How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

A GROCERY STORE full of strangers has a similar effect in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” Wallace gives the students what is basically a brutal description of adult life, in which you find yourself at the “hideously, fluorescently lit” grocery store full of annoying people after a long day of work and a horrible traffic jam. In that moment, you have a choice of how to perceive the situation and the people in it. As it turns out, that choice is basically one of attention: if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?2