speed altogether. The Slow Movement is not about idleness or nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. It’s about reclaiming our own rhythm—choosing when speed serves us and when it steals from us. “Being Slow,” Honoré explains, “means controlling the rhythms of your own life.” This is the movement’s moral compass. You can still travel fast, work smart, and love passionately; what matters is balance and awareness. The Slow philosophy invites us to rediscover presence: when eating, thinking, working, or making love, we give ourselves fully to the moment instead of rushing to the next task.

Honoré visits communities that embody this ethos. In Bra, Italy, birthplace of the Slow Food movement, meals are about connection, tradition, and care. In Orvieto’s Slow Cities, people walk more, drive less, and revive communal life. In yoga studios, on Tantric retreats, and even inside corporate offices experimenting with shorter workweeks, the same principle applies: reclaim time to restore quality.

Why Slowness Matters

Honoré warns that our fixation on haste isn’t just a lifestyle choice—it’s a cultural disease that distorts how we define success, intimacy, and happiness. By slowing down, we gain clarity. The “slow” virtues—patience, mindfulness, craftsmanship, empathy—are the foundation of creative thinking and strong communities. Science supports this: slower brain states (alpha and theta waves) foster insight and emotional balance. In societies that measure life by GDP and deadlines, rediscovering stillness becomes both a personal rebellion and a form of collective healing.

As Honoré journeys across continents—from the kitchens of Slow Food chefs to the meditation halls of Burmese-inspired retreats—he demonstrates how deceleration is not regression but progress of another kind. To go slow is to go deep; to take fewer turns but with greater awareness. In the chapters that follow, he explores how this simple shift reshapes our relationship with food, cities, work, sex, medicine, education, and leisure. Together, these portrait a hopeful truth: the cure for the age of rage may be as simple as learning, again, how to breathe, listen, and live at the right speed.

Honoré begins by charting how humanity’s relationship with time transformed from natural to mechanical. Early societies lived by “natural time”—eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, working with daylight. The invention of clocks in medieval Europe tethered human life to measurable units. When industrial capitalism arrived, ‘Clock Time’ became the essence of discipline and productivity. Workers no longer labored until the job was done—they worked until the whistle blew.

From Sacred Time to the Age of Efficiency

In Benedictine monasteries of the sixth century, monks pioneered structured schedules, ringing bells at precise intervals to mark prayer, labor, and rest. Later societies borrowed this practice for economic efficiency. The Industrial Revolution magnified this ethos: factories operated by the clock, workers were paid by the hour, and punctuality became a moral virtue. Benjamin Franklin’s adage “Time is money” epitomized the shift. Speed and output became synonymous with virtue itself.

By the late nineteenth century, scientific management (spearheaded by Frederick Taylor) reduced every motion to a fraction of a second. Taylor promised to increase productivity by transforming workers into efficient machines. But as Honoré notes, Taylor’s legacy extended beyond the factory floor—it invaded modern life. Today, people talk about “time management,” slicing their days into meetings, commutes, and meals optimized to the second. The result: perpetual acceleration and burnout.

Technology and the Mirage of Saving Time

Every new invention promises to save time—the washing machine, the car, email—but in practice only increases expectations. Labor-saving devices let us do more, not rest more. Honoré points to email as a prime example: while it speeds communication, it multiplies the number of messages requiring response, creating what he calls “Email Mountain.” In the 24/7 society, the line between work and home dissolves. Even sleep, our last sanctuary, becomes an opportunity for optimization through learning tapes or “sleep productivity.”

Technology, combined with capitalist competition, ensures that slowing down feels dangerous: there is always someone ready to move faster. This “arms race of speed” traps individuals and nations alike. Cultural conditioning reinforces it—especially in the West, where linear time (an arrow from birth to death) drives urgency and fear of waste. By contrast, cyclical traditions, such as Buddhism or Indigenous spirituality, view time as an ever-renewing flow, more forgiving and sustainable.

The chapter ends with Honoré’s chilling observation: speed once symbolized liberation, but now enslaves us. Like Milan Kundera’s insight that people in the fast lane can’t even know their own hearts, Honoré shows how pain, boredom, and even deathlessness are denied by the cult of haste. The clock became not a tool but a master—measuring our worth, shaping our self-worth, and driving us to an endless race toward nowhere.

After diagnosing speed addiction, Honoré introduces the counterrevolution: the Slow Movement. Born in Italy during the 1980s, it began with a culinary rebellion when Carlo Petrini protested a McDonald’s opening near Rome’s Spanish Steps. His group, Slow Food, celebrated local ingredients, traditional cooking, and the art of savoring meals. Soon, similar movements sprouted worldwide—from Slow Cities in Europe to Sloth Clubs in Japan—proving that slowing down was not regression but a creative act of resistance.

