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How To Do Nothing - Intro+Ch1 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-10-22 20:15:22
Edited:
2024-02-16 01:58:03
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[On my bedside table: 3 half burned candles (Vanilla Cashmere, Vanilla & Sandalwood, Oakwood & Cotton), wallet, glass of water using Revolution Tammix makeup pallet as a coaster (which i do not recommend necessarily I only use the two purples and sometimes the green, the rest is a little garish imo), almost empty wine glass using real coaster, lamp with fake flowers stuffed in it's ornate chest, and iPod pro case concealed by head of wine glass (iPod Pro case is missing the left headphone on the inside. I do not know where it is.)]

The introduction of How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

What to say that hasn't been said! I will simply give u a few quotes and  respond to what you respond to below. KTI 4ever

(little update on book reports at bottom)

----------------

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. Thought it can be hard to feAP BWDOEW IR SIAPPWea (my fingers slipped im not fixing it)

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.

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.

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.

Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.

Useful for what?

----------------

One of the keys to getting into hip hop or jazz in my experience is to find one album or artist you love, then investigate the personnel and guest players and relations that went into that artist or album. Then you branch out, because they probably all have albums and other projects they've been involved with. You'd be surprised at how fast you spiral into rich knowledge of the history and culture of that art form; these things happen in communities.

As such in this book you will find many beloved characters we may have seen before, like William James, Jaron Lanier, Braiding Sweetgrass, David Foster Wallace's 2005 Commencement Speech, and I dont know if you've heard of this site called Twitter?

More pieces of the puzzle fall together.

---------------

A Note on Book Reports:

We're prepping a survey that will be available in the FINAL Book Club post. But take a selfie with your book and screenshots/pics of your marked up pages and favourite bits and take a pic or two of places you read the book, or things that reminded you of the book, as you go on. We will seek these submissions at the end when we do our editorial work, and I think the product will be heartwarming.

HOWEVER: sooner! We are going to do some retroactive Book Report work. In early November  we'll put out a call for Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance submissions to honour that time and work and energy in the KTI community. We'll be doing reports on everything. So if you are interested in revisiting prev books or have some pics in your camera roll from those times or if you wanna take new pics to be included regardless, now is a good time to dust those old bones off.

We will work with what is given, so if there's not a big turnout for our throwback revisitation of previous, we will still be able to take our rich rich discussion threads and our own aesthetic sensibilities and create a lovely tribute to ground that has been tread. Witness & Memorial.

---------------

I am very touched by the passion & attention of u all.

I hope you've been well. And if you haven't, I hope this is something meaningful to give your attention to.

Let us know what you think. Let us know how you feel. I'll be contributing further below.

Files

Comments

Alex Dian

So, I must admit that when reading this I couldn’t help but make mention to the privilege needed to be able to step away and disengage. (I know she mentions it in a later chapter). I did like this quote for sure: “On a collective level, the stakes are higher. 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. ”

azalea water

i first read this book about three~ months ago, and had a lot of positive but slightly mixed feelings when i put it down - but i'm excited to read through it again! something i love about the introduction is the way it's able to get the primary philosophy of the book across by framing it within the context of the writer's life. using “old survivor” as an example of something that gains strength by it’s refusal to be useful and then going into the story by Zhuang Zhou does a really great job of establishing the main idea of the book. i might be wrong, but i think it’s a very taoist kinda approach to life. it reminds me a lot of the “practice non-action” that you find all the time in that philosophy. but this time it’s against western capitalism rather than 400bc china. the one kinda big gripe i have with a lot of the book is that many of the ideas Odell uses are quite privileged. the prospect of “doing nothing” is itself dependent on that being an opportunity that you have, which for many who need to survive capitalism is just not an option. anyway, killer opening.

Evelyn G
>>120409277

I'm curious if you could elaborate. It feels like she is discussing steeping away from the attention economy and not disengaging from society as a whole. Collective action and political participation does not necessarily require everyone to be on the facebook page. Cheers!

mia

this isn’t an insightful comment or anything but i was broken up with at the very same rose garden she talks about in the chapter and now i can’t stop thinking about it and why they chose that specific place

Willow De la Rivia

I have three thoughts on the book so far. On the intellectual side I share with my peers the rightful indignity that comes from living in the new age of social media. Governed by people whose favorite (and perhaps only) book is "ready player one" and see no issue with the grim future it presents. “The attention economy” and the way that it increasingly demands more and more of our precious limited time does give me “that funny feeling”. On the emotional side it is not how much time I spend on the internet that worries me. But the way it has rewired my thoughts. You know when you make up scenarios in your head, in the shower, when you’re bored, grocery shopping? At the worst of my social media addiction I could not daydream without it including a level of external perception. Win an argument you did not have a good answer for at the moment? That’s great! But wouldn't it be better that confrontation when you were oh so smart went viral and then everybody could validate your big big brain and infallible logic? I could not pick up my phone for hours and still the structure given to me by hours of watching and being watched did not leave me. On the pragmatic side I agree with Odell when she agrees with Rebecca Solnit on the idea that humans do not turn into heartless monsters when presented with disaster and that instead they tend to go towards empathy and connection. The issue, as many have pointed out, is that with irl spaces becoming harder to access (by work hours, decrease of free places to hang out, higher cost in the places you have to pay) we find that connection in the next best thing. Which would not be such a bad thing, I think, if participating in whatever online community did not always come with the looming threat of a tech bro salivating at the idea of monetizing your thoughts. [I read the chapters on the bus. I forgot to take a picture. You can imagine it in your mind, but remember your mental image could be worse than that of others, and therefore not make you worthy of being observed, so make sure to make up a good one.]

