[From the Archives] The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society
Learning to slow down and appreciate our world is at odds with our culture of expediency but is a critical skill and habit to develop a better understanding of our world.
An excerpt from my forthcoming book ‘An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture.’
Greetings, fellow wanderers,
Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander approaches 800 subscribers, I recognize that most new subscribers may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 100 posts in the archive, I want to expose these paywalled posts to newcomers.
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Cheers!
-JSB
Now onto today’s archived post, The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society
“I suspect the mind, as the body, works at about three miles an hour.”
-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Living in the fast-paced, status-seeking society that we do, we are under enormous social, cultural, political, and economic pressures to earn our keep, outcompete one another, and “maximize efficiency” from the cradle to the grave. We get caught up in the grind of our careers. We build families, communities, and businesses. We become tied to seemingly endless debts and responsibilities. If we are lucky and not tied too much to our work, we might have time to take our annual one-week vacation each passing year to destress and “recharge” as if we’ve become human batteries in the Matrix.
If we are fortunate, we may retire with our bodies, minds, and finances intact enough to enjoy the fruits of our labor and do some well-deserved traveling. However, throughout most of our lives, we are certainly not immersing ourselves in the kind of travel and exploration many of us, I imagine, still desire to do “at some point down the road.” “Someday,” we say, but not now, not today.
Not having sufficient time to travel and read deeply and widely to reflect on the complexity of our world is deeply consequential and may be hindering our abilities to cultivate critical thinking and empathy for one another.
Our society places a premium on efficiency. Whether it’s coffee in the morning to get us going, Amazon packages arriving at our door in a single day, or getting to work “on time,” we greatly value expediency in our society. We even now demand this of our information. Until recently, news cycles were not 24/7, but we have rapidly transitioned into an information and knowledge economy that requires constant processing. Efficiency and expediency have obvious benefits, but we seldom ask whether efficiency is an intrinsic good. What might we be trading off for its sake? Is technology truly liberating us, or are there unforeseen restraints being placed on us? And how do we better slow down in our world? Do we even have a choice in the matter?
In her enchanting book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, author Rebecca Solnit puts forth a compelling argument about the consequences of efficiency on our lives. By increasing our technologies for the sake of efficiency, we, in a sense, abolish free time
“…by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New time-saving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them.”
For instance, if a car manufacturer finds a clever way to double the output of its cars and thus meets last week’s quota by Wednesday instead of Friday, it would be economically unwise to allow everyone to simply take the extra two days off and enjoy the extra free time in celebration of their hard work. The company is incentivized to take advantage of those two days and continue to crank out more vehicles to outcompete competitors, and that decision is almost always in the hands of a few with shareholder interests in mind rather than the workers at the bottom.
The argument for efficiency, Solnit continues,
“…suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued—that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster-paced.”
Have you tried to just stare at and study the pattern of a leaf lately without being high on some psychoactive ingredient? Does anxiety soon creep in after a minute goes by of sitting somewhere without your phone and you have the sense that you are “wasting time”? Isn’t it strange that our culture of efficiency can elicit a physiological response of anxiety within us? Why are we bothered by inactivity and lack of efficiency?
The signs of people anxious to get to their destinations as quickly as possible are all around us. Advertising and marketing industries are compelled to find all kinds of clever ways to fill those voids and capture our attention. Perhaps this helps explain why so many of us are glued to our phones while walking down a street, unsuspecting of our immediate opportunities for direct experience. Even amid the wilderness where people visit with the direct intention to remove themselves from the demanding speed of everyday life, one can see traces of people cutting through the brush, anxious to get back to the rhythm of a restless, racing society. Solnit reflects on this observation on hiking trails:
Even on this headland route going nowhere useful, this route that could only be walked for pleasure, people had trodden shortcuts between the switchbacks as though efficiency was a habit they couldn’t shake. The indeterminacy of a ramble, on which much may be discovered, is being replaced by the determinant shortest distance to be traversed with all possible speed, as well as by the electronic transmissions that make real travel less necessary. As a member of the self-employed whose time saved by technology can be lavished on day-dreams and meanders, I know these things have their uses, and use them—a truck, a computer, a modem—myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival.[1]
This shouldn’t be interpreted as some technophobic Luddite call to smash our appliances and gadgets and get back to basics in remote cabins like the Unabomber. This analysis of our technology and culture is meant to show us that trade-offs are taking place at a rapid speed, and it might be wise to understand in what ways these current transitions in technology and culture might be impacting our behavior and society. How might the restlessness we all feel be related to our society’s efficiency addiction?
