Slow living and what it means to me

Slow living isn’t a new concept: a quick Google search will bring up a zillion different blog posts and opinion pieces on what exactly slow living means and how to practice it. But I find most of those write ups either too prescriptive with lists of rules to be followed, or too vague by equating it to a general uncapturable vibe. Even worse, slow living is often reduced to a #trend or #aesthetic built for quick consumerism on TikTok or Reels—really the total antithesis to what slow living is at its core. 

Or at least, what it is to me.

And I think that’s the key—slow living isn’t something that can be captured in a listicle or a pretty video or any blog post, because it is hyper-personal. One person’s slow living is another person’s boredom, after all. But I think that for those of us seeking a slower life, there’s value in outlining what it looks like to slow down in the context of our own individual lives. In this article I dig into why and how I’m trying to build a slower lifestyle, so you can hopefully find some ideas to explore for yourself.

What is slow living?

Slow living to me means making space in my life for quiet moments that bring me joy. It’s something I’ve written about before: slowing down is actually a practice of adding in activities that take me out of the day-to-day hustle and bustle of work and obligations. It has meant putting emphasis and priority on quiet, often solitary, and usually offline moments.

Which begs the question, why? What is it that draws me and so many others towards this lifestyle? What is the benefit of prioritising these (seemingly) anti-productive activities?

I think slow living is a natural reaction to our achievement-obsessed, hyper-productive capitalistic world. We can’t, unfortunately, opt out of the rat race. The economy sucks, we need to eat, and we need a roof over our heads. You have relationships to nurture and obligations to meet and people to care for (even more true if you have children). We’ve designed a world where not only success but basic safety is tied to how much we can do and produce.

So is it any wonder that we long to slow down?

To me, slow living is a rebellion against a system that demands so much of us. It’s stepping out of the daily grind whenever we can to seek moments away from it all. It’s building quiet—which was for so much of human history the natural state of existence—into as many pockets and corners of our lives as possible. 

How I came to my slow lifestyle

Like so many of us, I’m a chronic overachiever. And while that’s done me well in my career, it’s also meant that I’ve hit walls of burnout more than once. It became a cycle: focus entirely on work until I crashed, then take a desperate week off in an attempt to recharge. And I thought that that was all fine and dandy until something way more serious happened: I got diagnosed with a really rare variety of cervical cancer.

Now, I’m not saying burnout leads to cancer. Stress is definitely a contributing factor, but it’s almost definitely not the full story behind how I got sick (science, to be honest, isn’t really sure what caused my particular flavour of cancer). 

Cancer has a unique way of shaking up every corner of your life. As I went through months of gruelling treatment, I found myself re-examining every truth I’d held. What became clear was that I wasn’t happy. I’d let work take over every part of my life, pushing all the other things I loved—photography and writing and hiking and more—to the backseat. I’d felt for years like I didn’t have time for those hobbies. Work was so busy and I was so drained at the end of the day that even if I could find the time, I barely had the energy to do anything at all.

And that sucked.

The cracks in the facade had already been coming clear before I got sick. And after sitting with it for fourteen months of treatment, remission, and recovery, I knew that it was non-negotiable: I had to change how I was living my life.

Slow living at work

Balancing work with the things I love outside of work is an ongoing challenge, but I’ve been slowly building better frameworks for prioritising slowness with my demanding job. That has included:

• Removing work apps from my personal phone: Most of my work communications happen through Slack, so unless there’s extenuating circumstances like work travel, I don’t keep the Slack app on my personal phone.
• Muting notifications from work apps during my day: Even when I’m at work, I typically keep Slack muted and very often closed. Lots of people are able to handle incoming pings while they’re getting shit done; I am not one of them. Instead, I keep set times during the day where I check and address incoming pings, which leaves me other stretches to get into deep work.
• Saying no to more meetings: I come from a very meeting-heavy culture, and since my job is remote these are often necessary to work out project details. But I’ve gotten better at saying no to unnecessary meetings, too (though this is always a work in progress).
• Blocking my calendar: I love an organised calendar, and one of the most important ways I keep my day under control is by being over-the-top with time blocking on my calendar. I make sure to keep my full lunch hour blocked off, and will frequently book hours for deep work and tasks requiring complete focus. Depending on how busy of a season I’m in, I’ll even schedule time for stretching breaks and walks. Doing this makes those self-care moments non-negotiable, and protects my time and mental health from the craziness of my job.
• Taking small breaks: I’ve written before about fika, and about how the micro-ritual of making tea brings me a ton of joy. These kinds of small rituals help slow down the day and create pockets of breathing space, even when things are at their most busy.
• Being unreachable when I’m off: When I book time off, I mean it. At my company, I’ve noticed in the past couple years that vacations are becoming less respected—more and more, I see people working through their time off. That’s a boundary I won’t cross. When I’m off work, I do not log on (and I think everyone should do the same).

Work is work, and there will always be days (or even weeks!) when it’s a lot harder to avoid it taking over. But setting these boundaries has made it a lot easier to navigate those busy times, and has meant that I’m much better positioned to protect my space and keep work from spilling into my non-work slow life.