Izzy

I come from a background in STEM, and my day career is that of an engineer, so you can probably imagine how second-nature it is to me to want to "optimize," "be productive," for the sake of... whom? For those of you that live rent-free on the iPhone Notes app, maybe you can relate...I probably spend most of the time on Notes planning what tasks I will be doing each day of the month, constantly switching things around so as to best optimize the use ["Useful for what?"] of time, treating time as scarce when I could easily game for hours and not care when I blast through hours then. Capitalistic productivity to me is a disease bestowed upon us for those of us within the West, especially those like me who grew up impoverished and with families who helped push us into higher levels of productivity. Getting the best grades, extra extracurriculars all to put on a resume, and creating thee sob story and myth of the American dream, all to get noticed by Daddy College, and then the degrees are plastered on your wall and you think everything is going well until maybe you think to yourself if you're lucky, "Wait, why do I still feel unsatisfied? Unfulfilled?" Scary Hours. No more God's Plan. Unchecked Productivity was adaptive then to me, and maladaptive now (for those of us who "made it"). Some may even go their whole life endlessly producing on the labor conveyer belt into an abyss of billionaire proportions...which is why Odell mentions that it is certainly a privilege to even be able to question the idea of productivity enforced on us by Western capitalism. For some, it becomes an ego identity to shed 50-60 hours of life for the sake of "busyness" and ranking one another in a fomented circlejerk hierarchy. For countless throughout-and within my own community especially-most people, productivity keeps food scraps in the trash bin, butts wiped with 1.33-ply TP, and Juicy Foot on the bottom of your shoe. The right to do nothing is explicitly taken away by the overlords for those that can't afford to do nothing. However, I still think that there is merit in "productively" resisting against productivity and the frontal assault on our senses. Imagination is vital, and sharing ideas to actively resist against unchecked productivity and the attention economy is important for anyone with access to a screen and also exists materially in this world, privileged or not. My nieces and nephews are already glued to screens, and I don't want them to feel the existential dread that comes as an adult when you spend countless hours on Twitter and Reddit with nothing to show for it but being pissed off. Rich or poor or somewhere in the middle, there is a clear assault on our senses and endless propaganda to do more, make more, not just in the physical world but also the digital. Apps like Tiktok and Twitter are designed to keep you facing your reflection and get you addicted to a mixture of cortisol and dopamine. Not everyone can simply take a sabbatical like Odell's father and completely disengage from the world, but perhaps we can be like Old Survivor, and "resist in place" the pandemonium all around us- at least in moderation, and definitely not turning a blind eye to the abuse around us. We need to ditch the urge the grab the Soylent out of the fridge and get to cooking. Notable Quotes: "What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?" (xiv) "...financially incentived proliferation of chatter..." (18) - Twitter under Elon Musty #NOMO

Jay

I'm excited to be extremely normal about this book. The parallel between Old Survivor and the Zhuangzi tree story was exactly the one I had already been drawing in my head, so it was good to enjoy that moment of connection when you happen to be along the same thought process as the person you're in conversation with. I'm interested to see her take on the dropping out movement from the 60s, and I wonder if it or something else is going to help expand on the nuanced reaction to the fear of doing nothing as a privileged act. I think it's a valid worry to address, but 'X is privileged' also tends to be a thought-terminating idea in discourse rather than an invitation to think more deeply; a reason to dismiss the proposal rather than engage with it further. Successfully written off, box checked, time to scroll to the next thing that demands a judgement call in the endless stream of demands. I think the first chapter already sort of speaks to this indirectly, that the act of doing nothing and finding your humanness in a world trying to systematically smother it with noise and demands is an act of resistance, and it doesn't take one shape. Pushing back against the flow is significant in whatever big or small way you're able to do it, whether that's taking two years off, visiting a third place once in a while, or noticing the nature around you - being a human being with a body in the world and not a producer/consumer, if only for a moment. It all makes that space for something new to grow. And in the case of the people who are privileged enough to 'do nothing' (that is, do something not productive by our societal standards) by volunteering to maintain the rose garden, they're making the space more inviting for the people who might only have the time or energy for a visit. From each according to their ability oryouknowwhatever Sophie from Mars had a recent video essay ('The World is Not Ending') that's been rattling around in my brain and feels related. The thought is a little undercooked and there's still a lot of book and this post is already long enough, but I think the idea of being non-productive in the ways the author is talking about leads toward establishing spaces and people that are and will be vitally important, as the system works on squeezing every potential cent out of our time, thoughts, and attention, and inevitably pushes toward intolerable levels in pursuit of infinite growth. If the deal becomes shitty enough - if we're demanded everything in exchange for nothing - then rejecting the system stops being a privilege and starts being simple pragmatism. Every place, moment, and thought outside of it is a potential alternative, a vision of an imaginable way out, making space for more of the same.

