Slow Living Influencers Cannot Save Us

thoughts on consumption & society

Greetings! The Ancestral Homekeeper is a newsletter dedicated to slow & simple living for all of us. I’m Kristina, and I believe that the way we shape our lives at home will be reflected in our society at large. By blending the wisdom of our ancestors with contemporary thoughts on mental health, self nurturing, and social justice, we can find the path to changing our world. New letter is out most Sundays!

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The proliferation of slow living content across social media has kept a steady pace with the rising abundance of Reels and TikToks from consumption influencers. You’ve seen them — they are continually encouraging you to check out their latest Amazon finds, restock their fridges with them, and dm them to receive their exclusive list of beauty products or wallpaper selections and where to buy it all. I will admit that much of what they find and proffer seems useful, designed to make everyday tasks easier and more beautiful. I can even admit to purchasing some of these items, and will indeed share a tiny collection of links for things that have made slow living easier (and slower!) with you next week. But the vast majority of stuff being hawked is not what our society needs, and an exponential increase in slow living accounts tells my heart this is true. With the rise in hunger for new stuff, we also seem to desperately consume content that romanticizes homesteading, homeschooling, making beeswax candles by hand, painting with watercolors, escaping into books, and cooking apple pies from scratch on wood-burning stoves. Our feeds can feel dominated by these oppositional content pillars.

This, of course, mirrors what we are dealing in real life, where we find the fracturing of society into so many shards of discord. We’ve got the suburban moms with Stanley cups (no offense intended if you own one — we have multiple Yeti products, which were the hottest fashion in drinkware several years ago), picking up their kids from school in SUVs and shuttling them back and forth to their dozens of activities. We’ve got the homeschool mamas, outfitting their family in neutral linens and refusing all vaccinations and most modern medicines. We’ve got the rural folks, who might keep chickens and have large families, teaching them all about saving money and getting by with what’s around. There’s a whole gamut of political opinions, with the only thing in common being how loud we proclaim our thoughts, and how dissatisfied we are with the status quo.

It all seems irreconcilable. We forget the fact that there is so much overlap in the stereotypes listed above, and we just can’t bring ourselves to find links of commonality with those who differ from us or have oppositional lifestyles. The internet and social media are no longer places for discourse (were they ever, really?), they are places of shouting and rage and a need to be seen as right. Correct. Holder of the truth. Smarter than those around us.

I hate to say it, but I think we all just need to take a damned deep breath. We have to slow down a teensy bit if we ever hope to find the spaciousness to talk and really listen to each other. We have lost the thread — talking and sharing opinions, whether online or in real life, should not have the goal of converting people to our worldview. It should come from a genuine desire to understand another’s point of view. It is only when people feel heard that they can begin to listen and hear others.

And the constant selling and buying of so. much. stuff? It has a multi-pronged effect. First, it keeps us distracted. Not only are we spending time watching reels about hair curlers and clear plastic food containers for our pantries, we are spending our money on them, discarding the packaging they came in, finding a place for them in our homes, organizing them, cleaning them, organizing them, cleaning them, organizing them, cleaning them, and eventually, throwing them away to the landfill. So we purchase them, and they consume our time and our money. Reasonable?

They also consume our energy. We simply don’t have the energy to engage in these slow and thoughtful conversations with strangers if we are so busy maintaining our stuff. We don’t have energy for books that might foster new ideas if we are so busy scrolling. We certainly don’t have the energy to organize ourselves or, sometimes, even vote when we are too busy to remember.

Our consumption of stuff also continuously feeds the bottom line of the handful of major corporations that sell the vast majority of things we buy. These corporations have a much greater voice in the political arena because they can now take our money that we’ve given them to buy lobbyists to advocate for their business success with the government. Democracy as a concept is so beautiful, voice of the people and all that. Unfortunately, corporations are people too in our society, and their voice is much louder than ours.

Ultimately, we begin to feel responsible for the state of society, when in fact we have very little power to begin with. Throughout history, societies and civilizations shift when the people are able to organize and come together — you’d think that social media and the internet give us the tools to make this easier than ever. But toss in our yearning for more, our yearning for things that improve our lives, and you have an audience who will buy just about anything that promises ease or beauty. Our guilt at not being able to affect change on a larger level also has us turning to retail therapy. Our attention is fixed on the things around us and the things we do not yet own — not on how we can collectively work to make a different world for ourselves.

Collective. This is a word we know we are lacking in the Western world. We refer to the village, the villages of our ancestors, that many of us first realize upon having children, provided the safety net of care and compassion so lacking in the world today. Cooking was a chore shared among many in the multigenerational households. The farming was down mostly collectively, distributing the burden of work among households. The period after childbirth was one of nurturing, of others tending our homes and older children so that we might recover from the greatest physical act a human can perform. Women were not struggling to get back to work in time so there would be enough money to pay the bills. One mother wasn’t solely responsible for all of the childcare, all of the cleaning, all of the cooking, all of the household tasks.

Is it any wonder that these Amazon gadgets and “home hack” offerings are so tempting to us? Our modern lives consume every bit of spare energy we have — if a fridge organizer promises to make cooking or cleaning easier, why wouldn’t we buy it? If we trade a small amount of money for this mini countertop vacuum designed to clean our countertops for us, why wouldn’t we save ourselves the time and energy of wiping down our own counters? The promise of an easing of our daily burden fuels this choice. Where we once had a village of people to help us with our daily tasks, we now have a device! But we forget, or fail to realize, that this electronic gadget will need its own cleaning and care, its own discarding and replacement when it inevitably wears out after a short while. Thus, our energy, our money, and our time are still being consumed, and our lives feel overstuffed and frenetic. Our lives are no longer slow enough to just think. Certainly we have less energy for volunteering or political discourse or collective action.

screenshot from mozielife on pinterest

If you have read this far, and you are waiting for The Answer, I am afraid I will have to disappoint you. I do not have a complete answer — I only can note the problems and the steps I think we can begin to take. Personally, I believe that our consumption of slow living content is telling us simply that we long to SLOW. DOWN. So we need perhaps to find ways to stop scrolling, stop buying so much stuff, and start recognizing the very human needs that these behaviors are obfuscating. We don’t need more content about living slow, we need to actually slow down offline. We need connection. We need help, from each other. We need time to read and walk in the grass and pursue those slower activities that connect us to nature and each other. We need to lower the volume of advertisements shouting at us and amplify the poems and the songs and the stories that inspire us to grow and change. We need to remember our animal selves. We need to be still within.

As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts. I’ll be back next week with more, and until then, please take care of yourselves.

Love,

Kristina