The return of the slow thought
Why start writing again. What has changed since 2011.
Between 2006 and 2011 I wrote a blog: Thinker in action! Ninety posts about strategy, government, design, food, culture. Then I stopped. Not consciously — it faded away, as things do.
Fourteen years later I'm starting again. Not because the world asks for it, but because I notice that I need it. Writing is thinking on paper. Without writing, thinking becomes going around in circles.
What has changed? Everything. In 2006, social media was new and exciting. Twitter was a place for ideas, not algorithms. A blog was an act of independence — your own corner of the internet, without the interference of platforms that control who sees you.
Now writing is an act of resistance. Not heroic, but conscious. Against the speed of takes, the volatility of stories, the illusion that a like equals a thought.
The slow thought requires something different. She asks that you stick to one topic. That you finish a sentence. That you do not already know what your conclusion is after two paragraphs, but that you dare to write without knowing where you will end up.
Robin Williams said it beautifully — in an excerpt that I liked somewhere years ago and now found: we often see the value of things too late. Of people, of moments, of silence.
This is my restart. No manifesto, no promise of regularity. Just this: a place to think slowly. Move over.