Evelyn G

"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. I'm real too." I love the refocusing from the digital void to a placement in the body and the fractal like expansion of time that happens when you find your place in local realities. I'm excited to read on. It's all too relevant to many of the problems we face and impotently complain about. I find it hard to not reference the book when I'm talking to friends and curious co-workers. That being said it's been a very relaxing read.

annie liz

boy oh boy here we go Lore! Growing up, if my family was ever at a Serious Mandatory Event that wasn’t very entertaining for small children, my mom would have my brother and me pack up some toys or books with us to use during the event. We didn’t HAVE to entertain ourselves with what we brought, but she wanted to make sure we had at least something, and we were not permitted to make a nuisance at the Mandatory Event. if all else failed, my mom would say, “well, you can practice being bored.” It became a joke a few years down the line, and then just as quickly, became very much NOT a joke bc holy shit, nobody practices being bored now. There’s memes and jokes about how we can’t survive with our own thoughts for more than 30 seconds, the need for the constant input of something, anything, clinging to input to keep us from the ominous weight of presence.. they’re not really memes anymore. This book club comes at a fun time for me; over the last few months, I’ve been actively trying to reexamine my relationship to social media and existing on a day-to-day basis and, importantly, after that examination actually DO something about it. These actions stemmed from a lot of places; from my relationships, from my screen time metrics (yikes), from my ambitions, and 100% without a doubt from the work we’ve done in this book club. I got tired of talking and thinking about how shitty my interactions with the social media-shaped world are, and I want to be better. So I’m Doing! I’m soooo not there yet, it’s a work in progress, but one that has been really fuckin good for me. Check back with me in a couple years and we’ll see how it goes lol. This intro puts down some very good roots and lays out the plan very nicely. I’m excited to keep going. i feel like any thought i have now will be expounded and developed in further chapters so i’ll let em cook for now, but I’m honestly most excited to hear what you all think as we go week by week. Kill the Internet Touch Grass Live Laugh Love

benedict.m

judging by how hard a time i had summoning the attention span to even read this portion, i REALLY need this book right now. i think i'm not the only person in this community who tends to fill their time with things that *are* ostensibly valuable--good art, well crafted video essays, shit that does actually affect and expand you in some way--and still finds themselves in that anxious unfulfilled state at the end of a day. i'm already feeling pretty called out (but in the effective valuable way) by this book's argument for opting out of like the entire structure of media engagement on the internet, rather than just being more selective or conscious about your relationship to it. you can't just only consume good shit, you actually have to stop consuming sometimes.

annabel_182

So far, I think I’m going to enjoy this book! I’m finding Odell’s writing style to be fun to read. ANYWAY,,,,, on to my Take™ on the intro and chapter one: I thought the part about the crows and how they became part of Odell’s routine was so sweet? cute? made me yearn for a deeper connection with the natural world in a similar way that Braiding Sweetgrass did? idk. And sort of along those lines, I enjoyed how she reminded us that all of this “social media is literally designed to rot your brain” stuff should be used as a call to remember that life is actually about the tangible things and to go touch grass and stuff. "It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say." Loved that she brought up the lack of time to sit and think about what you’re going to say before you actually send out a silly little tweet with a “take” – I often feel like literally everyone in the world except for me is able to read/watch/learn something and then immediately digest it, and then have something intelligent and valuable to add to the conversation. Idk, I guess I just feel glad that she’s pointing out that it’s normal to sometimes take your time with things lol Also, as soon as she started writing about maintenance and care and being rooted to physical places, my brain locked in. The whole section about Old Survivor? Loved it! “When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “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.” The refusal to define the 8 hours that aren’t spent working or sleeping………. much to consider. Makes me think of the limitations that language imposes on the way we experience Life™ and also our compulsive very human need to define and sort everything into distinct categories. Semi related personal lore tangent: When I was like 12, my mom told me that I couldn’t always just consume content, that I actually had to make stuff too,,, and I still haven’t been able to stop thinking about it 11 years later. She originally told me this because I’d always talk about wanting to be a writer but I would never actually write anything. She suggested that I try setting a goal to write at least one paragraph about literally anything I wanted every day during summer vacation and I’m so thankful that she made me do this because that led to me picking up a (semi) regular diary practice that still continues to this day. It’s nice to have something that records my life for that long that isn’t like,, my fucking tumblr blog that I also started at that same age lmao ------------------- Some of my favorite snippets: (I'm sorry for such a long comment!) This is a four course meal in the age of Soylent. How little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season! the mere experience of life as the highest goal Just as surely as the needles that grow from Old Survivor are connected to its ancient roots, the present grows out of the past. This rootedness is something we desperately need when we find ourselves awash in an amnesiac present and the chain-store aesthetic of the virtual. Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.” Rogers’s point in the commencement speeches was made anew: we are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience.

