A Conversation with Rebecca Chen on Slowness
In this conversation, Rebecca Chen discusses her practice of deliberate slowness, the influence of traditional craft on her work, and why rushing diminishes both the process and the result.
Rebecca Chen’s studio practice is deliberately out of step with contemporary culture. While most of us move faster, she moves slower. While productivity culture celebrates efficiency, she celebrates duration. In her recent book The Long Now, she argues that our obsession with speed has impoverished both our work and our lives.
We began our conversation by discussing her morning routine—a two-hour ritual of tea preparation and contemplation that many would consider impractical, if not wasteful. For Chen, it’s essential.
Topics Discussed
• The philosophy of slowness in creative practice
• Traditional Chinese tea ceremony as meditation
• Why rushing diminishes quality
• The relationship between time and attention
• Resisting the culture of productivity
• Finding rhythm in unhurried work
• The ethics of taking time
transcript
Your book opens with a scene of you preparing tea—not quickly making a cup, but engaging in a full ceremony that takes nearly two hours. Some readers might see that as a luxury, even an indulgence. How do you think about it?
Rebecca Chen [00:04:51]
I understand that reaction. We’ve been trained to see time as something to optimize, to extract value from. Two hours seems like a waste when you could make tea in two minutes. But that assumes the only value is in the tea itself, not in the making of it. For me, those two hours are not separate from my creative work—they are part of it. They’re how I arrive at the state of mind necessary to do anything meaningful.
SABLE [00:05:29]
So it’s less about tea and more about creating a threshold between ordinary time and creative time?
Rebecca Chen [00:05:38]
Exactly. In traditional crafts—tea ceremony, calligraphy, pottery—there’s an understanding that you can’t rush to quality. You have to slow down enough to pay attention. The slowness isn’t the point; the attention is. But you can’t have one without the other. When you rush, you’re always ahead of yourself, already thinking about the next step. When you slow down, you can actually be present with what you’re doing.
SABLE [00:18:47]
You’ve written about how modern work culture treats time as a resource to be extracted and optimized. Do you see slowness as a kind of resistance to that?
Rebecca Chen [00:18:59]
I think it has to be. Not resistance for its own sake, but as a way of reclaiming agency over our own time and attention. The dominant culture tells us that faster is better, that efficiency is the highest value. But efficiency toward what end? If we’re efficiently producing work that’s shallow, thoughtless, disposable—what have we actually accomplished? Slowness is a way of saying: I value depth over speed. I value quality over quantity. I value being fully present over being maximally productive.