Summary

Pico Iyer begins his essay “Why we need to slow down our lives” by arguing that stillness, or the idea of going nowhere, is universal. Iyer gives the examples of people who have valued the importance of tranquility.

The writer continues to argue that tranquility is harder to find in contemporary society, where new information is produced at an increasing rate and technology interrupts people’s lives.

Iyer believes our capacity to select information has become more important than the information itself, and it is hard to step back and get a bigger picture of our lives.

He recounts a visit to Google’s headquarters where he discovered that the company has a number of programs to encourage employees to spend time offline, including meditation and yoga training. Iyer contin...