Notes on Possibility: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Jenny Odell says this book is for “any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized.”
I’ve read How to Do Nothing a few times now. It’s one of those books worth reading in circles.
Below are my most revisited highlights from the book, organized by core theme.
As always, books are best consumed in their entirety and in the context they were intended. This is my context, curated through my lens, shared here primarily for my personal reference. Anything in quotations is Jenny’s words unless otherwise specified.
If this sparks anything for you, I encourage you to buy/borrow the book!
“The ultimate goal of “do nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.”
To do nothing is:
A “dropping out”.
A “movement downward in place”.
Maintenance as Productivity
“Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation.”
In the attention economy, “disruption is more productive than the work of maintenance.”
“Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem?”
“I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.”
“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.”
“Time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on nothing”
“Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom?”
What if the “experience of life was the highest goal”.
Attention & Possibility
“Patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.”
“In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation…” — James Williams
Curiosity
“What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable.”
Surprised by how shallow attention and breathing are as default
“If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them.”
“Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves.”
“Curiosity is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known.”
“Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself.”
The Role of Art
Using art to influence and widen attention. “The artist creates a structure that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.”
“Labyrinthine quality of attention-holding architecture”
To Stretch Toward
“The word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tender, “to stretch toward.”
“If attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention.”
“Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.”
Sustained attention leads to awareness, awareness is the seed of responsibility.
“If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.”
Our attention renders our reality.
Monoculture & Context Collapse
“In a public space, you’re a citizen with agency. In a faux public space, you’re either a consumer or a threat to the design.”
In faux public spaces, we enjoy a “feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity”
“One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.”
We need “spaces for what we will.”
Social media and context collapse
Social media doesn’t allow for change: we’re supposed to be “monolithic and timeless like a brand.” Not a person who changes (which we would expect in real-life relationships) p163
“How much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding.”
There are parallels between what the economy does to our ecological system and what it does to our attention… “Components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated are the first to go.”
There is a tendency toward monoculture
Capitalism is unsatisfiable
“Pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance.” p199
“When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. […] And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.” p183
“A life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one.
A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”
Social Media
“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 desire, and profiting from them.”
“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.”
“It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.”
“The invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentives to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
“You 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.” — William Deresiewicz
“Some hybrid reaction is needed.”
“We absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to.
We need distance and time to be able to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all.”
Space & Deep Listening
“To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.”
Doing nothing offers us a sharpened ability to listen
Forming an idea requires privacy and sharing
“What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” — Gilles Deleuze
“The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.”
We are “restoring habitats for human thought”.
Refusal in Place
“To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do so means refusing the frame of reference.”
Refusal in place is an antidote to escapism.
The Desire to Leave
“A familiar and age-old reaction to an untenable situation: leave and find a place to start over.”
“When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now?”
On communes… “their wish to break with society and the media ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.”
“A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.”
The Invitation to Stand Apart
“Some hybrid reaction is needed. We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.”
“To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.”
Standing apart is: "Allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.”
“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.”
This reminds me of what Parker Palmer calls The Tragic Gap
“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. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.” p62
Components of a Refusal
“Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention.”
“Meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.”
“Quietly threatens social norms with simple actions.”
“It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable.”
Refusal requires latitude (to bear the reactions). Only available to those who already have a lot of social capital
Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why mass acts of refusal usually come from students
“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…”
“A real refusal refuses the terms of the question itself.”
This reminds me of watching Bob Dylan being interviewed
“What happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
