Modernity moves at the speed of profit. Time has been captured, fragmented, and sold back to us as productivity. We no longer live in time; we consume it. Each moment must justify its existence by yielding measurable output — efficiency, engagement, visibility. Capitalism has turned time into a commodity that demands constant circulation. To be slow, therefore, is no longer a choice; it is an ethical rebellion۔ The capitalist notion of time is linear and cumulative. It runs forward, never sideways, never inward. Its rhythm is that of a machine, not a heart. The tick of the clock replaces the beat of being. The worker, the student, the user — all are synchronized to this rhythm of acceleration. To pause is to fail. To rest is to fall behind. In this new temporality, even leisure becomes labor: we rest in order to produce more efficiently later.
This temporal regime — what Byung-Chul Han calls the “dictatorship of performance” — leaves no room for contemplation, for resonance, for the slow unfolding of experience. Under it, time no longer ripens; it is harvested. The capitalist subject moves from task to task, from notification to notification, addicted not to pleasure but to progression. Progress becomes the new transcendence, and speed its liturgy. We pray to the god of immediacy.
But the essence of life is not speed. Growth in nature, love between souls, the maturation of thought — all obey a different temporality, one of slowness and depth. A fruit that ripens too fast loses its flavor. A conversation that rushes toward conclusion misses its meaning. Slowness is not mere duration; it is density — the fullness of time that holds being, memory, and relation together.
The loss of slowness is also the loss of ritual. In ritual, time is not consumed but inhabited. It circles back upon itself, creating rhythm and meaning. The prayer, the meal, the craft — these are slow acts, resisting the linear logic of production. They affirm that some things are valuable precisely because they are unproductive. Capitalist time, however, destroys ritual and replaces it with routine — a repetition without resonance.
Digital life has accelerated this temporal violence. The screen collapses all distances: the far becomes near, the future becomes now. Instantaneity breeds anxiety. We scroll endlessly not because we seek information, but because we dread stillness. The algorithm feeds on our impatience; it measures our attention in seconds and sells it in fragments. The result is a subject without continuity — a person always in motion yet never arriving, always connected yet existentially isolated.
Slowness, then, becomes an act of resistance — not romantic nostalgia, but ethical necessity. To slow down is to reclaim the sovereignty of one’s own time, to wrest it back from systems that measure life by productivity. It is a political act precisely because it refuses the logic of speed that underlies both capitalism and its digital extensions. To be slow is to say: my time is not for sale.
Philosophically, slowness is akin to care — care for oneself, for others, for the world. Care cannot be rushed. To care is to dwell, to linger, to attend. The ancient Greeks understood this in their distinction between chronos (quantitative time) and kairos (qualitative time). Capitalism recognizes only chronos, the clock time of efficiency. The ethics of slowness calls us back to kairos, the timely moment that holds grace, presence, and meaning.
In slowness, we rediscover the possibility of listening. The accelerated subject hears only noise because noise is speed made audible. But to listen is to allow silence, to let meaning arrive in its own time. This is why Han speaks of “the disappearance of contemplation” as the true crisis of our age. Without slowness, there is no contemplation; without contemplation, no truth.
The ethics of slowness is, ultimately, an ethics of being. It restores to human existence what capitalism has stolen — duration, attention, communion. It teaches us that to live well is not to accumulate moments, but to dwell in them. It reminds us that the speed of light may be the measure of the universe, but the speed of love, thought, and spirit is infinitely slower — and infinitely deeper.
To resist the capitalist notion of time is not to step outside of modernity, but to transform it from within. It is to create spaces — in thought, in work, in love — where time is not devoured but allowed to breathe. Slowness is the breath of being. Without it, life suffocates in acceleration.
Dr. Muhammad Waqas Butt