Xaris _

I felt really seen by this book so far, especially in the intro. I'm always feeling like I don't do enough, and I struggled in school with the work load and how every moment taken to myself was procrastinating work. I just finished chapter one and I really liked the idea of maintenance work as art and Life energy. I HATE chores, largely because they feel like nothing. You can't do them once and then years later say "look at that thing I did". But that's life. And I guess "and that's beautiful" is the next thing to say haha but I still hate the nothingness of chores.

Xaris _
>>120427612

I also really feel like elaborating more on my thoughts, but I think I'm gonna not do that just yet, in the spirit of doing nothing, and try to read (listen to) everyone else's responses.

reva

mannnnn the description of "observational eros" made me feel CRAZY like that's exactly it. there is such a deep joy in looking really really really closely at something and noticing smaller and smaller details. like have you ever picked up a pencil sharpener and held it under the light and noticed all the incredibly fine scratches in the plastic from use. or the particular patterns of graphite smudges. doing this is the best ever in general the introduction to this book made me feel so crazy and delighted. all of the ideas mentioned feel very in line with my life recently, like i've been detaching from social media and my phone more recently and trying to slow down because college has kept me in a state of constant anxiety and being "on" and checking on all the various things i have to keep track of and i'm just. done with that. i want to take meandering walks outside and pick up sticks on the ground and like stop and look around me. i think the biggest thing holding me back from relaxing right now is honestly how school interacts with my adhd, like if i'm not constantly stressed and checking my calendar then i will just forget that events are happening and be 20 minutes late to everything i do. adhd does not mesh well with capitalist time at All. in summary i want to make friends with birds and know the names of all the trees i walk by every day and look really closely at bricks in the side of buildings and deeply understand the entire world in my immediate vicinity. and i'm loving this book <3

reva
>>120416640

hey same hat! i've also been deeply reevaluating my relationship with the internet and how i exist in my daily life and it's been very good for me! i wish you good luck with the process ^_^

Willow De la Rivia
>>120431295

The observational Eros bit reminded me of the movie "Ladybird" (a different type of bird watching I guess) and the scene in which the titular character writes an essay and is told by the teacher that she must really like her hometown if she could know so many details about it. She says it's no big deal, she just pays attention. And the the teacher responds: "Don't you think it's the same thing. To love and to pay attention?" I agree this type of "eros" is very underrated as well . (Good luck in school!)

Houston Coley

I wish I had time to write more, but I loved this quote about art being a way of framing or creating structure to highlight a certain experience: "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." I guess that idea struck a chord with me because my wife and I just showed our film to an audience for the very first time last week, and it felt like one of the most sacred things we've ever done; a lot of the film is quite meditative and quiet and slow, and the experience of getting people in a room to watch it almost felt like an invitation for all of those people to slow down and be present. It felt like something that could only happen in community, in a room with others—if you were watching a slow, contemplative movie on your laptop at home, you'd probably check your phone and find it hard to be present. We really want to have more in-person screenings in community with others in the future because it felt like a unique opportunity to create a structure to invite people into presentness specifically around experiencing art together with others.

Sarah Sarah
>>120414816

Wow, you kind of blew my mind with that observation about how "X is privileged" tends to get used as a thought terminating cliche. I'm going to really start paying attention to that. Also really like the idea that you can use your privilege to do nothing to make space for others to join you in doing nothing. Love!

valentin

"Could "augmented reality" simply mean putting your phone down?" Now that I work a full time job I have a lot less time available to spend on my phone. While I do still use it more than I want to, this limitation has caused me to be more intentional in how I use my screentime. Maybe I don't need to watch this YouTube video, maybe I don't have to check Instagram right now. I'm still figuring out how to divest from social media a little more. Ever since the YouTube adblocker debacle I've been trying to think of ways to quit it, but I'm not quite there yet... The first chapter was a gentle but powerful introduction to this book. It didn't feel like my world was turned inside out but I am aligned with Jenny Odell's brain waves now. Her talk about the granularity of perception of a certain thing (birdwatching) changing over time is real as fuck. One of the most rewarding aspects of learning a skill. Being able to distinguish bird noises. Or chords. Or climbing holds. Or Textiles. A heightened awareness of the Thing You Are Trying To Perceive. Something you rarely get from the flat spaces that social media are. Kill the Internet. "A public, noncommercial space requires nothing of 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 something [...] to be there." Genius little sentence there. If twitter is like a public square maybe it should have its properties. Like being noncommercial. Imagine a park where there's somebody constantly trying to sell something to you. Following you around and yelling at you. Uhh maybe the internet should be a little more like a rose garden. "Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything." (This quote is not hers but still beautiful) Kill the Internet. [BONUS QUOTE] "Do we really believe that human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?" (also not hers) Really makes you think huh..? Do we? Do you? Let me know idk but I do lean more towards Zen Buddhism than Rene Descartes.

