FAQ
Slow Up for Humanity is a collective 25-hour slowdown taking place across Belgium during the switch to winter time.
It is a gentle protest against a culture of “never enough”: always more production, more consumption, more performance and more availability.
Inspired by the bed-ins of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, we turn slowing down into a collective act. For 25 hours, people are invited to pause, rest, connect and reflect on how we organise our lives and our society.
You can participate at home, with others, or at one of the many participating locations, including museums, libraries, schools, cultural venues and public spaces.
Slow Up takes place from Saturday 24 October at 12:00 until Sunday 25 October 2026 at 12:00.
The 25-hour action coincides with the transition to winter time, when the clocks go back one hour.
The seasonal shift gives us a natural moment to pause. While nature moves towards winter, we ask ourselves why we keep pushing forward at the same speed.
Everyone.
You can join alone, with friends, with your family, at school, at work or at one of the participating locations.
You don't need to be an activist. You don't need to sleep in a museum. You don't even have to be good at slowing down.
All over Belgium.
Cultural organisations, libraries, schools, museums, community centres, sports clubs and other locations are opening their doors for Slow Up.
And you don't have to go anywhere to participate. Your home can be your Slow Up location too.
Check the programme for participating locations and activities near you.
The full list of can be found at www.slowupforhumanity.be/stories.
Want to become one of our partners? Let us know what you are planning to do, so we can feature your story on our socials and website. Get in touch
No.
The 25 hours are the symbolic collective action, but participation can take many forms.
Maybe you join an activity for an hour. Maybe you spend an afternoon offline. Maybe you sleep longer, have a long conversation or simply give yourself permission to do less.
Every form of participation contributes to making the collective pause visible.
Slow Up for Humanity is organized by Worried Citizens vzw, a citizen-led collective founded by Eline Goethals, Tijs Delbeke and Elisabeth Van Lierop. Their previous campaigns include Show Up for Humanity (2025) and 505 Concerten voor Menselijkheid (2024). They are aiming to turn societal concerns into active hope through cultural and public actions. Worried Citizens brings together everyday people who believe in a society rooted in kindness, empathy and fairness.
Slow Up is made possible together with volunteers, artists, cultural organisations, civil society organisations, schools, unions and many other partners across Belgium.
This initiative is a work in progress. We’re a citizens collective constantly learning and evolving. Do you have any questions or advice? Drop us a line
There is no single way to Slow Up.
You can spend the 25 hours sleeping, reading, cooking, walking, making music, talking with friends, doing nothing at all, or joining an activity organised by one of our partners.
You can participate alone or together. At home or in public. For the full 25 hours or for part of it.
The point is not to do Slow Up “correctly”. The point is to create space for rest, connection and reflection.
We do urge you to register and be counted, though. ;-)
Slow Up aims to bring public attention to the relationship between time, wellbeing, care and planetary boundaries.
We want to create space for a broader conversation about what we consider valuable, what we call progress and how we organise work, care, consumption and our economy.
We also want to show that activism can take many forms. A collective pause can be a way of making a shared concern visible and creating space to imagine alternatives.
Ultimately, we want to ask a simple question:
What could we gain if people and planet had more time to rest and recover?
In addition, stepping out of the daily ratrace can be a win-win for participants in itself: it creates space for rest, refection and recovery.
By slowing down together, people get the chance to connect and start to collectively strengthen social fabric.
Worried Citizens is a citizen-led initiative, by citizens and for citizens. We aim to turn worry into collective action.
In a context of climate breakdown, growing inequality and rising mental distress, many people feel powerless.
We want to break through that sense of apathy and show that change is possible. The problems we face are the result of decisions, and different decisions can be made.
Slow Up for Humanity is part of that effort.
As Margaret Mead famously said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Slow down often sounds like stepping back. Slow up flips that logic. It suggests a conscious shift upward: towards rest, care, attention, and connection. It is an active choice, not a passive one.
By slowing up, we resist a culture that always wants us to do more, be more, buy more. We choose rest over speed, presence over productivity, and a sustainable pace over exhaustion.
Because we don't simply want to slow down individually. We want to slow up together.
No. Self-care can be valuable, but it cannot solve problems that are created collectively.
We can learn to manage our time better, set boundaries and take more breaks. But what if we are exhausted because work takes too much of our time? What if care is unequally distributed? What if housing and basic needs have become unaffordable?
Slow Up asks us to look beyond the individual. We want to talk about how we organise work, time, care, consumption and our economy, and whether we could organise them differently.
Slow Up for Humanity is supported by a broad coalition of civil society organizations, trade unions, companies, thinkers, writers and artists. The organization also works with ethical partners who share the same core values.
This coalition-based approach is both intentional and essential. Slow Up for Humanity is not about “us versus them”, but about building shared ground between climate action, the right to dignified work, cultural voices and social justice. Through intersectional alliances, we bring together climate stakeholders, cultural institutions, labour movements, ethical businesses and citizen initiatives.
By building bridges across these fields, we strengthen one another and work collectively towards a society in which as many people as possible can live a good life on a liveable planet.
Slow Up is not affiliated with a political party or political movement. It’s not about left vs. right or us vs. them.
At the same time, we do not believe that questions about how we organise society are apolitical. How we work, care, consume, distribute time and measure progress are all questions with social and political consequences.
As the feminist slogan "The personal is political.” says: anything we do, say, or think can acquire political meaning. From the clothes we wear to what we post online, it all carries not just personal significance but also the weight of political meaning, whether we intend it to or not. We're calling for empathy and solidarity to be guiding values in all decisions we make as a society.
