The exhibit
It is 9:47 on a Tuesday night. The laundry is in the dryer, which means it is technically done, which means it has been done for two days and is now a warm wrinkled brick I will re-fluff at 11:15 and then ignore again. The rent check is on the counter where I put it on the first of the month, back when I was a person who paid rent on the first. And I am on the couch watching a woman in linen fold a single towel for four minutes, at two times speed.
I want to be clear that I know what I am doing. The video is called something like Slow Sunday Reset and it is forty-one minutes long. I watch it in twenty. The towel gets folded in what I assume is real time, but for me it is a brisk little blur, and the ambient piano has been pitched up into something that sounds like a chipmunk doing a spa day. I am not relaxed. I am efficient about being relaxed. I am consuming calm the way I consume everything else, which is to say: fast, on a screen, with the volume low so I can hear the dryer.
This is the promise on trial tonight. Not the towel. The towel is innocent. The promise is that watching slowness is a way of practicing it.
What the video is actually selling
Here is the thing I have started to notice about the slow-living genre: it is not slow. It is a product. It has a hook, a b-roll budget, and a sponsored oat milk. The woman in linen is not having a slow Sunday; she is having a shoot. The towel is folded for the camera, which means it is folded at least twice, which means the slowness you are watching has already been edited out of the slowness.
And I am watching it at two times speed, which should ruin it. If the video were actually about slowness, doubling the playback would destroy the whole point. The steam would rise too fast. The tea would steep in four seconds. The linen would flutter like it was in a wind tunnel. But it doesn’t ruin it. It improves it. The video is better at two times speed because the video was never about slowness in the first place. It was about the look of slowness, and looks compress beautifully.
That is the tell. A thing that survives being sped up was not a thing that required you to slow down.
The screen is not the problem, and that is the problem
I want to be careful here, because the lazy version of this essay is screens bad, linen good, and I don’t believe that. The data on how Americans spend their leisure time is actually pretty boring and pretty stable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, as reported by CNBC, Americans 15 and older average about five hours and ten minutes of leisure and sports time per day, and about two and a half hours of that is watching TV, plus another 37 minutes on things like video games and social media. The same reporting notes that in 2003, Americans also spent about two and a half hours a day watching TV. The number has barely moved in two decades. We are not watching more. We are watching the same amount, differently.
So the problem is not that I am on a screen. The problem is what the screen is doing to my sense of time. I have five hours of leisure a day, allegedly, and I spend a chunk of it watching a compressed version of a life I claim I want, which is a life with fewer things in it. The math is absurd. I have the time. I am using the time to watch someone else use theirs more beautifully.
And I am not alone in being a watcher rather than a doer. Pew Research Center found that the typical TikTok user posts seldom, if ever, and about half of all U.S. adults on the site have never posted a video themselves. Most of us are not making the linen content. We are consuming it. Pew also found that 85% of TikTok users say the content on their For You page is at least somewhat interesting, including 40% who call it extremely or very interesting. The feed is good. That is the whole business model. It is good enough that you keep watching, and it is fast enough that you never have to sit with the fact that you are watching.
The identity I bought
Here is what I thought I was purchasing when I started watching these videos: an identity. Not a practice, an identity. The person who has time. The person who sips tea instead of mainlining coffee. The person whose laundry is folded and put away, not warm and wrinkled in a brick. The person who could, if she wanted to, have a slow Sunday.
That person is cheaper to buy than to be. Being her requires a Tuesday. Buying her requires twenty minutes and a screen. The video is not a tutorial; it is a receipt. It is proof that I have taste, that I know what a good life looks like, that I am the kind of person who would fold a towel slowly if the towel were not currently in the dryer and the rent were not on the counter and the text were not unanswered.
The text. I should mention the text. It is from my sister, and it says did you mail the thing, and it has been sitting there since Sunday, and I have watched approximately four hours of slow-living content since then. I have not mailed the thing. I have not answered the text. I have watched a woman in linen water a plant, at two times speed, and I have felt, briefly, like a person who waters plants.
The Tuesday I actually had
Let me describe the Tuesday, because the Tuesday is the point. The Tuesday was: up at 6:40, coffee, a meeting that could have been an email, a second meeting that could have been a Slack message, a lunch eaten standing up, an afternoon of small fires, a commute, a dinner that was technically a bowl of cereal, and then the couch. The Tuesday did not have a slow Sunday in it. The Tuesday did not have a folded towel in it. The Tuesday had a dryer running and a rent check on the counter and a text from my sister that I read and did not answer.
The video did not lie to me about the Tuesday. The video never mentioned the Tuesday. The video showed me a Sunday that had been shot on a Thursday and edited on a Friday and posted on a Saturday, and I watched it on a Tuesday at two times speed, and for twenty minutes I was not on the couch. I was in the linen. I was in the light. I was in the life where the towel gets folded and the rent gets paid and the text gets answered, and then the video ended and I was on the couch again, with the dryer running.
This is not a moral failure. I want to be clear about that, because the genre of essay I am writing usually ends with the writer folding the towel and feeling better. I did not fold the towel. I re-fluffed it at 11:15 and then I went to bed. The rent check is still on the counter. The text is still unanswered. I am not going to pretend that the video taught me a lesson, because the video did not teach me a lesson. The video taught me that I like the look of a slow life, which I already knew, and that I will pay twenty minutes of a Tuesday to look at it, which I also already knew.
What the two-times-speed actually tells me
I have been trying to figure out why I watch these at two times speed, and I think the answer is that I do not actually want to slow down. I want to have slowed down. I want the feeling of having done it, without the doing. The two-times speed is not a failure of the slow-living promise; it is the promise working exactly as designed. The video is content, and content is consumed at the speed the platform rewards. The platform rewards speed. The video is built for speed. The slowness is the aesthetic, not the function.
If I actually wanted to slow down, I would not need the video. I would fold the towel. I would mail the thing. I would answer the text. The video is not a tool for slowness; it is a substitute for it. It is the thing I do instead of the thing. And the fact that I can watch it at two times speed and enjoy it more is the proof that it was never the thing.
The gap
So here is where I land, which is not a landing so much as a shrug. The video was never the Tuesday. The video was the receipt for a Tuesday I did not have. I bought the identity of a person with time, and I paid for it with the time I actually had, and the exchange rate was terrible. I am not going to cancel the streaming service. I am not going to fold the towel tonight. I am probably going to watch another one tomorrow, at two times speed, with the volume low so I can hear the dryer.
The rent check is still on the counter. The text is still unanswered. The towel is still a brick. And the woman in linen is still folding, somewhere, at whatever speed she actually folds, which I will never know, because I have never watched her at one times speed and I am not going to start now.
FAQ
Is watching slow-living videos at two times speed actually bad for me?
I can’t answer that as a health claim, and I’m not going to pretend the research says something it doesn’t. What I can say is that the video is not a practice. If you want the practice, the practice is the towel. The video is the look of the towel. Those are different products.
Does the data say Americans are watching more TV than ever?
No. The American Time Use Survey data, as reported by CNBC, shows TV time has been roughly flat at about two and a half hours a day since 2003. The change is in what else we do on screens, not in the total TV number. I used that fact to make a narrower point: the problem isn’t the quantity of screen time, it’s what the screen time is substituting for.
Why cite Pew and BLS in a humor essay?
Because the essay makes a claim about a behavior (watching rather than doing) and a claim about time (we have more of it than we think), and those claims are better with sources than without. The joke still lands on me. The sources just keep me honest about the size of the couch.