The Philosophy of Balance

The Society for the Deceleration of Time in Austria coined the term eigenzeit—“own time.” Every person, event, and process has a natural rhythm, they argued, and the goal is not to be slow for slowness’s sake but to honor the right tempo. This concept underlies every branch of the movement. It doesn’t condemn technology or modernization—it reclaims the driver’s seat. As Petrini puts it, “Being Slow means controlling the rhythms of your own life.”

Honoré attends the group’s annual Wagrain conference, where delegates debate how to apply slowness to real life—through flexible working hours, mindful design, or urban reform. They even stage humorous “speed traps” where pedestrians are stopped for walking too quickly and asked to escort a wooden turtle. Across continents, similar experiments unfold: Japan’s Sloth Club opens a cafe encouraging long conversations and candlelit concerts; in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation builds a clock designed to tick once yearly, reminding humanity to think in millennia rather than minutes.

Challenging Prejudice Against Slow

Despite this momentum, Slow remains a dirty word in much of the Western world, associated with failure or dullness. Honoré notes how dictionaries define it as “not understanding readily, tedious, slack.” The challenge is cultural; we equate busyness with importance. When people boast, “I’m so busy,” they’re really saying “I matter.” The Slow Movement seeks to rehab the word—showing that slowing down leads to sharper thinking, deeper connection, and greater joy.

By the chapter’s end, the message is clear: the Slow revolution is not a utopian fantasy but a practical rebalancing. In a future designer watches and stock traders may still exist, but they’ll coexist with gardens, shared meals, and acts of mindful creation. The motto Honoré highlights—tempo giusto—encapsulates everything: to live well is not to move the fastest but to move at the right speed for you.

Food, Honoré writes, is the first battleground in reclaiming slowness. In a world of microwavable dinners and drive-thru meals, eating has become more about fuel than pleasure. He recalls how the television cartoon The Jetsons imagined futuristic families consuming meal pills—fantasy then, nearly reality now. Meals once central to social life have become rushed “refueling stops.”

From Fast Food to Slow Food

Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement rebels against this dehumanization. It celebrates eco-gastronomy—good, clean, and fair food that nourishes people, the environment, and local culture. The movement’s campaigns preserve endangered ingredients, promote biodiversity, and teach “taste education.” From saving Vesuvian apricots in Italy to helping All-American turkey breeds survive industrial farming, Slow Food reconnects consumers with the land and the people who feed them.

In the book, Honoré recounts dining at Da Casetta in Borgio-Varezzi—the quintessential Slow Food restaurant—where meals unfold over four serene hours. Each dish, from Ligurian testaroli to cappon magro, is more than sustenance; it’s communion. Diners chat, reflect, taste, and build relationships. Even mistaken intrusions—like Vittorio admitting he sometimes eats at McDonald’s—become lessons in humility. The point isn’t moral purity, says Honoré, but mindfulness: knowing when to feast quickly and when to linger.

Slow Food as Cultural Preservation

Honoré shows that Slow Food’s power lies not just in taste but identity. Traditional foods are disappearing under globalized supply chains. Slow Food creates archives of small-scale producers—from Greek cheese-makers to Argentinian farmers reviving ancient roots like yacon—proving artisanal methods can survive and thrive. Even globalization, the movement argues, can be “virtuous” if it connects local producers ethically with global markets.

Ultimately, slowing down to cook or eat becomes an act of rebellion against homogenization. Taking time to chop an onion, smell cinnamon, or share bread with others restores connection to one’s senses and community. The lesson of Slow Food, Honoré concludes, is simple: when we eat slowly, we remember we are alive.

Cities, Honoré observes, are paradoxical symbols of both progress and chaos. They pulse with opportunity but also breed stress, noise, and isolation. In contrast, Italy’s Città Slow (Slow Cities) movement shows that urban life and slowness can coexist. Born from the same philosophy as Slow Food, it transforms towns like Bra and Orvieto into sanctuaries of humane pace.

Principles of Slow Urbanism

Each Slow City commits to fifty-five pledges—to reduce traffic, promote green spaces, preserve local architecture, support artisans, and foster hospitality. In Bra, cars are restricted, neon signs banned, and small grocers prioritized over supermarkets. Cafés encourage conversation, not turnover. As deputy mayor Bruna Sibille tells Honoré, “The best way to administer a city is with the Slow philosophy.”

