Slow Living

It started with a slow food movement and spread from there to all expressions of life.

It was a movement that took its starting point from the city’s accelerated lifestyle and pace. Everything about city life is accelerated, everyone moves quickly, people become impatient and frustratedly aggressive in queue culture, in transport blockages and in crowded places. Frustrations, aggressions and misunderstandings are reinforced by the fact that city people have minimal contact with the hordes of other people they run into while moving around the urban landscape, while trying to avoid meeting them. They have a low tolerance and empathy threshold, because compassion is not possible without an encounter with the other person. The level of chronic stress is high in the urban environment.
And in working life. Industrialism demanded hurry-up all the time.

And on the highways, which are built for people to rush to work, and when traffic jams always occur in the same places at the same times, people sit in their own rolling sardine cans and get blood clots all over it – only one man and one woman per can, because you can’t figure out how to drive into town together and save a lot of money on it, so if it were a widespread practice, there wouldn’t be traffic jams. The egg was laid by a hen that laid an egg.

Slow food was a deliberate choice of words with a clear address to fast food. Understand that correctly. Food that can be served quickly does not necessarily mean bad food. It depends entirely on the concept, preparation and choice of the raw materials that are used. A dish can easily be a slow-cooked dish that is simply given the final touch before serving. But unfortunately – and now we’re throwing out a number – 90% of all fast food, especially in urban environments, is synonymous with cheap, fast and industrially deteriorated food. Maybe it’s been thrown into a damp deep fryer, maybe it’s been thrown into a microwave, maybe it’s been simmering in a hot display for hours, maybe it’s been overcooked on a spit and then dry-fried on a grill plate supplemented with damp cooking oil. Fast food chains are often international mega-corporations, and their only criterion is how cheaply they can do it and how much they can make. They are heavy consumers of flavor enhancers to compensate for the natural flavor that comes with all good and well-prepared food. The refrigerators in supermarkets, kiosks, 7/11s, gas stations are full of catering food in plastic containers. Fast food has become synonymous with junk food – stick your head in a trash can and eat your way through.

In comparison, street food in the fringe world is full of examples of quality food made with little means by the small, hard-working street vendor. He shows up on the street at 7 am (at the latest) and gets to work with his pots, marinades, baking, whatever, maybe he/she just has a stand on wheels, and the cooking utensils look like something from a scrapyard – but it works, and it tastes heavenly when customers arrive from late morning until late at night. Slow cooked – fast served and lots of tradition, skill and love.

Modern city life consists of being able to do more and more in less and less time with less and less cost. The slow food movement started a broader movement for a slowed-down pace of life in the recognition that the all-too-fast food was only a symptom of an entire culture of life that had been blunted and defined by the inhumane work standards of industrial society under the conditions of industrialism.

The old-timers had a saying: haste is a waste (Danish: hastværk er lastværk meaning: haste makes sloppy). It was a simple common sense realization in the people’s soul that if you rushed too much, the result would be bad. Industrialism created a hurry-up-all-the-time culture. Factory piecework said hurry-up, profit maximization said hurry, rationalization experts said hurry, lean systems said hurry. The culture went from being adult and well-considered and things take the time they take to childish-impatient immediate satisfaction of needs. Which children’s needs are we talking about? The needs of the employers, the needs of the big machine, not the needs of people. But because people are easy victims, they identify with their executioners, so they make it their needs.

It sounds like socialist talk, but people who know overetagen.dk know that socialism is very little on our minds, because socialism was not created by workers but by employers (socialists have NO idea who brainwashed them). The Soviet Bolshevik state created a society with low productivity, but it was certainly not because the poor workers were supposed to have a better and slower life, it was because the Soviet state stole or destroyed all small private enterprises and demotivated all private initiative. Why make an extra effort if the State steals everything anyway without giving anything in return and on top of that despises and mistreats the population?

If people are motivated, have self-control over their productive lives and are therefore naturally rewarded for extra effort, there are almost no limits to their diligence and willingness to work. The industrial society and the Soviet state – the experimental chamber of industrialism in the great open prison – committed the ultimate blunder of forcing this productivity by creating a slave-whip society. The demotivation was overtaken by the whipping far along the way – until the regime collapsed.

