How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.

This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. 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.

Discipline and sheer force of will explain much of why we valorize our culture’s refuseniks.

To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do.

It was a familiar feeling of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.

Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.

Let’s not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors.

Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me.

Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation.