This week’s Slow Digest is a compilation of slow care media recommendations from the C21 staff: Managing Director Katie Waddell, and Graduate Fellows Chloe Kwiatkowski, Ceceilia Loeschmann, and Jamee Pritchard.
This week, through a collection of recommendations from C21 staff, we explore how media, whether essays, films, environmental writing, or fiction, can become a companion in understanding what “slow care” means in a world that often demands speed, productivity, and resilience at all costs. Each contributor offers a work that lingers, asks us to pay attention, and reminds us that care, personal and collective, is a sustained, deliberate act. Together, these pieces form a meditation on how we might nurture connection, hope, and presence amid the complexities of contemporary life.
- Katie’s Recommendation: Laurie Penny, “Life Hacks of the Poor and Aimless: On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care,” The Baffler, July 7, 2016
This article re-frames self-care as a responsibility rather than yet another manifestation of the production-consumption cycle that so often defines life in our contemporary capitalist milieu. It’s a few months shy of one decade old, and it’s crossed my mind every few months for at least that long.
In the first half of the 2010s, I was one of the “anxious millennials” the author describes, and took terrible care of myself both in the name of productivity and in the name of the “fetishize(d)…abject hopelessness” that I misguidedly believed was my lot as a person with a conscience. The words that impacted me in 2016, and catalyzed a changed attitude and eventually changed behavior, come a few paragraphs in: “The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis…caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle.” The year I read this essay was the year I started making regular doctors appointments and checked my credit score for the first time.
Re-reading it now, just two sentences in, “The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity,” is an experience made all the more eerie considering that the current high-profile proponents of “clean eating, healthy living” and “personal productivity” are, respectively, vaccine skeptics and business leaders who promote AI with an evangelical fervor (while appearing ambivalent about the role of humans in an AI-driven economy).
This essay was, and still is, a refreshingly sober take on self-care, made all the more necessary by the cultural, social, economic, and political forces at work today.
- Chloe’s Recommendation: Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders
When asked for a media recommendation that encapsulates this year’s theme of “slow care,” I decided on a film that has stuck with me over the past two years: Wim Wenders’ 2023 film, Perfect Days. The film finds beauty in the mundane rhythms of everyday life, lingering on moments of routine and quiet attention. Accompanied by a classic rock soundtrack that feels both tender and deeply comforting, Perfect Days offers a gentle viewing experience capable of lifting one’s spirits and invites reflection on self-care and the value of slowing down.
- Ceceilia’s Recommendation: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold is a true Wisconsin GOAT, and I would recommend Sand County Almanac to anyone interested in conservation. The collection of essays chronicles a year of Leopold’s observations on his Sauk County farm and completely changed the way I see the world. You can read the whole text at once, or month-by-month if one so prefers to take it slow. The work is a classic within modern environmental literature and conservation philosophy. Leopold has a poetic way of writing, and this text hits particularly hard if you have ever spent an extended period of time in our state’s natural areas.
- Jamee’s Recommendation: The Last Tribe by Brad Manuel
Back in November 2024, I wrote a Slow Digest essay called Slow Reading When the Sky is Falling: A Testimony to Dystopian Fiction. As the title suggests, I discuss my mission to become a slow reader, someone who luxuriates in the pages of 500-600-page tomes that speculate on how the world will end and how people will respond to that catastrophe. As I write in that essay, my love of dystopian fiction comes from “being wrapped up in its darkness and despair as its characters try to survive a post-apocalyptic world.” My love for the genre also comes from the underlying hope and optimism that weave themselves throughout the story.
Slow care, to me, is about personal and collective survival and how each of us has a part to play in caring for ourselves, our communities, and our sanity, especially in times of grief and turmoil. My slow care recommendation is The Last Tribe by Brad Manuel, a book that sticks with me for its simplicity and slowness. The author emphasizes the best parts of human nature and how people not only survive, but also re-learn how to care for themselves and their community after a global pandemic. A handful of survivors must find food, shelter, and water while processing the grief of losing family, friends, normalcy, and security in their existence. We see each character’s perspective as they contemplate the next steps of their survival. There are no government experiments gone wrong, no ill-will among survivors, and barely any violence in the story. The story is about resilience, hope, individual and collective action in the midst of rebuilding society.
The views, information, and opinions expressed in Slow Digest do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System. The Center for 21st Century Studies supports scholarly debate about, and engagement with, the pressing issues of our time.