I am revisiting Jenny Odell's fascinating book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Originally published in 2019, her work feels more urgent today than it did a mere six years ago.
The pace of life--of change, of disruption, of technology--continues to accelerate.
Most everyone I talk with is not okay. At all.
I see a deep disorientation in most people's eyes as they ask: What is happening? Why are social norms being broken right and left? Is there anyone, anything I can count on? Are things going to work out?
Everything feels urgent, confusing, off-kilter.
There is growing pressure for all of us to "do something." There is increasing pressure to "say something" when concerning events happen in the world, as if "saying something" will help anything.
Even our leisure time feels frantic and forced. No one I know is sleeping well. Caffeine is swilled like water. A couple recently told me about how they mix alcohol and Ambien.
Despair is the word of the day.
In the midst of all this, philosophers and theologians, cultural anthropologists and meditation guides, sages of all sorts all whisper, "Be still."
When everyone and everything around us is screaming "DO SOMETHING!" what if the only sane response--at least for a bit--is to actually do nothing?
To let the dust settle.
To allow our souls to catch up with our bodies.
To breathe our way through the hubbub.
Odell writes:
"Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.
We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands.
For some, there may be a kind of engineer's satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience.
And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent.
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."
While all of us are busy doing something and saying something, the deepest answers to our societal angst are most often discovered in moments of "accident, interruption, and serendipitous encounters."
What if "off time" is what we all need most right now?
Yes, most of us who have a voice should say something. Those with no voice need us to lend ours to them.
Yes, most of us who can do something should do something. Those with no power to act need us to lend our right action to them.
But if we don't precede our speaking or doing with "doing nothing," our words and actions will tend to be reactive and unwitting, even potentially destructive.
While the world spins and burns, start by doing nothing.
The way will appear.
Take it.
Yes ❤️
Right?!?!