things i notice when i'm not rushing

is slowness possible in the digital age?

It takes a particular sort of slowness to notice things - not the kind that manifests through any conscious attempt, but the kind that arrives organically, quietly, the way sunlight creeps across a room. The world doesn’t stop spinning when you decide to slow down, but it shifts slightly, just enough to see it differently. Details once blurred into the periphery step into focus, timid yet persistent, waiting to be acknowledged. This is my love letter to them - to let them know I notice them, or try my best to, anyway.

When I’m not rushing, I notice how my feet hit the ground. There’s a rhythm to walking that you can’t hear when you’re power-striding to the next obligation, the hurried clack of soles erased from the auditory memory as quickly as it is created. Moving slower, my steps feel more deliberate, tethered to something larger. The uneven pavement tells a story: a fault-line of a crack, weeds pushing through defiantly, rain pooling in tiny craters. I think of how many feet have walked these paths, how many unnoticed details have endured beneath them, uncelebrated, yet unbothered.

The air changes when I’m not rushing. It remembers me. I feel it on my nose, my cheeks, my fingers when they escape my coat pockets. Sometimes it carries whispers of scents, the ghost of a strangers perfume haunting me down the street. It feels like the world is breathing beside me, and I beside it. I feel it shift as I move, from the cool shade of a tree-lined street to the sun-warmed plain of a park to the damp chill of a tube station. It is a bridge connecting me to the places I inhabit in the moments I choose to truly be in those places.

But most of all, I begin to really see people when I slow down. A woman at the bus stop, her hair tied back in a way that speaks more of function than fashion as she scribbles tiny words onto a tiny notepad. Her gaze dithers between the horizon, willing the bus to appear, and the page that is getting increasingly crumpled the faster she writes. She hurriedly pushes the notepad into her bag as the bus arrives, and I catch a glimpse of a collection of other slightly-crumpled tiny pages filled with tiny writings as she flips through them to close the pad. The man across from me on the train has tired eyes. He’s reading a book and I tilt my head to catch the title. It’s a battered paperback, the book as weathered by time as the man himself. I’ll never know what he thought of it but, for the length of the journey, his quiet presence became a part of mine. Seeing him read the book is important to me. On that train carriage, there were 7 people reading. This is an unusually high proportion; usually I would expect to see someone important with a briefcase scrolling through Twitter (I have never been able to bring myself to call it X), someone’s mother on level 1000 of Candy Crush, a teenager having a loud FaceTime gossip session. On that train carriage, I felt oddly validated in my attempt to slow it down. Me and my book, 7 strangers and theirs.

Scrolling, I realise, is its own kind of rushing. The endless flick of the thumb, chasing a flash of stimulation, tiny sparks of dopamine that fizzle out as quickly as they arrive. I think about how much I’ve scrolled without knowing what I was looking for; how little I remember of what I’ve seen. It’s like casting a net into the void, hoping to pull up something meaningful, but most of what you catch is gone the second it meets the surface. The moments we scroll in aren’t entirely meaningless - they’re just flattened, stripped of their texture by the act itself. It’s a kind of consumption that leaves you empty: candy floss dissolving in water. I catch myself scrolling in moments of boredom, stress, exhaustion, convincing myself I’m taking a break. Yet my brain is still sprinting, hungry to catch the next flash of sound and colour. The autopilot loop feeds you just enough to keep you coming back. There’s a numbing quality to it, an escape that usually, paradoxically, leaves you more tightly wound. It’s only when I step away that I remember what it feels like to let my thoughts stretch out, to linger on an idea without the end destination being a double-tap or a swipe.

This has given me a visceral disgust for social media. I haven’t cared much for Instagram in a while, only use SnapChat to talk to 2 friends who I can’t remember ever talking to on any other platforms, and even TikTok leaves me irritated after not too long. This is not to say I have stopped using them, I am, after all, a teenager of my time (I almost caught myself saying ‘just a girl’ here but my hatred for that phrase and what it encompasses is a conversation for another day - and one I’m sure many on Substack have already unpicked to great lengths). I still reach for social media to wind down, but I have begun to default to Substack and Pinterest - a step in the right direction, I hope.

When I put the phone down altogether, though, the world regains its depth. Maybe it really is that damn phone. Things feel heavier, more real, like they demand to be held rather than skimmed. The world isn’t just there, providing a backdrop to your busy. There’s a sort of clarity in stillness that scrolling can never replicate. It feels like remembering how to breathe deeply after years of shallow inhales. I have begun to read for pleasure again, instead of only ever rushing to read set works for lectures or seminars. The same goes for writing, it doesn’t only have to be for essays under strict deadlines (for example it could be here, hi!).

Noticing isn’t always easy. Slowing down means seeing the cracks, too. The boarded-up shops that used to buzz with life. People whose faces bear the burdens of invisible weights. The way the world frays at the edges, inequity and neglect peeking through the gaps. It’s tempting to look away, to rush past and forget you ever saw it. Yet noticing, I think, is its own quiet rebellion. To stop and see is to push against the pace of a world that demands constant motion, constant productivity. It’s a way of reclaiming time. It doesn’t solve problems, but it plants seeds of awareness, curiosity, of care.

Sometimes I long for a world that I doubt ever existed. Where rushing wasn’t necessary, where not everything was transactional. I picture it in hazy sepia tones, something imagined framed as a memory - a place where people moved slower not out of leisure but out of a kind of unspoken respect for the day itself. Where life wasn’t measured in notifications or the number of open tabs on your browser. I think of this fantasy when I find myself travelling in rush hour, people pushing past one another, heads down, bodies angled forwards as if to propel themselves faster into the next moment. I wonder what they think they are chasing, or if they are aware they are chasing at all. It’s disorienting enough that I often get swept up in it, pushing forward with them.

And yet I know this is woeful romanticisation. Slowness, after all, is a luxury. The privilege of being able to stop is one that almost no-one can afford in a world demanding efficiency and measurable outcomes. As I say this, my fingers are flying across the keyboard to get the words out. I scroll. I rush. I double-screen. I hate that I do it, but I do. We are wired to constantly consume to stay connected.

Is it too much to ask for to longingly stare out of the window? Whatever happened to the lost art of pondering?

Maybe what I really yearn for is not a different world, but a different way of being in this one.