Urban planners extend these ideas globally. From Japan’s “Slow Housing” co-operatives that let residents co-design their own apartments to London neighborhoods adopting Dutch Woonerf living streets, communities are rethinking city design around walking, safety, and community. In Maryland’s New Urbanist enclave Kentlands, families reclaim walking as social glue, transforming suburban sprawl into a social network of porches, parks, and pedestrian life.

Reimagining Transport and Time

Honoré dives into the cultural war against cars. Speed is both convenience and hazard; it kills roughly three thousand people daily worldwide. Anti-speed initiatives like Britain’s Speed Awareness Program teach drivers mindfulness behind the wheel, revealing that rushing saves little time but wastes peace. Meanwhile, “Home Zones” in London and car-free Fridays in Paris show small shifts can restore communal space.

These experiments prove that slowing down urban life isn’t retreat—it’s progress measured in human connection. When drivers see pedestrians not obstacles but neighbors, and when streets invite conversation rather than congestion, the city becomes what it was meant to be: a place for life, not haste.

Hurry hasn’t just invaded our calendars; it’s reshaped our minds. Honoré argues that constant acceleration trains us to think narrowly and reactively. Borrowing psychologist Guy Claxton’s distinction between Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking, he shows that insight often arises when the brain idles rather than races. As Claxton writes, “intelligence increases when you think less.”

From Overdrive to Awareness

Fast Thinking—our default mode—is analytical and linear. It thrives under deadlines but misses subtlety. Slow Thinking is intuitive, creative, and rich with subconscious processing. Studies reveal relaxed minds solve problems better than hurried ones. Darwin’s wandering walks and Einstein’s daydreams weren’t indulgences but incubators for genius. Honoré himself finds ideas bubbling up not in busy newsrooms but after meditative stillness at retreats.

Cultivating Slower Minds

Meditation features prominently as a gateway from chaos to calm. During a silent retreat at Britain’s International Meditation Centre, Honoré and forty others are stripped of distractions—no phones, books, or small talk. The process is frustrating at first, but as external noise fades, stillness yields clarity. Neurological research supports this: meditation enhances activity in the left prefrontal lobe (the brain’s happiness center) and lowers stress hormones. Business leaders such as Bill Ford adopt meditation, not just for serenity but better decision-making.

Other forms of Slow Mind—yoga, Chi Kung, walking, and even SuperSlow weightlifting—embody the same principle: deliberate movement breeds awareness. The former Air Force medic Ken Hutchins, founder of SuperSlow, teaches that true strength comes from control, not frenzy—20-second repetitions instead of pumping iron to exhaustion. Slowness here means precision and respect for body rhythms.

The payoff is transformative. Whether through mindfulness or mindful exercise, you sharpen intuition, restore energy, and rediscover joy in deliberate effort. In a world that rewards speed, the mind’s deepest creativity waits patiently for those who pause long enough to listen.

Honoré’s exploration of medicine reveals how haste harms health. Modern doctors, he notes, practice “beeper medicine”—six-minute consultations aimed at prescribing, not listening. The industrial model of care mirrors our economy: treat symptoms quickly and move to the next patient. Yet healing, like growth, rarely follows a timeline.

The Rise of Slow and Integrative Medicine

In reaction, millions turn to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—acupuncture, herbalism, meditation, reiki—that emphasize patience and whole-person wellness. Honoré visits London’s Hale Clinic, where founder Teresa Hale combines conventional doctors with holistic practitioners under one roof. Here, taking time to listen becomes therapy itself. Research confirms this: patients who feel heard recover faster and experience fewer chronic symptoms.

Unlike Western quick fixes, CAM cultivates trust in the body’s own pace. Healing unfolds through rest, awareness, and time. When Danira Caleta practices reiki on a cancer patient terrified before surgery, the woman enters the operating room serene—and recovers faster than expected. Slow medicine proves that gentleness can be potent. Honoré himself, skeptical at first, experiences recovery from leg pain after such treatment.

Redefining Health Culture

Slow Medicine doesn’t reject science; it demands balance. Integrative clinics across Harvard, Columbia, and Duke show evidence that meditation and yoga reduce hypertension and pain. Critics warn of charlatans, but proper regulation—like Britain’s licensing for osteopaths—anchors holistic care in credibility. Economically, prevention is cheaper than cure: herbs like St. John’s Wort offer safe, low-cost alternatives to antidepressants.

Ultimately, Slow Medicine reclaims health as relationship—between doctor and patient, mind and body, humans and nature. Medicine stops being a race to suppress symptoms and becomes a dialogue about how to live well within time’s natural rhythm.

