Speed has become the soundtrack of our days. We scroll through videos of a few seconds, listen to podcasts at increased speed, eat in front of the screen, reply to messages while doing other things. Even rest must often be “productive”. Yet, just as everything accelerates, it grows silently an opposite desire: to slow down.
It is no coincidence that World Slowness Day, which is celebrated today 4 May, speaks above all to a generation that grew up within continuous notifications, algorithms and permanent connections. More and more young people talk about the need to “detox” from social media, to turn off the phone for a few hours, to go back to doing simple things: reading, walking, being silent, even getting bored. A word, the latter, which for years almost seemed to be avoided.
The Instagram page that “won” the algorithm
Amid this collective need to slow down, something curious has happened in recent years. Right on Instagram – the symbolic place of speed, infinite scrolling and continuous distraction – a page with the name almost began to grow against the current: @vita________slow. Today it counts beyond 800 thousand followers and has become one of the Italian points of reference for those seeking a different relationship with time.
There is behind this project Gianvito Fanellidesigner and creative who deals with communication. The “Slow Life” page was born in 2020, during the lockdown. Fanelli lives in Milan and, closed at home like millions of Italians, decides to give life to something he has cherished for a long time: a personal archive made up of photographs, thoughts, images and reflections collected over the years around the theme of slowness and the relationship with time. «I had built my personal archive», he says. The first content published on the page is a photograph taken in Alicudi, in the Aeolian Islands. From that moment, the page that had remained almost “dormant” until then begins to come to life. The response of the people surprises Fanelli himself first and foremost: «The first 10 thousand followers already seemed enormous to me», he says. Then, content after content, that counter-current narrative dedicated to slowing down has begun to intercept an increasingly widespread need.
Slow living as a daily goal
Fanelli talks about slowness without transforming it into a perfect formula or a lesson to impart to others. Indeed, he admits how difficult it is, even today, to truly protect your time. «Today I notice more easily when I’m running too fast. Sometimes I manage to protect my time, other times I don’t,” he explains. For him, slow life is not a goal achieved once and for all, but something to build every daybetween balance, fatigue and constant distractions.
The question inevitably arises spontaneously: Can we really talk about slowness on social media? Isn’t that a contradiction? “I wouldn’t say it’s a contradiction,” he explains, “but, without wanting to use big words, an act of resistance.” Give up talking about the slowness right there, inside social media, it would mean leaving room for only one possible narrative: that of continuous running, performance, productivity without breaks.
Slowness is no longer an escape from the world
Today, slowness is no longer described as romantic nostalgia or escape from the world. Instead, it becomes an attempt to remain human within a system that constantly pushes us to accelerate.
Cities that choose more human rhythms
Collective experiences and concrete projects were also born around the need to slow down. In Italy, for example, it has existed for some time Cittaslow, a network of municipalities that has decided to transform this philosophy into a real model of daily life. Born at the end of the nineties from the intuition of some Italian mayors inspired by the Slow Food movement, lThe initiative tries to rethink cities in a more humane way, less crushed by haste and the logic of continuous productivity.
The goal is not to “go slow” in a romantic or nostalgic sense, but rethink the relationship with time within cities: reduce traffic and noise, enhance public spaces, support local activities, defend local traditions and productions, improve the quality of the environment and daily life.
Today the network involves dozens of Italian municipalities and hundreds of cities around the world. Realities often far from large metropolises, where time still retains a more human dimension: lived-in squares, neighborhood relationships, less compressed rhythms, attention to the landscape and sociality.
Slowness, then, no longer seems just an individual choice or an alternative lifestyle. It becomes a collective response to a world that continually accelerates, and the increasingly shared attempt to restore value to daily time.