One of the main concerns as a social scientist is wondering how all the subtle unconscious changes in our technology and society might impact our psychology and behavior for the worse. It’s nearly impossible to divorce ourselves completely from the current conditions of our hectic lives, and most of us are hesitant, if not outright reluctant, to do so when allowed to “get away from it all.” Once we have become cushioned by the convenience of all our gadgets and entertainment, it becomes very difficult to slowly trim it back. Slowing down our lives is incredibly challenging today because we are entangled in a complex web of social relationships and responsibilities.
Even enjoying the act of reading, which historically used to be mostly a leisure activity, has been impacted. Our modern world, so bloated with information, has given birth to speed reading technologies like Spreeder that claim to allow you to read three times faster. Reading fast isn’t really the point, though—rather, it is how much useful information a reader can process, retain, and recall in their brain. I’m sure it’s great for powering through Harry Potter, maybe less so for a dense book like the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers, which is one of the longest books I’ve ever read, with 1,360 pages, and took me 7.5 months to read. Speed reading information like this probably won’t help you much if your goal is to retain and understand the subjects you are passionate about.
Mediums like Twitter and Instagram optimistically attempt to make our information quickly accessible and digestible in a few hundred characters or with images without words. These technologies are signs of a society desperate for more and more information. However, even if pictures are worth a thousand words, that’s still not adequate to understanding the context of our world, nor does it consider how much misinformation derails our thinking on a day-to-day basis. These communication models are brilliant in theory, given how much data we must synthesize regularly for work, and also doing our best to keep up with the news, but it is debatable whether our brains can keep pace with all the rapid changes occurring in society and culture. By receiving more of our information this way, are we certain that we can better process and store information and be more informed, or is this feeding into an illusion?
There remains much information in our world that simply cannot be synthesized as quickly as we’d like. It would be wonderful if we could simply insert a chip into our brains and instantly upload black belt-level Kung Fu to our martial arts repertoire or the Encyclopedia Britannica, but we can’t. Maybe Elon Musk’s Neuralink company, with the promise to “unlock human potential,” will eventually make some strides toward improving mental capabilities for our species, but I wouldn’t expect that to scale any time soon.
The truly important stuff requires time and discipline to learn. Learning things like history, mathematics, and the scientific process requires years and years of dedication. And even then, our minds are still limited by memory problems. For all the technophiles out there who think they can speed read and analyze everything in an afternoon and pride themselves on reading a whole book a day, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but our brains are not computers and you’re probably not processing as much information as you think.
What all this means is that hefty and dense books still need to be read and patiently pondered over if you truly want to understand a subject, no matter how archaic it feels. Listening to podcasts is enjoyable and entertaining, but it is debatable how much information we retain from passively listening to a podcast on, say, the French Revolution, especially if we’re being distracted by other tasks like driving or cooking. We have to legitimately engage with a subject. Long conversations and training still must be had with experts in their field. Watching how-to videos on YouTube can potentially help you fix a broken sink in real-time, but it won’t help you master much else in this world. Learning a trade like carpentry or martial arts, or becoming a scientist or economist, or doctor takes most people a lifetime to master.
Out of all this comes the realization that there is a need for a type of hierarchy in society based on knowledge and expertise, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We live in populist times when many believe we can easily dispense with “elites” and somehow become magically smarter and more capable of doing everything ourselves. But we cannot all be expected to always be “doing our own research” and thinking we can somehow will ourselves into knowing more than those who dedicate their lives to learning a set of skills and subjects. No, this doesn’t mean someone automatically becomes the authority. No one should be assumed to ever have a monopoly of knowledge or wisdom. But some people can be an authority or expert in their field. And we need those experts in knowledge to help us all navigate the complexities of life on this planet.
The slowness of learning means we can only grasp so much understanding in our lifetime, and we will have to come to depend on others to help inform us when we are ignorant. This should humble us, not frighten us, or make us feel inadequate. The real challenge for all of us, then, is that we have to learn how to construct more trust within our society. And building trust and gaining empathy, unfortunately, takes time and patience, especially if it comes in the wake of violence and conflict.
