What is trending?
These trends are a continuation of the now familiar Slow Food movement started in the late eighties by Carlo Petrini. The Slow Food movement relishes things like fresh local seasonal produce, recipes handed down through generations, sustainable farming and so on.
This sparked other Slow Trends, two interesting ones are Slow Sex and Slow kids or raising unhurried children in an reaction to the pressure to live ever more hurried lifestyles.
Why it’s important?
Ever since the industrial revolution over a 100 years ago, faster, higher and stronger has been the motto of the modern world, creating a frenzied living pace, causing heart attacks in people under 30 from doing 90 hour work weeks. The Japanese even have a name for death caused by overwork, karoshi.
The obsession with speed is creeping in everywhere even into the bedroom and into the way we raise our kids.
- 1 out of 4 people admit to answering a cellphone during sex.
- Bedtime stories are now available in 1 minute editions.
- Children as young as 3 enrolled for private tutoring classes in Britain.
- Pornography and our speed culture teaches that all that matters in the bedroom is the finishing line.
In East Asia it is not uncommon for a child to spend 80 hours a week at academics, million of kids spend additional time in ‘cram schools’
An unsatisfying sex life leads eventually to an unhappy marriage, and marital problems are costing US companies up to 7 billion dollars a year.
Computer camps and motivational seminars now accept children as young as four.
What’s the butterfly effect?
Across the board the obsession with speed and success is reeking havoc in our relationships and in our children. We were not created to move this fast, our relationships suffer from hurried love making and our children suffer from anxiety, sleep deprivation and a list of disorders, which all can largely be traced back to being taught to go faster, sooner.
The pioneers and global hotspots
The reaction to this fury is the Slow Sex movement and Slow kids (or raising unhurried children) .
Just pick up any local men’s magazine now a days to read how they are urging readers to return to seducing their partners with long laid-back encounters, complete with candles, music and a massage.
Nothing highlights the yearning for slower sex more than the worldwide Tantra boom, everyday 12 000 plus people navigate to www.tantra.com. Tantra teaches basically that love making is a spiritual act that weaves together the partners, it advocates slow love making. Even the most un-spiritual of us, knows about the strong emotional bonds a physical relationship creates and can benefit from paying more attention to it and creating more time for it.
South Korea is cracking down on cram schools with the minister of education, Lee Ju Ho, at the helm of the movement quoted: “But that energy has been spent on raising test scores, not nurturing creativity or any other aspect of human nature,”
In Finland, children enter preschool education at the age of six, and formal schooling at seven. And Finland routinely tops the world rankings for educational performance and literacy. Read more about the Finland school system.
An anti TV movement is aiming to create more space for kids to just be kids, time to play, daydream and discover. Essentials for nurturing well balanced creative children. www.turnoffyourtv.com
By: Pierre Du Plessis
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About Pierre
Pierre is a communicator, a dreamer and a troublemaker. He loves how we are all connected in more astounding ways and more than we ever thought.
He is completely obsessed with life in contemporary culture and he wallows in new ideas and marvels at how they can restore and re – create our world.
Image credit: Gallo Images/ Getty Images
