## Metadata - Author: [[Jenny Odell]] - Full Title: How to Do Nothing - Category: #books ## Highlights - Seneca, in “On the Shortness of Life,” describes the horror of looking back to see that life has slipped between our fingers. It sounds all too much like someone waking from the stupor of an hour on Facebook: Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season! ([Location 53](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=53)) - We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=59)) - Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. ([Location 76](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=76)) - Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down? ([Location 86](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=86)) - I see people caught up not just in notifications but in a mythology of productivity and progress, unable not only to rest but simply to see where they are. ([Location 124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=124)) - To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual. In an environment completely geared toward capitalist appropriation of even our smallest thoughts, doing this isn’t any less uncomfortable than wearing the wrong outfit to a place with a dress code. As I’ll show in various examples of past refusals-in-place, to remain in this state takes commitment, discipline, and will. Doing nothing is hard. ([Location 160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=160)) - an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=200)) - 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](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=263)) - Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits “is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.” Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.” ([Location 524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=524)) - It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground. “Direct sensuous reality,” writes Abram, “in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; 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.” ([Location 578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=578)) - In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. 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. ([Location 593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=593)) - make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=597)) - As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=605)) - BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. 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. ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=633)) - Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” ([Location 646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=646)) - As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” ([Location 701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=701)) - 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. ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=721)) - Retreat and refusal are the precise moments in which the individual distinguishes herself from the mob, declining to buy a house and a car and conform to a stodgy, oppressive society where, as Diamond puts it, “there was always some Total Death Corporation job with your name on it.” But in order for these refuseniks to stay out there and function as a commune, they needed to negotiate a new balance between the individual and the group. As Weiss recalled of the Philadelphia commune, “the slipperiest decisions always involved reconciling privacy and communality, the individual and the house”21—in other words, the very fundamentals of governance. ([Location 900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=900)) - Memory and horizontal alliances are two hallmarks of individuality. ([Location 995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=995)) - To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. ([Location 1251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1251)) - McEvilley, as so many others throughout history have, admires Diogenes’s courage when it came to flouting customs so customary that they were not even spoken about. He writes, “[Diogenes’s] general theme was the complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values, on the ground that they are automatizing forces which cloud more of life than they reveal.”12 When McEvilley says that Diogenes’s actions “[thrust] at the cracks of communal psychology” and “laid bare a dimension of hiding possibilities he thought might constitute personal freedom,” it’s easy to think not only of how easily Pilvi Takala unsettled her coworkers at Deloitte, but every person who, by refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, revealed its often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives. — ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1330)) - To this day, although he has his critics, Diogenes is often hailed as a hero. For Foucault, he was the model of the philosopher who tells it like it is;13 for Nietzsche, he was the originator of the Cynic approach behind any genuine philosophy.14 ([Location 1341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1341)) - In the eighteenth century, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert wrote that “[e]very age…needs a Diogenes.”15 I would agree. We need a Diogenes not just for entertainment, nor just to show that there are alternatives, but because stories like his contribute to our vocabulary of refusal even centuries later. ([Location 1344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1344)) - But beyond showing that refusal is possible—highlighting the “cracks” in the crushingly habitual—Diogenes also has much to teach us about how to refuse. It’s important to note that, faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1349)) - what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. ([Location 1360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1360)) - For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor. ([Location 1360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1360)) - VOLUNTATE, STUDIO, DISCIPLINA–IT is through these things that we find and inhabit the third space, and more important, how we stay there. In a situation that would have us answer yes or no (on its terms), it takes work, and will, to keep answering something else. ([Location 1420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1420)) - Like any expression of discontent, “Civil Disobedience” is already an attempt to seek out those who might harbor the same feelings. Thoreau’s ultimate hope was that if enough individual people decided at once to exercise their moral judgment instead of continuing to play the game, then the game might actually change for once. This jump from the individual to the collective entails another version of what I’ve so far been describing as voluntate, studio, disciplina. In Diogenes, Bartleby, and Thoreau, we see how discipline involves strict alignment with one’s own “laws” over and against prevailing laws or habits. But successful collective refusals enact a second-order level of discipline and training, in which individuals align with each other to form flexible structures of agreement that can hold open the space of refusal. This collective alignment emerges as a product of intense individual self-discipline—like a crowd of Thoreaus refusing in tandem. In so doing, the “third space”—not of retreat, but of refusal, boycott, and sabotage—can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public. ([Location 1498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1498)) - Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. 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 1772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1772)) - Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. 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. ([Location 1798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1798)) - “Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.” ([Location 1840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1840)) - There is more than a touch of delirium in William Blake’s description when he invites us “[to] see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” This way of looking, in which we are Alice and everything is a potential rabbit hole, is potentially immobilizing; at the very least, it brings us out of step with the everyday. ([Location 1951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1951)) - So why go down the rabbit hole? First and most basically, it is enjoyable. Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known. Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven’t seen that you’d like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner. Although it’s never seemed like a choice to me, I live for this feeling. Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself. ([Location 1955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1955)) - This leads into a second reason to leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice: doing so allows one to transcend the self. Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known. ([Location 1959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1959)) - In his 1923 book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber draws a distinction between what he calls I-It and I-Thou ways of seeing. In I-It, the other (a thing or a person) is an “it” that exists only as an instrument or means to an end, something to be appropriated by the “I.” A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.” Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it…When he says You, he means: You, my ability to use!” ([Location 1963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=1963)) - As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear. — ([Location 2035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2035)) - 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. ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2208)) - It’s in the realm of poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to “empower” us by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other. Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly. ([Location 2211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2211)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together—with attention—perhaps we can meet each other there. ([Location 2315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2315)) - I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point. At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to. ([Location 2664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2664)) - I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind. ([Location 2706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2706)) - It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics. ([Location 2756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2756)) - I obviously like birds. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns. ([Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2773)) - What becomes clear in Barassi’s analysis is that thought and deliberation require not just incubation space (solitude and/or a defined context) but incubation time. My experience suggests that these challenges apply not only to activists but also to an individual trying to communicate with others, or just maintain coherent trains of thought. Whether the dialogue I want is with myself, a friend, or a group of people committed to the same cause as I am, there are concrete conditions for dialogue. Without space and time, these dialogues will not only die, they will never be born in the first place. ([Location 2931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=2931)) - One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book—about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space—means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality. ([Location 3478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=3478)) - The idea of an aimless aim, or a project with no goal, might sound familiar. Indeed, it sounds a bit like our old friend, the useless tree—who “achieves” nothing but witness, shelter, and unlikely endurance. ([Location 3502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=3502)) - it was the historian’s task to turn his back on the imagined course of progress and dig up each record of this impulse from the debris, to make the past live in the present, to literally do it justice. Manifest dismantling is similar. It asks us to remember—in the sense of re-membering, the opposite of dismembering. ([Location 3511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=3511)) - When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself—nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more. ([Location 3561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FLNFRGK&location=3561))