In perhaps his most subversive chapter, Honoré takes on the workplace—the epicenter of Fast culture. For centuries, technology promised shorter hours and abundant leisure. Franklin and Marx envisioned a four-hour workday. Yet instead of liberation, machines chained us closer to the job. Today, overwork defines success.

The Illusion of Hard Work

The modern professional worships busyness. Americans work 350 hours more per year than Europeans, and Japan coined karoshi—death by overwork. Productivity, however, declines with fatigue: overworked countries like Britain and the U.S. produce less per hour than “lazy” nations such as Norway or Belgium. Honoré argues that working less often means working better.

Countries adopting shorter hours—like France’s 35-hour week and the Netherlands’ flexible employment laws—report happier workers, lower unemployment, and resilient productivity. In Japan, younger generations of Fureeta refuse their parents’ punishing schedules, embracing freedom even at economic cost. In North America, movements like Take Back Your Time Day and “work-life balance” campaigns are transforming corporate culture.

Flexible Time, Better Thinking

Companies that slow down often thrive. At SAS software and the Royal Bank of Canada, employees choose flexible hours, work from home, or job-share like Karen Domaratzki and Susan Lieberman, who each work three days a week managing international banking. Their reduced schedules make them calmer, more creative—and ironically, more productive. Marriott’s “anti-presenteeism” experiment proved the same: managers who go home at 5 P.M. inspire higher morale and deliver better results.

Slow Work also means Slow Thinking. Strategic insight, innovation, and empathy can’t be rushed. German lawyer Erwin Heller finds that spending two hours listening to clients reveals their unspoken motives and prevents costly mistakes. Even executives like Jill Hancock, who now turns off her phone after hours, discover that stepping away sharpens focus and mental health.

If there’s a moral, it’s that slowing work restores meaning to labor. “We can still turn on the gas,” says one businessman, “but we don’t have to all the time.” The Slow workplace asks not “How fast?” but “How well?”—a shift that may matter as much to global sustainability as it does to personal sanity.

When even sex becomes hurried, Honoré suggests, it’s clear we’ve reached peak velocity. The chapter opens with the public ridicule of musician Sting’s admission to practicing Tantra—a telling sign of our culture’s discomfort with slow pleasure. Beneath the satire lies a serious issue: the commodification and acceleration of intimacy.

The Rush to the Finish

Despite the sexual revolution, studies show the average American has sex only thirty minutes per week, with many men reaching orgasm within two minutes. Pornography, performance anxiety, and pharmaceutical “fixes” like Viagra reinforce the view that faster is better, turning pleasure into a race to climax. Women, who take twice as long on average to reach arousal, are left behind both literally and emotionally.

Tantra and the Rise of Slow Sex

Honoré explores how ancient Tantric traditions—originally spiritual, not erotic—have reemerged as tools for modern reconnection. In workshops led by teachers like Leora Lightwoman in London, couples learn breathing, eye contact, and mutual touch through exercises like “Yes-No-Maybe-Please,” slowing the act to expand awareness. Even skeptics, like journalist Val Sampson and her husband, find the results transformative: deeper intimacy, prolonged pleasure, and emotional honesty.

Beyond Tantra, a grassroots “Slow Sex” movement—born in Bra, Italy—transplants Slow Food’s ethos from the kitchen to the bedroom. Its founder, Alberto Vitale, urges lovers to abandon conquest culture and rediscover sensuality over performance. As one Japanese magazine teaches readers, the best encounters are “Polynesian-style”—unhurried exploration over frantic efficiency.

The lesson is neither prudish nor hedonistic: slowing down erotically rebuilds connection, patience, and empathy. As participants like Roger and Cathy Kimber discover, slowing sex can even enrich marriage and spill over into life itself—making partners kinder, calmer, and less obsessed with speed at work. Intimacy, Honoré concludes, may be the most profound teacher of slowness we have.

Few aspects of modern life better illustrate speed’s cost than childhood. Parents push kids to read at three, learn languages at five, and fill calendars with sports and tutoring. In response, Harvard dean Harry Lewis writes a letter titled Slow Down to students rushing through degrees—and thus life itself. Honoré sees in this an emerging philosophy of Slow Schooling.

The Cost of Hyper-Parenting

Psychologist David Elkind warned decades ago of “the hurried child.” Yet now, school systems and parental anxiety amplify the race. In Japan and Korea, “cram schools” breed exhaustion; in America, even preschoolers endure “drill and kill” curricula. The results: sleep-deprived, stressed, less imaginative children. Studies by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek show that playful learning fosters greater creativity and emotional intelligence than forced acceleration.

