But I think if you cut through those forces you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource, it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. Time is money, as Benjamin Franklin said. And I think what that -- that does to us psychologically is it -- it creates an equation. Time is scarce, so what do we do? Well -- well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line. A finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a -- a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best.
Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're roadkill, the opposite turns out to be true. That by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better, they make love better, they exercise better, they work better, they live better. And in this kind of cauldron of moments, and places, and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the International Slow Movement.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/carl_honore_praises_slowness.html
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