Lots of time and energy will always need to be expended on understanding the aspects of our lives that truly matter in today’s world: cultivating healthy social relationships; appreciating the complexities of things like history, science, culture, politics, and ecology; mastering our craft, trade, or creative outlets. But this proves to be a paradox when the pace of society and the turnover of new information continues to quicken. How do we keep up with everything going on in the world if things keep speeding up?
What does any of this have to do with travel and adventure?
One of the best insurance policies against ignorance is to confront issues and arguments directly. Though this will sound old-fashioned, the two best ways I know to do this are through travel and reading as extensively and deeply as we can. Slow travel and slow reading are the best mediums to engage with complex ideas—something many of us keep forgetting in our media-saturated world, full of those who think they can watch a few TikTok videos and be sufficiently informed on some random political topic. Much of social media unwittingly incentivizes hubris, rather than understanding. How do we temper these ugly sides of ourselves?
Slow travel and slow reading are far better, albeit more time-consuming, ways to know and understand people, places, and ideas because all our senses are often present and engaged while traveling and reading. What type of reading and travel? Anything that causes a person to critically judge reality: a book that intimately grips us into seeing the world from the mind of another; considering the viewpoints of someone you strongly disagree with in an attempt to see their perspective; following a blog that challenges our preconceived notions of life in another area of the world; examining a landscape or culture that tunes us into witnessing a completely different way of life.
Part of our social currency depends on being up to date on current events. But how much do we need to be aware of all current events, all of the time, especially those that will likely have little to no significant impact on our lives? At what point does this information become psychologically damaging and more costly than beneficial? With a finite amount of time on this earth, we owe it to ourselves and others around us to be a bit more mindful about who and what we give our time and attention to. We can ask ourselves, “Is what I’m doing right now truly fulfilling? Is this issue I’ve been ruminating on all day worth my time? Is this contributing to human flourishing and an example of the values I want to see more of in our world? Am I going to do anything actionable with this information to improve my life or those of others?”
One of the most striking things found in hiking for four months on the Appalachian Trail was the incredible sense of ease and reduction of my anxiety and worry about the ongoing social, political, and economic problems tirelessly circulating the airwaves. We were forced to slow down, and our previously fast-paced life was put on mute for a moment, and we could once again hear the birds singing and the wind swaying the trees. It made me think of just how much our technological connectivity has become both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, by being “connected,” we gain our social currency and can deem ourselves “informed” and participate in all the social and political gossip and movements occurring in our culture. On the other hand, we are strangely disconnecting ourselves at the same time from our immediate surroundings. It seems increasingly difficult to separate what actual events and issues are pertinent or impact our lives anymore. During the time on the AT, our lives felt far more authentic, and our thoughts were much clearer, primarily because we could slow down. As Solnit observes,
“I suspect the mind, as the body, works at about three miles an hour.”
Do not be mistaken. This is not an argument for burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the many problems around the world. On the contrary, slowing down to reflect on what things we do and do not have control over and how much power we possess to contribute toward goodness in the world is what is key. Sending out endless passive-aggressive social media posts in the ether of the internet probably doesn’t amount to much problem-solving in the real world. The world can be an absurd, pointless, and depressing place full of what seem to be insurmountable problems like Sisyphus endlessly pushing his boulder up the mountain, yet as Albert Camus famously wrote,
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
So step back for a moment, take a deep breath, and begin slowing down to allow yourself to think more clearly. What little things can we do?
Like the Hubble telescope, fixated on its long exposure to the deepest realms of our universe, we too must mirror our long exposure to a diversity of ideas found exclusively in the interactions we have with cultures, landscapes, and literature. In short, we must learn to slow down and structure slow travel and slow reading into our lives if we hope to lead a less anxious existence amid our expedient culture and society.
I suspect that one of the few ways we have to overcome our world’s most sinister vices of prejudice, bigotry, hatred, and ignorance may be through deeper forms of travel and adventure because they tend to cultivate both critical thinking and empathy. Maybe this is just a romantic delusion. However, the fact remains that I, along with countless others interested in understanding the world through these slow-wandering mediums, tend to feel anxieties and fears diminish, a sense of peace overcome me, and an appreciation of the human condition set in with each step in the direction of another adventure, whether that be “out there” in the world or with my head buried in a book.
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project. Much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
[1] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Group, 2000), p. 10.
Thanks for your reflections on learning. I think of knowledge as an expanding bubble: the bigger it grows, the greater contact it has with everything beyond it that is, as yet, unknown.