Sarah Sarah

Really struck by Odell’s reference to rest as resistance via the labor mantras of old: Eight hours for work Eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will I got stuck here. I find the remaining eight hours of “what I will” are slowly crept into and chipped away at. These eight hours start to feel like four hundred eighty minutes instead. And I think our drive to always “be productive” has made me think like that. Skip the rest of my comment if you’d rather have chill vibes, because I’m going to unpack how manic and sick this always-be-productive mindset has made me lately even in my off hours. Keep those four hundred and eighty minutes like a ledger, and it gets really dire really fast. - Shower and do basic hair care? Subtract 40 minutes. - Do I exercise? Subtract 60 minutes - Clean the gross sink? Subtract 50 minutes because I cleaned the whole bathroom too. - Take a walk? Subtract 30 minutes. - Eat breakfast? Subtract 25 minutes. - Answer texts? 25 minutes. - Lunch? 25 minutes. - Groceries? 70 minutes. - Cook a healthy dinner? 49 minutes. - Clean up after cooking? 35 minutes. - Wash laundry? 10 minutes. - Fold laundry? 20 minutes. - Insert another dozen items just like this. Insert bathroom breaks and how long it takes to wake up from the second snooze and god knows what else. It’s gross, right? It’s obsessive and gross to dole out my life in these minute-by-minute chunks like a budget, to always be on a hustle. Maintenance is absolutely restorative, but I have to fight the idea that time spent on maintenance is a ledger and I’m subtracting something when I take care of myself. I left the list above semi-generic to be relatable, but that’s not what life looks like for me right now. I just became a mom of two as of July. Today is my first day back at work. That list above doesn’t begin to tap into the maintenance of caring for two small children and how that bulldozes everything else off of ledger. “How to do Nothing” got me thinking about where maintenance care and unhealthy standards of productivity intersect for me as a WFH mom. I fight that ledger every day. Some days I fight alongside it, triumphing at the wealth of productivity I can cram in that four hundred eighty minutes. Other days the four hundred eighty minutes crushes me, some days before even half of it has passed I feel defeated. Some days I find myself thinking that it’s gross that I have to keep this ledger. The fact that I’m alive under these constant equations of time, that the math is a millstone around my neck, sucks so hard. The only thing that sucks worse is when I’m so crushed that I just want to turn my brain off and give up on maintenance. So I go on Reddit. Subtract 100 minutes.

Olive Nicole

“The endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity” There’s an inherent irony in this book, and Odell seems to recognize this. I forgot to do the reading in time so I read it on the train on the way to work, picked it up again while eating my lunch, and I type this during my time between assignments at work. This line stood out to me, particularly “frightened, captive attention” because that’s what I felt checking the time while trying to grasp what was on the page and I had to stop writing mid-sentence to do my job and come back later

Chandler Sterling

Can we just take a second to talk about how amazing the cover of this book is? The flowers pop so nice and make my eyes do a little dance every time I get to look at it. I'm even more thrilled that they already have a point beyond aesthetics with the whole Old Survivor bit and the fact that this all came to be from some time spent in the Rose Garden. If you haven't taken 5 minutes to enjoy the cover, I invite you to do so as a way to dip your toe into "Doing Nothing". It definitely put me in the right headspace when I did it between the Introduction and Chapter 1. You do you though, flowers may not be your thing like they are mine. I appreciate the introduction taking the time to relate to the reader in what is surely a world full of people enamored by efficiency. There is no moment where I felt less than for thinking in terms of productivity, and I think that makes the medicine go down much smoother. There is also, "Like Old Survivor, you'll find that this book is a bit oddly shaped." (pg. xx) which goes on to be completely transparent about the overall structure of what's to come. I don't know about everyone else, but thanks to the mini lesson plan Odell provides in the intro, I feel more at ease. Productivity brain wants to know what I'm going to learn next as efficiently as possible, and that section definitely shut it up for long enough to appreciate Chapter 1 at a calmer pace than I'm used to. Also very passionately underlining every section about relearning the value of nonverbal communication and not have A Take. Silence is Golden. I'm generally only capable of speaking when I've rehearsed something in my head about 5 times, so maybe I'm biased there. The bit about Deep Listening on page 7, and pretty much everything about the Rose Garden and bird watching (noticing) reminded me of haiku. A lot of people just learn that a haiku is 3 lines alternating between 5 and 7 syllables, but traditional haikus had so many more rules than that. Some of it is due to translation (the kireji, or cutting word, that is supposed to end one of the lines doesn't have a good English equivalent), but some of it feels like something we should return to. There is typically a kigo (seasonal reference) in haiku which is why they are always in such close relationship with nature. The traditional haiku was constructed to compare two images in order to capture a specific moment or feeling, so there's a very strong focus on the present when writing one. I have spent too much time talking about haikus, but I would also recommend writing one some time while trying to use the traditional rules. It's very meditative, and feels like "Doing Nothing" without doing nothing at all. And just to prove I did club some of the previous books, a list of some quotes that I have tied red string around in my Kill the Internet cork board. "This place, just as much as the place where you are now, is calling out to be heard. I think we should listen." (pg. xiv) ------ Braiding Sweetgrass "Obviously the solution is not to stop reading the news, or even what other people have to say about that news, but we could use a moment to examine the relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange." (pg. 18) ------ Amusing Ourselves to Death (Light Side version) Feel free to add additional yarn to my board! And make sure to have fun killing the internet everyone!