The slave-state owners always think in terms of coercion, force and coercion and never in terms of a common understanding and a win-win situation.
The slave state owners see themselves as precisely owners and not as allies.
The slave state owners think of the Roman state as their background, which subjugated peoples and cultures through brute force, confiscated their resources and creations and even took credit for these creations.
The slave state owners in the West saw that the socialist model in the East had ‘inappropriate’ downsides, so they tried to adjust the model so that people only discovered that they were ‘socialized’ = enslaved when it was all too late. This is the Scandinavian model called social democracy.
The slave state owners have always operated according to the fascist principle: There is nothing above the State. And the State – that is them.

The slow life is about one concept: balance. It is not a snail’s pace philosophy. Speed ​​is appropriate when it is appropriate, slowness is appropriate when it is appropriate. Musicians call it tempo giusto, the right tempo. You can’t put a metronome on it, there is no objective yardstick, you have to feel your way, you have to take into account the form of the day, the accoustics on location and it is not the same today as yesterday and tomorrow.

What almost always makes us pick up the pace? It is the environment, our sorroundings, the others.
We are surrounded by people who have picked up the pace.
We are surrounded by media influences that tell us to pick up the pace.
We are raised by school systems that tell us to hurry.
We go out into the street where all the signals say hurry.
And if they don’t tell us to hurry, they tell us to wait – and wait and wait,
until they let us hurry.
We drive on highways that tell us to hurry until the traffic comes to a complete standstill,
so we sit there getting furiously frustrated that we can’t hurry,
even though they tell us to hurry.
We sit on trains that are delayed and are about to be too late to hurry.

In a competitive society, we all have to hurry.
It’s about winning the race and coming first.
We didn’t learn to be the best, only to be the first.
Who’s going first? we shouted at each other as children, and of course it was in jest, and we laughed about it, because who doesn’t like a little speed race?
But we kept shouting at each other as adults, and now it wasn’t funny anymore.

There is a problem with life in the fast lane with a stiff dick and hair left behind.
The problem is the same as the travel experience.
When we get into a car, we put a kind of TV screen on our heads.
The road rolls by, and all sensations of intermediate stations are erased.
The distance between point A and point B is meaningless.
There is a start, and then it is over, and everything in between is a TV broadcast.
It is only when we get out of the car that we really experience.

In a competitive society, we forget what competition could be:
that the only true competitor is OURSELVES.
Competition is to surpass ourselves. We can never lose that competition.
In a competitive society, there are always losers.
We are constantly looking over our shoulders, as if we are being persecuted.
We live in a state of fear of what others think of us.
Or rather: We live in a state of assumptions about what others think of us,
after which we adapt to these assumptions and try to live in a way that is supposed to mitigate others’ supposed assumptions about us.

The slow life is not resistance or inability to speeding up.
Being busy is not the same as being stressed.
Let’s define stress.

Stress is not a disease, and it is not unhealthy.
It is the body’s natural and appropriate reaction to a critical situation, where the body and its occupant are in danger of death, or where an extreme external influence provokes. It activates the adrenaline in the body, which simultaneously shuts down other functions in the body for as long as it lasts. And the last thing is extremely important to understand: for as long as it lasts.
Because if the situation is not normalized, and we do not get a full overview of the situation again, then the stress is not released, and the balance is not reestablished. After that, it becomes traumatic and pathological, because the body cannot tolerate chronic stress, but only acute stress. From being acute = life-saving it becomes chronic = life-threatening.

What causes stress in working life?
Stress is not busyness, it is a lack of overview. When we have a full overview of work tasks, we can put ourselves in the saddle without stressing and get a lot done. Or stress in a harmless way to de-stress afterwards. In types of work with emergency response, police, hospital services, fire brigades, military, there is a debriefing after stressful tasks to take the pressure off and ensure normalization of those involved.

