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A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.
Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down?
The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.
the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.
But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.
What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?
“What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”
To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this
It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.
The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).
Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem?
Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.
escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.
To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”5 The goal and the reward of Deep Listening was a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.
I’m reminded of a 1991 lecture by John Cleese (of Monty Python) on creativity, in which two of the five required factors he lists are time: 1. Space 2. Time 3. Time 4. Confidence 5. A 22 inch waist Humor
With renewed energy and a different perspective on his job, he went from technician to engineer, and has filed around twelve patents so far. To this day, he insists that he comes up with all of his best ideas on the top of a hill after a long bike ride.
Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.
When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.
If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?
In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”
“Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”
And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.
#NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”
So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.
Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see
The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.
Gathering all this together, what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise
He also hated the city, seeing in it only opportunism, corruption, political machinations, and military bravado—the kind of place where Demetrius Poliorcetes, dictator of Athens, could tax the citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars ostensibly because his mistress needed soap.
Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.
Preemptively calling it a “peaceful project” avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, “peace” is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered.
Even the crowd-shunning Epicurus, who taught that one shouldn’t speak in public unless requested to do so, showed some orientation toward the outside world by using his house as a base for publishing the writings of the school.
“The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”
In any narrative of escape, this is a pivotal point. Do you pack all your things in a van, say, “Fuck it,” and never look back? What responsibility do you have to the world you left behind, if any? And what are you going to do out there?
The Seven Storey Mountain,
F
Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. The result is something like the sleep-deprivation tactics the military uses on detainees, but on a larger scale.
but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement.
“[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.
stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.
We need a Diogenes not just for entertainment, nor just to show that there are alternatives, but because stories like his contribute to our vocabulary of refusal even centuries later. When we hear about Diogenes blowing off Alexander the
This gets at Bartleby’s next-level refusal: he not only will not do what he is asked, he answers in a way that negates the terms of the question.
It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable.
Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning.
“Civil Disobedience” is already an attempt to seek out those who might harbor the same feelings. Thoreau’s ultimate hope was that if enough individual people decided at once to exercise their moral judgment instead of continuing to play the game, then the game might actually change for once. This jump from the individual to the collective entails another version of what I’ve so far been describing as voluntate, studio, disciplina. In Diogenes, Bartleby, and Thoreau, we see how discipline involves strict alignment with one’s own “laws” over and against prevailing laws or habits. But successful
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To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention.
It’s a testament to this toxic “grind or die” atmosphere at universities that, even in the face of major illness, we put the pedal to the metal and continue to drive our health off a cliff. It’s not like this is a conscious decision to be miserable, but sometimes it feels as if taking care of our own health is a guilty pleasure…We subliminally equate feeling burned out to being a good student.
the workaholism is driven by a very real fear of very real consequences that exist both within and outside of school.
Portwood-Stacer’s interviews also show that “the personal or political decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.”
For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. But while commercial social networks reign supreme, let’s remember that a real refusal, like Bartleby’s answer, refuses the terms of the question itself.
