The Fake Intellectual is an online collection of articles and essays written and curated by writer & photographer Thomas W Coombs, published bi-annually.

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Issue 48; The First Slow Luxury

Take a minute. Take another, take a few more minutes away from that side hustle, your day job, your life.  Just stop.  Take a seat and watch the world just happen around you.  With a coffee, a book or just watch people running around within their busy lives.  The most precious thing we own is our time and the ultimate slow luxury is to take some some of and  to do absolutely nothing.

We live in a world that is awake all the time, everyone is busy, whether it be work commitments, daily family life, fitting in the day to day is always a struggle.  Our lives are made up of moments whether bad or good. Those moments happen and we work to fill those moments with something, every second of every day of people's lives is filled with the tasks of our modern world.

Slow luxury is not just items or high end moments, like that vintage watch passed through generations that started new or spending time with friends at a great restaurant, they are also the moments in between.


I will find a quiet seat at a wine bar and watch the world pass by and read a few pages of a book, sipping on something light.  The act is not the drinking or the reading, it is the slowing down within the time I have.  Time will not slow down for me, but the luxury is having the time to just sit still and take in the sounds and smells of my local life without being part of it for that brief moment.


We have lost the word luxury to modern consumerism, what we can own and show off, but many of the real luxuries in our world are not seen or heard.  I will embrace the first slow luxury item until it runs out.