Curious about (slowing down)

On conniving convenience.

Progress has delivered everything except the will to endure it.

There is so much importance when it comes to understanding our tools and how they can affect the psychology of a culture and the overall well-being of our lives. While diminishing the monopoly of gatekeeping with information is a beautiful thing, I think that what’s getting lost is the depth of everything. So having access to it all is great, being able to travel and listen to different perspectives of a certain subject, engaging in discourse is critically important but what I have come to observe is while we are getting better at going wide we are not getting better at going deep and I think that is a greater danger—one that we will only realize in retrospect.

American culture, while abundant in accessibility and efficiency, often overlooks a critical cost: the loss of depth in our experiences. With productivity placed at the pinnacle of our values, we’re conditioned to move quickly, but not necessarily to feel deeply. The solution isn’t simply to slow down by avoiding fast food, taking more mental health days, or becoming less productive — it’s about intentionally creating space to absorb and process what we’re doing. It’s about reclaiming the richness of our daily lives, not by doing less, but by experiencing more.

Technology is eliminating the experience of acquiring knowledge, of struggle, of risk taking and the pursuit of education. Kids aren’t even dealing with solving the math problem as they have calculators, we aren’t reading texts, and I mean really reading them anymore, we are just sort of passing them by and going ‘wide.

Doordash, rather than taking time to cook, pre-cut vegetables, pre-minced garlic. It seems trivial, but it is removing the very soil that we need to empower ourselves with skills that ground us. Not struggling to write an essay because we have ChatGPT bringing up a counterpoint, not pushing ourselves to the arrival itself. That is where the nectar of growth lies, the sweetness of education and of shaping our perspectives, lives, and culture. That makes us human, that brings us to the here and now, and allows us to play with the here and now.

Yes, these are tools, but that’s all they are is the means to an end. As Alan Watts has said, with modern jet travel, you can arrive almost instantaneously. But when you eliminate the distance, you eliminate the journey…and life should be played! Like a sonata and waltzed like a waltz. The point of a dance is to dance, not to get to the other side of the room! It is through the dancing, and the stumbling and the tripping and putting in the time and practice that is required of us that we actually develop a deep sense of knowing, the deep sense of learning, and a deep sense of triumph in our ability to dance.

And even if we’re brand new to this life and this world, we know that it is this practice that actually improve our self-esteem and our overall skillset: practice, depth, NOT just exposure.

The danger is imminent because if you’re like me, convenience is what I look to as default. With these tools at my disposal, it is becoming an uphill battle to choose the alternatives. Even while knowing its importance and vitality.

Now, children don’t even have this wisdom, they are looking for survival based on the tools in front of them. They aren’t being exposed to the long way home, especially if we as parents aren’t modelling it. What is the result/a lack of grit, a lack of determination, and perseverance in the wake of things that don’t come easily. A resistance to the very things that make us human. I am vowing here to work to take the long way home. To choose the hard way. To choose the slow, the inconvenient, the boring. Because I know that that is where the magic lies. And it will take endurance, it will take a calling deep in my character, and a redefining of what is important to me. I think this is being lost most importantly in our children, and I think it could be really dangerous if we don’t start encouraging engagement in some of these really important presence-demanding activities. Practicing piano has taught me a lot about. This as well.

So let’s decide to embrace presence in those things that demand our timing is at the beck and call of nature. Reading—really reading, sex, classical music, gardening, watching things grow, writing, cooking (impulsively), failing, then trying the recipe again. Make up a dance with your sister like when you were children, paint and paint and fuck it up then paint it again.

It was Ernest Becker who pointed out: “...early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value. The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.”