In Defense of Slowness: A Journey Through Malaysia's Small Towns

HAVING GROWN UP in a small town, I find it hard to be in the city for long. The shopping malls and constant barrage of stimuli are exciting, but they cannot compare with the slow life of small towns and villages. One of the best things that these settlements offer is simply permission to exist without a “ringgit sign” hanging above your head, indicating a potential customer or transaction. Whether in a sulap, warung, or kopitiam, or even the outdoors, you can sit around chatting away for hours. There is no rush or pressure to meet key performance indicators. More subtly, there is a sense of being part of a community, without needing the justification of a shared activity or paid membership.

This sense of belonging is something that we—my partner Jonathan Dexter and I—tried to capture and convey through our social media project, “Small Towns Malaysia”. But our goal of creating something lasting to disrupt the throwaway nature of our social media feeds encountered some resistance. Even when we were pro-ducing content for state and federal tourism boards, many people commented that our videos were too boring. But we persisted and somehow built a significant following of people who also loved small towns and the intentional pace of life offered there.