Slow TV

You tryin to slow tho bro?

Author

Tyler Barstow
February 10, 2023 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

Intro

For me, one of the most under-appreciated cracks in the internet’s firmament is the collection of slow TV videos on Youtube. As someone who has, uh, “anxiety” about “everything”, finding it during quarantine was something of a revelation and I’ve loved going back to it occasionally ever since.

During the first couple years of Covid I was living in LA in an apartment which was wonderful but more of a poem than a think piece, you could say, from a dimensions perspective and the only thing that kept me sane many days was covering the windows and putting videos like the ones below on my TV.

I’ve long thought that meditation is boring, which I know is likely just my subconscious wanting to avoid feeling an uncomfortable emotion or memory or something else, and I still think it’s boring. But videos like these have been an entry point for me into both enjoying and being present with a type of active stillness. In any of these videos, I often feel like I’m the unseen fish swimming around under the water or the birds hopping around in the trees rather than the mountains in the background, and that’s OK. Someday I’ll understand in a clearer way that I’m all of it, just like you are, or maybe I won’t. Either is fine and probably just about the same.

I can’t really explain why my favorite locations on earth are mainly places I’ve never been (i.e. Japan and Northern Europe), but it might be that we gravitate towards outer landscapes that mirror, both in mood and structure, our inner ones. There is, at least, some degree of topographical sameness that I feel with certain settings that I can’t fully explain any other way, so that’s my walkaround theory for now. Regardless, shout out to the many homies worldwide who spend so much time and effort capturing longform windows into the strange, sometimes noisy peace of being alive. It’s difficult in many ways to be human, but there is a kind of sweet purity available in certain types of our observations that helps make the medicine of our other experiences go down.

Slow TV Videos

The embed links are being weird for some reason. Preview mode is showing the links as working and the test emails are showing the links as not working, so I don’t know. To be safe, I’m giving each title a header that’s also linked to the video.