Five years back, I was having a casual conversation with my brother. You know, the usual ones. A conversation with no purpose, but it feels good to have it for no reason.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I told him that life is happening, I am just watching it pass by, and I need to slow down and blah, blah, blah. He mentioned an initiative called the Slow Project. It sounded like a lot of crap.
At that time, I don’t think I really knew what slowing down meant. How does it feel? What is the process? What changes have to happen so that I don’t watch my life pass by and, instead, participate in it?
We bantered about it for a while, and then we moved on, the same way we move on from most of the good things we are supposed to chase or keep track of.
At least, I thought I had moved on. My subconscious hadn’t.
The wish was there, somewhere.
It is said that desires and thoughts appear in your mind with a feeling around them. The conscious mind forgets and takes care of what is happening presently. Somewhere underneath, the desire, that thought, is still there, and it doesn’t go away just because you stopped paying attention. It keeps coming back, again and again, until you finally listen.
It happened in a similar way for me. And I didn’t even know what I was asking for or what was actually happening.
“Slowing down” was just a phrase. The first time I actually mentioned it in a proper conversation with my brother, it came after a this post regarding this desire to settle in my hometown once and for all. At that time, I guess it was about too much city life in the preceding years and an intent to literally slow down and spend life in a small city. I convinced myself that all I wanted was to settle in Dehradun once and for all.
A small detour here.
Between 2014 and 2024, a full decade of my life, I turned into a social media junkie. Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram — I was on all of them, and I needed to know everything the moment it happened, anywhere in the world. Not only that, I needed to have an opinion on all of it, and I wanted people to read it. I am different, I kept telling myself, and the world should feel privileged to read my opinions.
I consumed content like somebody mad about possessing all kinds of knowledge, and I kept posting because, in my head, I truly believed that with my humour and satire, I was one good post away from becoming a popular voice online.
The endless consuming slowly pulled me toward the self-help and personal development crowd, the people who had apparently cracked the code of life and seen, done and won it all. I was saving their content on my phone to read later. Later, as you can guess, never came.
The real damage was the dopamine hit I was getting from the plans in my head and feeling success without lifting a finger. Every day, a new big idea would show up on my feed, I would get excited, start something, and then the next big idea would arrive before I could do anything meaningful with the first.
I never stayed with anything long enough to see it through because in my endless pursuit of consuming knowledge and wisdom, I became an expert doom scroller.
The day I pulled the plug
Everything comes in cycles, and thankfully, my social media cycle is over. The thrill of doing absolutely nothing had been fading for a couple of years. I knew this had to stop, but knowing something and doing something are two very different things, and it took me two more years to close the gap.
The phone has now become an instrument for what it was built for: communication. I don’t scroll any social media anymore, and I have app blockers to stop me during my weak moments.
I have reverted to reading newspapers. I realised I hadn’t missed a single thing that I should have known immediately on X or FB. The world carried on perfectly well without my opinions on every matter.
And then in those moments, I found my slowness, the seeds of which were sown five years back by this incredibly powerful mind.
Coming back
To make it clear, I am not writing this because I think I have become some wise man. I am not spiritually enlightened, and that was never the goal. I am not on a journey to salvation. It is still a fight every single day to save myself from these distractions, and the pull is very much alive. As the saying goes: “You have to succeed every day; the devil only has to succeed once.”
But taking the option away from myself has helped me more than any amount of willpower. Or maybe it complements my desire to be strong in this matter.
This thing is tough in its own way. For someone like me, who is not into listening to songs or talking while travelling unless it is absolutely necessary, there are times when I don’t know what to do. When I travel in public transport, there is nothing to do on my phone, so I look up and look around. I watch people, and so far, I have managed to do it without looking like a creep.
What slow really means (for me)
It is not about being lazy or giving up on goals and hobbies. And it is tough to define. It is an abstract thing, not tangible, not measurable. But it adds more life to the days.
Slowness came for me in the form of making peace and accepting some truths. Firstly, I am human, and I will make mistakes. Secondly, it is nearly impossible to do everything, so it is okay to let a few things go. Thirdly, there are a few things I have absolutely no control over, and hence, what I choose to react to and how I react are very important.
Hence, I decided to stay away from FOMO. I try to plan my weekends to avoid doing random things. I eat food without a mobile in front of me.
There is no need for me to have every update the second it happens because if it is truly important, it will find its way, most probably in tomorrow’s newspaper.
I still have my moments of absolute boredom when picking up my mobile would be the easiest way out of doing nothing. It happens in the metro, in restaurants, or while waiting for somebody. I try to persist and tell myself that:
I chose to be slow, in a world designed to make everything fast.
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