Thanks to productivity culture, late capitalism, and self-optimisation, in 2025, we be rushing. The internet’s suggested antidote? “Slowmaxxing.”
What is slowmaxxing?
Last month, a TikTok that waxed lyrical about the lifestyle trend—which advocates for a slower pace of life—went viral: “You need to be reading long, fat books. You need to be making 48 hour chocolate chip cookies. You need to spend hours watching wildlife. You need to be spending 15 minutes making coffee. You need to breathe in and out, You need to be slowwww,” it advised, to mass resonance. (The video was based on a tweet by @robyns_quill on X a few years back.)
Slowmaxxing is more than just an internet trend, though. Zach Collier, the publisher of Provo Music Magazine, says that it informs his approach to how he runs his production company. “We’re super efficient with our time when we need to be, but really take it easy when we don’t.”
So why does switching to a lower gear feel so tempting right now?
A possible explanation for the rise of slowmaxxing is society’s obsession with productivity and efficiency. By dint of late capitalism, our brains have been pickled in the idea that our time is there to be optimised: that a moment not spent on a 9-5 or a side hustle should be dedicated to self-improvement, from the physical (gym classes, Pilates) to the mental (listening to podcasts at 2x the speed to for maximum information absorption.)
This need to be constantly productive has been exacerbated by social media and technology, which we use to measure and share almost every aspect of our lives, from our Strava stats to how quickly we can devour Sally Rooney’s latest novel. “Social media algorithms have essentially gamified productivity and achievement, creating artificial urgency and FOMO,” says Ben Sharpe, a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and the Director of the Human Attention Laboratory at the University of Chichester.
According to Sharpe, society’s productivity demands are at odds with what our brains are actually capable of, creating a jarring dissonance. Slowmaxxing then, can be viewed as a form of rebellion against productivity culture, a theory that tracks with the argument that sleep is a form of resistance against capitalism.
It’s also no coincidence that slowmaxxing has emerged amid the short form content epoch. These days, we’re so unaccustomed to concentration that netizens joke that watching a movie without going on your phone feels like a marathon, and that binging Succession feels like reading. Sharpe says that although constantly switching between platforms feels like a mindless way to spend our time, it actually has a damaging impact on our mental state. “People are experiencing what I'd call ‘attention fatigue,’ where the constant stimulation and variable reward schedules of digital platforms have left many feeling cognitively depleted.” Basically, the pace at which content is churned out and consumed has left us yearning to touch grass.
What are the benefits of slowmaxxing?
People are also becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that living in a brainrot state isn’t exactly helping the political landscape, as delineated by a recent TikTok overlaid with the text, “when I’m scrolling but then I remember that anti-intellectualism and chatGPT is on the rise and fascists love the uneducated and learning and reading is an important form of resistance.” Avoiding clickbait content and re-training our brains to think critically, then, could quite literally determine the future.
And slowmaxxing, unsurprisingly, has cognitive benefits. Sharpe explains that when people slow down, they're working with their brain’s rhythms, rather than against them, allowing for “attention restoration.” We carve out time to be slow and leisurely and really prioritize breaks and time away. As Collier observes, “honestly everyone is just much happier. Haha. It’s been kind of wild undoing the hustle culture programming.”
All in all, Slowmaxxing offers a welcome respite from hustle culture and information overload. As Sharp observes, people are “seeking more sustainable ways of engaging with information and experiences. It's essentially a grassroots cognitive rehabilitation movement.”
Featured image Saltburn©
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