Models of Slow Learning

Honoré profiles schools that rebel. Finland delays formal education until age seven, yet leads in global literacy. Japan experiments with “sunshine education,” cutting Saturday classes and promoting creativity. In Canada, the University of Toronto’s Laboratory School cultivates depth over testing, proving that well-being breeds excellence. Home-schoolers adopt similar rhythms, reclaiming family time and discovering children learn faster when free to set their own pace.

Parents, too, rediscover the joy of boredom and play. Community initiatives like New Jersey’s “Ready, Set, Relax” night cancel all homework and activities for one evening, encouraging families to cook, converse, or wander. Kids like Jack Barnes, once over-scheduled, thrive when given “empty time” to build, imagine, and rest. As Plato foresaw millennia ago, genuine education begins among beautiful, unhurried things.

Slow parenting and schooling are not luxuries but necessities for sanity. When children learn presence instead of performance, they carry it into adulthood. The next generation of Slow thinkers may not just live better—they may save a civilization spinning out of control.

Leisure—once the crown of civilization—has become another task to optimize. Honoré reminds us that true rest is an art form. Quoting Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness, he argues that to fill leisure intelligently requires maturity. Yet modern life treats free time like an empty slot on a calendar to be consumed by TV or errands. Slow leisure restores what sociologist Agnes Repplier called “the true fabric of self.”

The Craft of Contemplation

Reviving nineteenth-century ideals, Honoré explores the renaissance of crafts, gardening, reading, and art. Knitting groups, once dismissed as quaint, now serve as meditative sanctuaries—“the new yoga,” as author Bernadette Murphy calls it. Slowly looping yarn quiets the nervous system, lowers blood pressure, and builds community. Gardening performs the same miracle outdoors: in the earth’s rhythms, we relearn patience, humility, and connection.

Reading also makes a comeback. Book clubs and literary movements—especially among children reawakened by Harry Potter—encourage what Israeli author Amos Oz calls “the art of slow reading.” Some scholars experiment with nineteenth-century pacing, reading Dickens in monthly installments. Others, like professors in Canada, augment the practice with reflective diaries, finding deeper understanding when consumption slows.

Music, Art, and the Tempo Giusto

Even the arts suffer from haste. In Germany, pianist Uwe Kliemt leads the Tempo Giusto movement, urging musicians to play classical pieces at their historically intended, slower tempos. His performances reveal harmonies lost to twentieth-century virtuosity obsessed with speed. Similarly, John Cage’s As Slow As Possible—a concert scheduled to last 639 years—symbolically opposes the acceleration of culture. As Honoré writes, “A concert so slow that no one who attends opening night will live to hear the final note is perhaps the perfect monument to patience.”

In every domain, slowing down leisure transforms it from consumption into creation. It reconnects us to timeless pleasure—doing one thing well for its own sake. When life itself becomes an art, not a race, humanity regains what progress forgot: the grace of stillness.

Honoré ends where he began: with time itself. The tragedy of the Titanic, launched as the fastest and “unsinkable” ship, symbolizes the danger of technological hubris. A century later, we are all sailing modern Titans—machines, cities, and careers driven by speed at any cost. But slowing down, he insists, is no longer indulgence; it’s survival.

Balancing Fast and Slow

The Slow Movement’s ultimate teaching is balance. Honoré rejects false dichotomies: Slow versus fast, old versus modern. Instead, he champions tempo giusto—the right speed. Some moments require acceleration; others demand stillness. By learning to shift gears consciously, individuals reclaim sovereignty over time. Cultures, too, must redesign systems—education, work, medicine—to honor biological and social rhythms.

Slowness is contagious. A man who reads to his children unhurriedly may inspire a calmer household; a company that shortens hours may influence an entire industry. The psychologist Larry Dossey calls this “time exit” therapy—the act of stepping outside clock tyranny through meditation or mindfulness. As people rediscover these exits, communities reach “critical mass,” transforming personal choices into cultural revolutions.

Toward a Slower Future

Slowness is not elitist. Anyone can begin by walking instead of driving, savoring a meal without devices, or pausing before replying to an email. At its core, being Slow means treating time not as an enemy but as a companion. When Honoré learns to read bedtime stories without glancing at the clock, his son finally drifts off—not rushed, but fulfilled. The moment encapsulates the book’s thesis: joy is found in presence, not pace.

Honoré’s call is both humble and radical: to govern the clock rather than be governed by it. If enough of us find our tempo giusto, the world itself might slow—not to stop progress, but to make it worth living through.