margaret (formerly Samson)

Its so good to be reading this with everyone :) I don’t really have much of an overarching take on this one yet, and I think Odell would be pleased by this. I am so glad that we’re reading it - i think in my personal story, it’s a book that I need to read, and need to read now. But it’s so early that right now, I believe I need to simply listen. ((Also I’m totally copying Annie Liz in listening to the book while reading it on this one. I think this is a good book to have as the focus material while I come to terms with the results of my internet addiction. KTI indeed. It’s just as well though, I can’t bring myself to write in books. Its the same reason why I haven’t gotten a tattoo and why i struggle to put things up on my walls in my house - I dont trust that the marks I make will hold up over time.)) Notes: (p. xv) Regarding the Useless Tree - the whole time she was restating that story, showing the tree to have a very different definition of usefulness to what the humans expected, the CJtheX flavored rat in my brain was just scrambling on its little wheel. Usefulness in the eye of the beholder. “You worthless man about to die - how do you know i’m a worthless tree” what a raw fuckin line oh my g-d (p. 1) “the garden encompassed everything i wanted to cover: the practice of doing nothing, the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance.” I am often reminded of the directions given to the humans in the garden of Eden - to do gardening, and to name stuff. In other book club books, I’ve been reminded of the deep human tendency to study and label and chart and dissect and experiment with things, and how I see that being an extension of naming (how can you name something that you don’t understand? And as you come to understand it, don’t you also encounter new things to name?) But this is an instance where I am reminded of this other imperative task of humanity - to do gardening. To make stuff that is good and is a wise use of resources. To creatively cultivate the world around us. It is comforting to me that Odell is an atheist, if only because it allows me to say “see? She wasn’t just playing on that Garden of Eden thing like so many christian writers like to do”. The connection between her voice and God’s feels so much more organic as a result. (p. 13) “Its interesting, and certainly troubling, to understand the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space.” Ok ouch, didnt need that parallel to be made, that connection hurts my soul to encounter. (p.16) Ok so she’s mentioned Franco Berardi a bunch of times and I wonder if that might be useful further reading for us if this particular chapter speaks to us, but the quote she has on this page, “Fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor” reminded me of this study that was done about Ants - apparently some significant portion of ant colonies are usually just kinda slacking, but this is necessary for the colonies for various reasons. I don’t know why this came to mind - possibly the use of the term Cells, or maybe Pulsating. Very ant-ish vibe to me. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-015-1958-1 (p. 18) “It is this financially incentivised proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time.” So 1) thank you, Odell, for using the words Horrified and Offended - the visceral language here feels so useful, to remind me of just how desensitized i am to this sort of reality, and to how awful it really is when you think about it. And 2) hello, Postman. Lol. And 3) the outcomes are disturbing, but (as with Postman’s work), I’m not convinced that it’s truly about the medium. I don’t find video / image / internet medium to be inherently more predisposed to this kind of sludge, although it certainly doesn’t seem to help. It seems more like its about the pace of the information, not necessarily the information itself. So what systems are at play that are contributing to this? Is it all just capitalism? Just the internet? (p. 22) “This is real. Your eyes reading this text. Your hands, your breath, the time of the day, the place where you are reading this, those things are real.” Ok but also i struggle so hard to trust my own senses and my own experience as being valid. Its a very postmodern problem to have. A hyperlink - Vlad Vexler, a dude who talks about the Ukraine/ Russia conflict (among other things, I guess) did a video a while back about institutions and trust, and i feel echoes of that video as I contemplate why i am so quick to disregard my own senses and experience. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there, and I’m not always sure who to believe. It shakes the foundational trust that is needed for institutions (or in this case, my own intuition) to operate unimpeded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C80MP4lvAQ (p. 25) “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.” This concept of the work of mothering being an art, and being an act of maintenance, and maintenance itself being an act of resistance, it resonated with me. I have lived this, and I lived it harshly- the earliest months of being a mother were spent in the isolation of pre-vaccine covid. Our house was still being renovated, and my husband was starting his construction business at the same time (honeslty what the hell were we thinking) and so he was off doing this super productive, entrepreneurial, brand building work, and I was… at home. Maintaining a household that wasn’t really even in one piece. It was so lopsided of a way to feel - on the one hand, I’m doing the most important thing, holding down the fort. And on the other hand, the fort isn’t important enough for us to finish building, because there are Clients to worry about. (p. 28) “A fear of our carnal embedment in a world ultimately beyond our control– by our terror of the very wildness that nourishes and sustains us.” I’ve long been compelled by this idea of the Female of our species as being slightly more connected to the animality of our bodies, due to the menstrual cycle and the childbirth of it all. I don’t totally buy it (it sounds a bit like patriarchy in cottagecore clothing IMO) but at the same time, something in there does have some truth. I am at the mercy of my body for at least a few days each month. I will probably not feel like getting out of bed, I will probably have headaches, I’ll probably feel sick. I can prepare for it and put it on the calendar and have comforts for when it happens, but at the end of the day that carnal wildness is a part of my physical experience in a way that it just doesn’t seem to be for the men in my life. (would be very interested to know the thoughts of any non-binary/ non-cis, if you got em.) Links that I noticed / connections to other works / further reading as recommended by Samson’s Ratbag Brain: “One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious.” (xxiii) - a hyperlink to one of those vlogbrothers videos where John defines a book that is Good as being Worth our Attention. This has stuck in my mind like a splinter in the years since I first watched John’s video, and it came back to my conscious brain while listening to the introduction, and only now, on hunting it down and rewatching it to see if i am indeed in the right spot (I am, 2:05 is where he starts to say the quote i was looking for) is the word Good tying in to the ___X of it all. https://youtu.be/4VymR174m_4?si=jTkWDoFfrjjy_cX6 Re: the general use of trees in the introduction - it reminds me of this episode of the Bibleproject podcast, comparing Humans to Trees. I like to think that’s because there’s something fundamental about our world that makes the comparison between humans and trees so useful. https://bibleproject.com/podcast/humans-are-trees/ . “Those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat… i see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency… the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs.” - Abby Cox’s latest video, which I listened to while assembling a Klippan sofa (irony?) points out that women’s fashion wasn’t always dominated by patriarchal systems and was, actually, once a women-dominated field, until the rise of sewing machines made it possible to shove that work into each individual home, and upon the (mostly female) domestic engineer / homemaker / housewife, thus taking away an industry from women and also adding more tasks to the average household burden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVwhg8LZnlc Also, and I haven’t read this one yet, this feels very similar to the More Work for Mother thesis that I’ve seen in various other places. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ruth-schwartz-cowan/more-work-for-mother/9780465047321/?lens=basic-books

