The Unexpected Benefits of Cutting Back
Featured Guest Blogger May 12th, 2009
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow sex, and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, and community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.
Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations, or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.
It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” i.e. uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. According to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a widespread desire to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market.
Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.