Slow living hobbies

Protecting my boundaries at work is one piece of the puzzle. Another piece is bringing in the hobbies that represent slow living to me: the ones that take me out of the busyness, that let me disconnect from the wider world, and that ground me and connect me to the moment and my immediate surroundings. 

These hobbies are hyper-personal, and what works for me might not work for you! One of the joys of embarking on a slow living lifestyle is exploring and discovering what hobbies really help you stay grounded. For me, these include:

• Hiking: Perhaps my ultimate slow living hobby, hiking has only gotten more important to me over the years. I’m a big fan of what I call slow hiking: taking my time, not being bothered by distance or speed, and really paying attention to the natural world around me. I almost always hike alone, and nothing turns my mood around faster or makes me feel better about the world. It also is my number one way of kick starting my creative process.
• Photography: Photography is an ultimate grounding exercise for me—it gets me out of the house, and is an exercise in paying attention to the details around me. It also often goes hand-in-hand with hiking, since my favourite thing to take pictures of is trees.
• Gardening: Since I live in Canada, this is very much a summer hobby. We first moved to a house with a yard in 2020, and since then our garden has been ever-expanding. Gardening is kind of a weird one in that it has actually contributed to my stress in the past—something that I’m trying to combat in 2024 with a new, more chaotic approach. But at its best, gardening feeds my soul in so many ways and as I sit here writing in February, I can’t wait to get my hands in the dirt.
• Crochet: Crochet is one of those hobbies that I give up and come back to on a pretty cyclical schedule. It’s also totally tied to the seasons: in the fall I’ll launch a bunch of new projects, but if they’re not done by March I probably won’t touch them again until the following autumn. But still, as someone who loves nothing more than being cozy, making a bunch of scarves and blankets out of yarn is a really satisfying process.
• Writing: Calling writing a hobby is kind of weird, since I make my living off of it as a content marketer. It’s also the thing that’s been with me longest—I remember sitting down to write stories when I was four or five, and I’ve never stopped. I go through cycles of writing fiction, but in starting up this blog it’s obviously non-fiction that’s taking up the bigger part of my life right now. But it’s an ideal slow hobby for me, providing an outlet that allows me to reflect on all the things that bring me joy.

Something I notice in putting together this list is that all my slow hobbies could be considered, in one way or another, productive: whether it’s exercise or veggies or a blanket, all of them produce some kind of end result. I don’t think that a slow hobby needs to be productive—in fact I think we should do what we can to get out of a productive mindset at all. 

But I also want to acknowledge that at some sort of basic level, I think humans do want to be productive. The problems arise in our current world when every ounce of productivity is wrung out of us on things we don’t find personally fulfilling. Part of what makes for a good slow hobby is that it fulfils some kind of creative need that is personal to us. It’s not that work can’t be fulfilling—but I do think that it’s important to also have sources of creative fulfilment that we don’t rely on for a paycheque.

The problems with slow living

It feels kind of disingenuous to talk about slow living without talking about the obvious problems with it. Each of the below points are things I want to talk about further in their own posts, but I want to include them because I want to make it clear that I’m not blind to them. It’s easy to sit here in my comfortable childless home with my swanky remote tech job and expound on the virtues of living slowly—it’s a lot different for a single mom working a minimum wage job who would (very rightfully) scoff at all of the above. So without further ado:

• Even being able to consider a slower lifestyle is immensely privileged. Like I said above, I’m writing all of this from a position of immense privilege, and the #slowliving movement as a whole doesn’t really account for the realities a lot of people are living. I can’t fix that, but I can acknowledge it, and say that our culture should do better (for example, by introducing universal basic income).
• Slow living is not a solution to rampant capitalism (and can even support it). One thing I’m personally aware of is avoiding any rhetoric that paints slow living as a way to recover from burnout/protect our energy/be more creative so that we can be better employees. Like I said above, we should all be able to have hobbies and fulfilment that are not tied to our ability to survive in our capitalist hellscape, so I’m trying to be mindful of decoupling the two.
• Slow living veers pretty quickly into tradwife, fundamentalist corners of the internet. Unfortunately, a lot of my interests end up bumping against this bullshit (gardening blogs are a goddamn minefield). I want to be clear that this space is inclusive, safe for trans folks, and absolutely not about any kind of fundamentalism. 

It’s an ongoing journey

Truth be told, I’m actually kind of uncomfortable labelling my life as a “slow living lifestyle,” though it certainly makes it easier to market this blog online. The reality is that creating a slower life is an ongoing process—you won’t suddenly wake up one day living a slow life, unbothered by the realities of existing in 2024. 

Instead, slow living to me is about bringing in moments of quiet, being comfortable with the potential of boredom, and putting emphasis on creating space every day. It’s an ongoing practice, a gentle sort of pushback against the fast-paced lives so many of us have lived (or are still living!).

And sometimes, for me at least, it’s about taking a lot of pictures of trees.

Tell me what slow living means to you down in the comments! I’m curious to see what resonates.