Slow Up therefore wants to contribute to the public debate. We ask for a society that puts the wellbeing of people and planet at the centre.
We also deliberately choose a form of activism that seeks connection rather than further polarisation.
We have one planet. We are going to have to figure this out together.
Sometimes it is. And sometimes it needs to be.
Protest takes many forms. Some are loud, urgent and confrontational. Others create space for dialogue, connection and imagination. We believe there is room for all of them.
Slow Up chooses the softer spectrum. Not because the challenges we face are soft, but because we want to explore what activism can look like when it brings people together rather than pushing them further apart.
We live in a time of growing polarisation, where it can be tempting to divide the world into “us” and “them”. But there is no separate planet for either side.
We have one planet. We are going to have to figure this out together.
That doesn't mean we agree on everything. It means we believe change requires finding enough common ground to move forward together.
Slow Up is an invitation to create that space. To slow down, listen, talk, connect and imagine what we might build if we stopped seeing each other as opponents and started seeing each other as fellow inhabitants of the same fragile planet.
In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono turned staying in bed into a public protest. Their bed-in showed that protest does not always have to look like confrontation.
Slow Up takes inspiration from that idea and gives it a contemporary meaning.
For 25 hours, we deliberately do less. We make rest visible. We gather around conversation, culture, care and connection.
There is no work-life balance on a dead planet.
There is no wellbeing on a dead planet.
There is no music on a dead planet.
We often talk about mental wellbeing and the climate crisis as if they were two separate problems. They are not.
We need a liveable planet to live well. And the way we organise our lives affects the planet we live on.
The Paris Agreement aims to keep long-term global warming well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Yet we are already experiencing the consequences of a warming world: extreme heat, drought, wildfires, floods and growing pressure on the ecosystems we depend on.
So taking care of ourselves cannot mean looking only inward. If we want people to have time, health, safety, connection and space to enjoy life, we also need to take care of the conditions that make those things possible.
That is why Slow Up connects wellbeing with planetary boundaries.
Because what is the point of creating a better work-life balance if the world we live in is becoming less liveable?
What is the point of making more time for the things we love if the natural world that makes those things possible is disappearing?
Slow Up is about asking how we can build a society that takes care of both.
It’s a fair question. With climate change accelerating and inequality remaining so high, it can be difficult to imagine a future in which everyone can live well without pushing the planet beyond its limits.
But there are reasons for hope.
The Global Justice Report, published by the World Inequality Lab and developed by a team including Thomas Piketty, Lucas Chancel and other researchers, asks exactly this question: can we combine global prosperity and greater equality with planetary boundaries?
Their answer is yes, but not by simply making our current system more efficient. Their modelling shows that a liveable future requires several changes at the same time: a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, a much smaller material footprint, more sustainable consumption and food systems, shorter working hours and a significant reduction in economic inequality.
In their sustainable convergence scenario, all countries can move towards high levels of prosperity while global warming reaches around 1.8°C by 2100, compared with more than 4°C in scenarios where inequality persists and decarbonisation remains slow. This is a modelled scenario, not a prediction, but it shows that the future is not predetermined. Different ways of organising our economy and our lives lead to different outcomes.
And that is an important part of the Slow Up question:
What if a good life doesn't require more of everything?
What if we measured progress not only in how much we produce and consume, but also in how much time we have, how well we care for one another and whether we can live within the limits of our planet?
that's why we still believe that a liveable future is possible.
If we want it.
Because they are not separate worlds.
A society built around constant growth, productivity and consumption puts pressure on both people and ecosystems. We extract more from the planet while asking more from ourselves.
The result is visible in different ways: exhaustion, burnout, loneliness, inequality, biodiversity loss and climate disruption.
Slow Up explores what happens when we stop treating these as completely separate problems and start looking at the systems that connect them.
Economic growth can create prosperity and improve living standards. But endless growth in the use of resources is difficult to reconcile with a finite planet.
Slow Up asks a different question: what if the goal of our economy was not simply to produce and consume more, but to create the conditions for people to live well within ecological limits?
That means thinking about what we value, what we measure and what we consider progress.
That is an important question.
Time is not equally distributed. Women still do a disproportionate share of unpaid care work. People working shifts, multiple jobs or insecure jobs often have very little control over their time. Single parents, caregivers and many people living with financial pressure may have very little room for rest.
Slow Up does not want to pretend that everyone has the same freedom to pause.
Instead, we want to ask why rest, time and connection have become privileges in the first place.
Twenty-five hours will not solve burnout, inequality or the climate crisis.
That is not the point.
Slow Up is a symbol, a collective experiment and an invitation to ask bigger questions.
What happens when we stop for a moment?
What do we notice?
What do we value when productivity is no longer the goal?
And what would change if we built more space for rest, care and connection into everyday life?
You can support the work of Worried Citizens in several ways: participate in Slow Up, help spread the word, organise an activity, become a partner, volunteer or support the organisation financially.
Every form of support helps create space for collective action and public conversation around the future we want to build together.
Discover all the ways you can support us here:
Every contribution, big or small, helps us grow this positive, citizen-led movement and make Slow Up for Humanity possible. Your support enables us to organize the action, reach more people and amplify its impact.
Any surplus will be reinvested in similar future initiatives that align with our values. All use of funds will be communicated in a transparent way. Together, your support helps ensure that Slow Up for Humanity creates lasting, positive change.
More information, visual material and contact details are available via info@worriedcitizens.com
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