• Author: Jenny Odell
  • Full Title: How to Do Nothing
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

My initial reaction to Chapter 1 is that it leans a little too much, for my taste at least, into a kind of emotionalizing reaction to Donald Trump being elected president in 2016. I would not classify myself as a MAGA supporter or enthusiast. But I have a hard time empathizing with people whose emotional world can be rocked by the change in president. I felt the same during the Obama years when I would hear people say it was a dark day in America after election day.

I understand that was the circumstances of the book being written, but that kind of couching of the entire subject matter is a turn off for me. It's a turn off to me when people make politics such a large part of their identity and state of their mental health. I'll keep pushing through to see where we go.

Highlights

Introduction Surviving Usefulness

  • We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. (Location 46)
  • We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate. (Location 49)
  • Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a “symptom of deficient vitality,” and observed “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.” (Location 51)
  • What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. Such “nothings” cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables. (Location 63)
  • I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. (Location 74)
  • I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the “dropping out” of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community. (Location 82)
  • 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. (Location 90)
  • I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. 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. (Location 98)
  • It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. (Location 194)
  • I hope it can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival. (Location 263)

Chapter 1 The Case for Nothing

  • wakes up and looks at phone ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device –@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016 (Location 275)
  • this period of reflection convinced Muir that “life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.”7 Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”8 (Location 393)
  • My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. (Location 414)
  • 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, (Location 721)
  • Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.” (Location 781)
  • “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”54 (Location 1146)
  • Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. (Location 1210)
  • In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, 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. (Location 1218)
  • We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of these movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call “standing apart.” (Location 1242)
  • 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. (Location 1246)
  • But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. (Location 1256)

Chapter 3 Anatomy of a Refusal

  • It was probably this kind of social stamina that Diogenes had in mind when he said he would only accept disciples who were willing to carry a large fish or piece of cheese in public. (Location 1432)
  • 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. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out? His search for this answer occasioned the experiment’s many harsh “controls”—for it to work, it needed to be pure. “I brought my isolation to the public while still preserving the quality of it,” he said. (Location 1449)
  • “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” (Location 1469)
  • 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. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. (Location 1571)
  • A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. (Location 1579)
  • For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. (Location 1753)
  • Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. (Location 1772)
  • A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. (Location 1774)
  • to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. (Location 1779)

Chapter 4 Exercises in Attention