Can sourdough bread baking, long-reads, and growing tomatoes be considered acts of civil disobedience?

800 page novels, 3.5 hour blockbuster movies, 4+ hour podcasts… Not to mention homesteading social media accounts with millions (and millions) of followers, slow food journaling version 2.4 promoting sourdough bread-making, old-school pickling and marmalade making — what’s going on?

Are we experiencing a new and evolved slow revolution? Is this the beginning of a silent revolt against TikTok and other kinds of mind-numbing fast-pace entertainment that encourages overconsumption and is destroying our attention span?

I started noticing these changes a couple of years ago. But the past half year they have been impossible to ignore. The podcasts I listen to that used to be around 30–45 minutes long are now easily 3.5–4 hours — allowing for a much, much more in-depth conversation as well as for small-talk and random anecdotes; I just finished reading my second 800+ page novel this year (and have read several 600+ page novels as well); and I am following more and more homesteading and slow-family-farming instagram accounts that somehow nourish me, aesthetically and emotionally (and I am clearly not the only one. Several of these accounts have millions of followers).

Furthermore, I have started enjoying my good old record-player again. The feel and the sound of the vinyl is just so much more satisfying than listening Spotify on my Sonos. It is the rawness and imperfection that makes the difference (alongside the offline-ness).

To answer the question in my subtitle: Can sourdough bread baking, long-reads, and growing tomatoes be considered acts of civil disobedience?

Yes, they certainly can!

In a world governed by overconsumption, capitalism, and reduced attention spans (making 10 second TikTok videos the preferred source of entertainment), self-sufficiency, long in-depth podcast conversations, lengthy novels (and movies) characterized by expansive character- and environment descriptions, and slow cooking most certainly are ways of revolt.

This revolution is accompanied by a rise in handmade products, which has given birth to a new idea of what luxury is. Luxury in the new age of slow living is not flashy. On the contrary actually. Luxury is interlinked with authenticity; with real people talking about stuff that matters to them, and often about how they broke free from the 9–5 rat-race. It is furthermore interlinked with time; with having time to read that 800 page novel, to listen to the 3.5 hour podcast, to bake sourdough bread, and to grow tomatoes.

Luxury is also closely connected to transparency; to purchasing (or perhaps more correctly, investing in) products that are made in an ethical and sustainable way, and in products that last and can be repaired — clothes for example that decay in an aesthetic manner and that can be mended without them looking like old rags. And herewith a new concept of what it means to be well-dressed has emerged. Being well-dressed in the new age of the slow revolution does not mean to wear clothes from well-known luxury brands, flashing one’s purchasing power. Rather, being well-dressed includes wearing handcrafted garments, flashing creative mends, and investing in handcrafted garments, upcycled clothes or vintage items.

It appears that many of us have had enough. Enough shallowness, enough empty calories in the shape of mindless entertainment, enough smoothness and sameness, enough each-to-their own, enough ridiculous TikTok shorts of tripping cats and chewing people and lip syncing and make-overs, enough consumption — as in buying stuff, going through it and discarding it again — and enough homogeneous, mass-produced convenience-foods and fast fashion products.

The slow revolution anno 23–24 is about reclaiming our civil rights to celebrate diversity, to engage in meaningful conversations, get aesthetically nourished by well-made things that last, to age with grace, to celebrate nature and seasons and the rhythms of life, and to have time enough to engage in reading, cooking, gardening, talking, playing, and listening to vinyl records.