Natthew Lee

I feel like there’s a lot of art about how digital friends and connections are just as real and meaningful as irl connections. I’ve tried to make that work, tried to make it the case, but that just doesn’t do it for me. My digital friends are always somewhat secondary in my mind. It feels like a betrayal to say, because the generation above us was telling us that digital friends weren’t real, and I wanted to prove them wrong. Being a digital native, someone who grew up on the internet, was always a point of pride/a point of difference between me and my parents. I understood things they didn’t about how the internet works. As a furry I believe living in and actualizing fantasy can be vital for your soul. But there is something inherently soulless about building VR chat and twitter communities when nobody can meet their true love outside of swiping on tinder. Maybe we’re building communities in the wrong place guys???? I loved hearing about the author’s medium being context, and about all of her artistic work. So interesting let me gobble that shit up om nom nom Loved her description of “eight hours of what we will”: “the most human way to describe that period is to refuse to define it”. Freedom in refusing to pin something down. Makes me think of how “personal branding” is boxing yourself in for the sake of…… what? Very interested in the feminine life force and masculine death force. Odell describes the traditionally Feminine as upkeep, order, community, routine (gathering, keeping the house in order), and the traditionally Masculine as dynamic, wild, individuality, avant garde (hunting, providing through violence). Kind of goes opposite Jordan Peterson’s whole Masc/Fem syzygy of traditionally Feminine Chaos (Pandora’s box, Eve eating the apple, the seductress, fluid gender expression) vs. traditionally Masculine Order (Domination, The king/tyrant, rigid gender expression, taming the wild woman). Gender is so multifarious in its attributes. “Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in ‘progress’” (26) Makes me think of NYC mayors getting elected because of stupid new programs they can put their names on when all we really need is someone to pump millions of dollars into the subway system to repair and maintain that shit. But maintenance isn’t a sexy campaign promise. “We are are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience.”

valentin
>>120489895

Yess the cover is fucking awesome! I never really engaged with haiku beyond the surface level of 5 7 5 syllable poems. I'd love to hear more about them!! We all benefit from learning a bit more. Things becoming less granular and such.

