What is Slow Business?

You may be wondering why there’s a Small Business Profiles section of this site. Why would that be of interest to someone hoping to get into slow living? Why are these small businesses and their owners even relevant?

Well, as someone who worked for a venture-backed start-up for a few years, I can tell you that not all small businesses (in fact most do not) operate with mindfulness and intention. I think that burn out is a common trope of the start-up life, and there’s a reason for this. After leaving my start-up job, I had to take 3 months off of work just to start feeling human again. Now I’m even more susceptible to burn out than before, which has pushed me to become incredibly mindful about how I live my life and how I spend my time.

During my time at the start-up, I lost sight of everything else that mattered to me: family, relationships, my health (both mental and physical). All I cared about was working hard, becoming indispensable to my bosses, and climbing the ladder, because I thought that success in my career would make me feel fulfilled. Maybe you know this to be a fallacy (good for you, honestly), but at the time I didn’t. It was a hard lesson to learn. My mental and physical health both declined, I nearly destroyed my relationships with those closest to me, and I forgot to wish both of my parents happy birthday in the same year.

I do believe there is a way to work in the more traditional/corporate business world without experiencing this, and in fact, I think some people are good at putting up boundaries to ensure that their personal lives do not suffer from their work lives. I am just not one of them. And I know a lot of people who have taken a different path and started their own businesses, not for the desire to grow that business larger and larger at the expense of themselves and others, but to live a more conscious and intentional life.

These small businesses were started with the intention of staying relatively small, and usually they were started from a place of passion. Often these businesses were begun by an owner who created the business as a means of escaping the “grind” culture that typically negatively impacts people’s mental and physical health (like it did mine).

I have a lot of people in my life who are entrepreneurs, strangely enough. Maybe I just connect with those types of people, because I see parts of myself in them. Or maybe it’s just becoming more popular to strike off on your own as our society’s expectations become less and less aligned with reality (I’m talking to all of you millennials trying to buy houses or have kids in 2023). But for me, it comes down to the fact that I’m interested in people who are building the life they want as best they can within their particular circumstances. We all have limitations, but I believe we can also find inventive ways to live slowly within them.

So, in this part of the Slow Living Society, you’ll be able to see profiles written about people I think are embodying the entrepreneur lifestyle, but doing it without the manic desperation that comes with a business that’s growing at 300x per year.

I can’t wait to hear your feedback and I look forward to hearing your thoughts about these inspiring individuals!