If this overview is missing, we must ask the next question:
Who in working life is responsible for or can/should take responsibility for ensuring that stress can be avoided and resolved when it cannot be completely avoided?
Firstly, management has a great responsibility. It is a management task to ensure that precisely the management and distribution of work is ensured by having the big picture. Good management frees employees by providing them with a full overview.
Secondly, it is the employee’s responsibility towards themselves to speak up and leave. Unfortunately, quite a few, if not many, employees have been intimidated into not speaking up and showing the flag when the situation deteriorates.
Are we intimidated from the outside, or have we managed to intimidate ourselves?
Fear creates the object of fear – not the other way around.

Companies are increasingly reporting people who ‘go down with stress’, which triggers long-term sick leave. Stress has become a diagnosis. Burnout has become a concept in our time.
At the same time as these cases became more and more frequent, the HR syndrome in management culture was pronounced. HR = Human Resource Management, which is the management of human resources. Note that in this technocratic management culture, people are not primarily considered human beings with resources, but as resources in themselves. In other words, like coal and sand dug up from the ground, like grain harvested from the field, like pigs from a pig farm. We are not primarily people who have chosen to make our human resources available for appropriate payment, but resources that, as a side effect, have an attached human being who must be managed to make himself available as appropriately as possible for the business plan and the annual accounts.
The management culture in companies reflects this industrialized view of humanity.

The slow life is about YOU being the one who controls when to drive fast and when to drive slow. It’s about self-control and overview. The desire for speed has gone wild, when there always has to be speed across the field with a snappy dog ​​in the ass all the time. First we were whipped, and then we became self-flagellants. Even in our spare time after working hours, everything had to go fast.

Food had to be swallowed quickly.
Sex had to be finished quickly.
Many people can no longer read a book, because it goes too slowly.
Ready-made meals and fast food are being eaten like never before in the small homes out there.
People have to sacrifice their paid lunch at work, because there’s a deadline.
Or they’ll eat a sandwich while they continue writing on the deadline-hit assignment.

The slow life is about the right to control our own pace. Surprisingly enough, it turns out that productivity is the same and often better – just without the side effects. Job satisfaction = productivity. Some companies have understood it, others have not. Others again – and this is almost the worst – say that they have understood it very well, after which they fire off a lot of fancy platitudes and signals and pretend that they are oh-so-understanding. After that, business-as-usual.

In nature, everything happens at its own pace. But where agriculture used to live and produce by following the pace of nature, crops and animals today are stressed to produce at an up-tempo all the time. Neither plants nor animals have time to grow up anymore. Chickens are pumped so that they grow quickly, after which: off with the head. Cows are bred stressed from birth, so that they can produce 20 liters of milk a day – and must be killed after 2-3 years and sold as bad minced meat. Crops are pumped with fertilizer so that they can give as much as possible in the shortest possible time. We are consumers of fast-growing wood, even though we know that slow-growing wood is much better – which means that it is being exploited.

The slow life is not about removing technology from life. It is about you controlling technology and not technology controlling you. However, that is just how it has become, and people are completely dictated by TV, text messages, emails and social networks. Since people’s activities on these networks and channels are directly proportional to the Tech companies’ harvesting, exploitation and resale of personal data, these have been deliberately made addictive. The mobile is the new cocaine. It is now completely OK to spy deeply into people’s private lives, which 40 years ago would have been a crime. The companies are untouchable, because the authorities who were supposed to check that they did not commit these widespread abuses are cowards They know it is happening, but they turn a blind eye. Microsoft has a larger turnover than the gross domestic products of most states. States and governments are in bed with the Tech companies. Why? To avoid reprisals (the stick), and because they themselves use the companies’ hi-tech to monitor citizens (the carrot). Non-tech companies – and certainly the tech companies themselves – are now monitoring their employees – without announcing it.

The philosophy behind these illegalities is the low-brow one: If it works, it works.
And: As long as we are not punished for it, we will keep doing it.
Good old-fashioned ethical considerations are out of the question here.
Companies and the state have developed a blue-stamped criminal mastermind culture, where they allow themselves to do it without asking employees or citizens for permission.

