Slow living in a hyperconnected world

Lifestyle · 2026-05-26 · 6 min read

By Sara Iyer, Culture & media

Slow living is not doing less. It is refusing to do many things badly at once.

The exhausting part of modern life is rarely the work itself. It is the constant partial attention: several conversations, several feeds and several unfinished tasks held open simultaneously, none of them completed and all of them present.

The correction is structural rather than spiritual. Fewer concurrent commitments, longer time horizons on the ones that remain, and a willingness to be slower at responding in exchange for being present at anything.

A few concrete moves carry most of the benefit: audit notifications and switch nearly all of them off, keep one screen-free evening, and do one activity a week that produces something physical and cannot be optimised.

This is not an anti-technology position. The same tools that fragment attention also make it possible to work from a quieter place, keep distant friendships alive and learn nearly anything. The question is who sets the pace.

The awkward truth is that slow living is easier with money and autonomy. Treated as a moral standard it becomes another performance; treated as a set of small defensible choices, it is available to most people most weeks.

Tags: lifestyle, wellbeing, productivity

Sara Iyer — Sara writes about digital culture, entertainment and how creative work is changing for ESPYCRUX. She reads the release notes and the box office, and thinks the two explain more together than either does alone.