Life in the slow lane

One of the many writers ambling to the Edinburgh International Book’s Festival is Nick Thorpe, whose new book, Urban Worrier, records the stressed-out Edinburgh-based journalist's attempts to find the secret of balance and fulfilment. It was “a book born of necessity,” Thorpe tells me. “I’d got to the stage where I just couldn’t work any harder.” Thorpe, who plunged into the Channel from a Cornish cliff, wing-walked on a bi-plane and went to a naturist convention – all in an attempt to find whether letting go of control is the secret to happiness blames his stress on “a kind of a background radiation that seems to saturate modern life. I don’t think anyone’s really clear why we’re all so stressed, other than that we’re getting on to do the next thing and keeping the mortgage paid.” In the end, he says, he was able to “observe my anxiety from a bit of a distance.” 

Thorpe finds you don’t have to go far to step back from modern living. “There’s a kind of meditation these days that’s quite popular called mindfulness meditation,” he says. “It’s not particularly modern, it comes from Buddhism but it’s now available on the NHS. The great thing about it is that just by spending a few minutes at the beginning and the end of each day you can catch on to the places where you habitually fret too much.” 

Are the the old ways the best? As editor of anti-work ethic magazineThe Idler, Hodgkinson certainly thinks so: “The system since about 1950 has been to really discourage looking backwards because that doesn't increase productive output. It encourages wage earning, going into debt and spending lots.” Gardening, for instance, has never sounded so subversive than in Hodgkinson’s husbandry handbook Brave Old World. “If I grow my own vegetables and keep pigs then I remove myself from the money system in a way because I’m not contributing to the overall gross domestic product.” 

Hodgkinson is menaced by the gadget-hungry status quo that’s invaded even Westminster’s archaic halls. “All politicians are neophiles,” he says emphatically, “They’re just in love with anything that’s new. You get this whether it’s New Labour or Tories, they’re falling over themselves to show how cool and up-to-date they are with new technology. The old ways are forgotten.”

Scythes and hand-mills get the thumbs up but Hodgkinson is no Luddite: “We have to live in the modern world and embrace what’s good about it,” he concedes, “But still be very very wary of this thought that technology can solve all our problems, it just wont.”  

But if a whole lifestyle conversion rather jars, then there’s Matthew de Abaitua’s more temporary solution. “What I like about camping, what I use it for, is to basically defamiliarise myself and have a more intense aesthetic experience out in nature,” he says. The Art of Camping sketches a vivid history of resurgences in camping’s popularity. “You would say they’re related to times of economic hardship,” he says of these. “I really threw myself into it when I didn’t have any other work.”

Unemployed and now chilly and damp? Perhaps unappealing, but de Abaitua is convinced of the divisive pastime’s benefits. Like his Idler colleague Hodgkinson, there is a political undercurrent to breaking away from the rat race and exploring a new lifestyle: “There is something inherently progressive about camping, which I think is to do with the fact that people go out of their normal constraints. They can explore different ideas and bring them back to society.”

if productivity, technology and urban living is the hare on the road to progress, then these three writers are backing the tortoise. Who wins of those two again?