A completely simple and impractical measure like ‘forgetting’ your mobile teddy bear for just half a day at a time is a score point for the slow life. If you enter a public means of transport and do a quick overview of, for example, the S-train compartment, you will discover that somewhere between 50-75% of the passengers are hunched over. Their necks are hunched over and their eyes are glued to their mobile phones. There is less talking in train compartments than in the past, because most people pull the curtain down over their faces within the first half minute after boarding and go into a hushed tone, after which spontaneous conversation is no longer possible. We have become afraid of each other, and this chronic petty anxiety is part of a life that is far too fast, a tempo non-giusto.

Is the fast life in the fast lane really fast?
One might ask. The answer already lies in the experience of drivers in traffic-controlled areas. A young speed-loving guy in a black Audi or VW Golf steps on the nail when the light turns green, and who stops and waits when you reach the next traffic light in the green wave? The guy in the black Audi does. At distances of up to 50 km, you can perhaps gain 5 minutes by driving too fast. What do you want with those 5 minutes?

The opposite end of the scale must be the camel stop in the Sahara.
Well, the camel caravan didn’t come today, so maybe it will come tomorrow or in a week.
We just wait so long, no need to worry about it, it will come when it comes.
We sit down in the shade for so long, have a cup of tea and a pipe and a chat about life.

There is a large international study on the ways people move in public spaces. It has been shown that there is a kind of ‘equator’ for how you move. Do you walk purposefully and quickly with your eyes forward, or do you walk more slowly while looking around?

It turns out that in Italy, for example, there is a border halfway down the boot. Once you have reached the upper edge of Palermo, people are much more laid-back. If you sit on a bench and watch the passers-by, you might notice it. If you do the same in one of the northern Italian cities where a lot of money is made, Milan, Florence – we ignore the tourists who are always strolling, because they are on vacation – then the pace is forced and high. But if you measure quality of life and happiness, it is below the pace equator that they score high.

If you want to be rich, you have to run fast. That’s what they do up there.
If you want to live a happy life, you have to walk quietly. That’s what they do down there.

Do the slow people south of the tempo equator go and drive it, and get nothing out of it? They get all sorts of wonderful things out of it. They grow a lot of fantastic wine and olives, and buffalo milk and lemons are the best in the world – down there. The city of Palermo in Sicily, down there, has been voted one of the five best cities in the world for street food – you know the little bike shop that gets up at 7 in the morning and… They say there is more poverty down there, but isn’t that because wealth is measured by income? If you travel in the so-called poor areas of the Peripheral World, you can experience the paradox in comparison to the so-called developed areas in our part of the world, that joy and hospitality are far greater. People wave to you on the road, the children are totally curious and come running, you can risk being invited inside to a ‘poor’ family who loves to have a strange guest from distant lands visit – and where you are treated like a king. You don’t do that in the ‘rich’ little country of Denmark anymore, because the hot food and hospitality are closed. We don’t have time for that.

When the stressed-out family comes home from their day at the slave factory and in a hurry has picked up their overtired offspring from the children’s institution with the standard 1.3 m² per screaming-wonder (how many cm² should a caged chicken have?), then things have to go well with the two hours of ‘quality time’ that are left, where all conflicts are avoided, because the modern family has left upbringing to the institutions, and where they are hastily fed with fast food, after which the screaming wonders cage themselves in their room with a mindless computer game, because now they are thoroughly tired of commanding adults and screaming fellow wonders. After a whole day of screaming at themselves and their fellow inmates, they have had enough.

Have you seen the famous short film by Carl Th. Dreyer ‘They reached the ferry’? Probably not, because what person under 50+ has seen a silent film from the beginning of the last century, which was the heyday of Danish film? A motorcyclist with a passenger in a sidecar is in a hurry, because he has to reach the ferry. A large black car has got in the way. The motorcyclist tries in every possible way to overtake. When he finally succeeds, he sees that it is Death sitting in the black car and laughing at him out of the side window. They reached the ferry – the ferryman was Charon, who sailed souls across the River Styx to the realm of the dead.