How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

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.

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?

Our “citizenship” in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together.

Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being.

When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.

“It’s just you with yourself and your own crap, so you have to deal with it.”

“eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.”

Although leisure or education might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it.

A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

Eric Holding and Sarah Chaplin call CityWalk “a ‘scripted space’ par excellence, that is, a space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs, and orchestrates use.”

Anyone who has ever tried any funny business in a faux public space knows that such spaces do not just script actions, they police them.

faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on 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.”

yes, it did get easier to work. From anywhere. All the time!

No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s promotional]

there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”

When I realized this, I grabbed on to it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. 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.

When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #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.”

She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity.

All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work.

I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. Its only use was as a flashlight and a timer.

“I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

t]he purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”

Removal and contemplation were necessary to be able to see what was happening, but that same contemplation would always bring one back around to their responsibility to and in the world.

we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all.

By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, “[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.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I

“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.”

Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.

actual looking was a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practiced; there was “a lot to see” only if you were willing and able to see it.

A picture represented something other than itself; a painting represents itself.

I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default.

If, as I’ve said, attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished—to be done with it.

I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

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

thought about how it’s possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before),

“be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down.

I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.

It’s also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence

There was life after the death of the ego.

If critical distance is what we’re after, I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.