Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow art and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.

Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.

It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. And according to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a collective wish to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex  systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market. Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification - that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.

Note: This post first appeared on Boston College’s Work-Family Network, where I occasionally blog.  

Recently, I was asked a good question - why are we as a nation addicted to multitasking? - by Mike Hoyt, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic.

To preface, let’s just say that this topic couldn’t be more important now. A number of people have been pointing out the links between my book, with its sub-title flagging a dark age, and the economic mess we are in. An overdependence on our machinery as an outsourced brain, a tendency to undercut our powers of focus and attention, a yearning for the instant, push-button answer rather than the hard work of problem-solving - these are some of the reasons why we face such a deep, steep economic dive.

And then there’s the multitasking. Let’s take a look at the blind love of multitasking in our culture today.

First, I think that we can trace a line between our economic habits and culture and the legacy of Frederick W. Taylor, the great efficiency expert. His influence on global capitalism is still enormous. There’s a section in the book that gives detail, but in brief, he forced workers to chop up work into almost interchangable parts in order to make each piece of a task go faster. In turn, his influential teachings eviscerated the organic quality of craftsmanship and in many senses, turned people into machines, as Peter Drucker and others have noted.