ursula

Enjoying the read so far! Lots of food for thought. I'm looking forward to what's to come and reading more of everyone's thoughts. I've been appreciating Odell's emphasis on our flawed premise of what productivity even is, with the whole question of "Useful for what?" asked through the stories of Old Survivor and Zhuang Zhou's 'The Useless Tree'. I also found myself very struck by Odell's point about how our narrow understanding of productivity causes us to almost fetishize growth at the expense of care (p.25). While the growth of capital comes to mind as a prominent example of this dynamic, I've been thinking more about what this might mean for personal growth, and how that might in turn harm individuals, communities, and our capacity to enact positive change at large. I know that for me, I feel driven towards a need to grow, but I never feel like I'm growing Enough. I'll feel ashamed of not knowing precisely where or what I want to grow into. I tell myself: you should grow quicker! But Odell's "antidote to the rhetoric of growth" is a helpful way of interrogating the basis of those questions and self-criticisms. Care is the antidote. The idea of thoughtless growth also reminded me of Fiona Apple's song, 'Extraordinary Machine'. Specifically this verse: "I noticed that my opponent is always on the go And Won't go slow, so's not to focus, and I notice He'll hitch a ride with any guide, as long as They go fast from whence he came But he's no good at being uncomfortable, so He can't stop staying exactly the same" This opponent of hers seems to move quickly purely for the sake of moving, going somewhere new without caring where or why he's going there. But, despite all the movement, he stays stuck in the same position! Meanwhile, Fiona, as the speaker, "still only travel[s] by foot and by foot its a slow climb". I can't help but see a parallel with Odell's point about how we're encouraged to be constantly striving for novelty, but that paradoxically keeps us perpetuating the old status quo. Aimlessly marching towards false growth.

RobinDH

Liking this so far. Other people have touched upon the attention stuff better than I could, so I'll talk about Odell's use of non-fiction as a form. There's a part in the introduction where Odell talks about the structure of the forthcoming essays that I really like and put into words something I've been thinking for a while: that the essays are made in the traditional sense of the word "an essaying forth" and that they should be considered "less a lecture than an invitation to take a walk." This made me think of what I like in an essay (a form I've become pretty interested in these past few months): bringing together a broad variety of subjects to illustrate a singular point or idea. It made me think of this Brian Dillon quote, from his book Essayism, where he likens the structure of the "conglomerate" essay to geological formations*: "Always, with the fragment as with the essay itself, there is this ambiguous shuttle between identity and dispersal, between formal, almost physical integrity and a fracturing or even pulverizing action. ‘Fragment’ gives us ‘fragmental’ and ‘fragmentals’: geological terms for rocks and shales that are heterogenous, composed, of more than one substance. I like the idea of the essay as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things." Like, I like Zadie Smith―her essay on Barthes and Nabakov is a must-read IMO―but I prefer Charles Baxter, who, like Odell, ties together so many threads you wouldn't think to connect in service of something bigger. (Please read Burning Down the House, it's incredible.) Focus isn't necassarily a virtue Wrt essays and non-fiction in general, for me. Some other things I liked: -Gordon Hempton's definition of silence, "not the absence of something but the presence of everything" struck a cord with me. -Everything to do with conceptual and performance art was v. interesting to me. -I've heard the Seneca bit before but Odell helped put it in a new perspective for me. *This is wayy off-topic, but this, William Gass comparing a Sir Thomas Browne sentence to a wall and a Henry James sentence to a spiral staircase (https://x.com/ddillingworth/status/1396521944577581056?s=20), and Zadie Smith talking about the architecture of a favourite, familiar work of art in her Barthes/Nabakov essay have me thinking about the structure of a work of art in relation to physical structures―man-made or natural.

annie liz
>>120514046

super interesting note on online friendships and relationships. I’ve made some of my closest friends through online community spaces, and I love them till death, but I think they’ve survived because there came a point where we DID cross the online barrier to in person. The first time i met a digital friend in analog space we hugged each other for like 2 minutes, then just kind of desperately kept clutching each other’s hands going “you’re real!!! you’re real????” which seems to be a common experience with online-to-in-person meetings. The relationship we’d built wasn’t necessarily less tangible for being formed in cyberspace, and sometimes it took years before we finally could meet together, but ultimately to be sustained it needed a mutual space to fucking cling to someone and feel a warm body hold your hand to say “i’m here, and so are you”

Teralin

i’m finally able to participate in a timely manner!! yay slower pace but also yay audiobooks because my little pea brain can’t sit down and read for any extended period of time apparently. i am not very good at doing nothing so PERFECT timing some passages that stuck out to me: the one about listening versus hearing. it felt pointed because at many times while hearing this book read aloud i had to rewind and actually listen to the words that were being read and comprehend them. i felt called out. i know that i’m not a very good listener in general. i’m not a very good noticer at all. it’s like my observation and comprehension skills are on the back burner at all times. comprehending is active work—work i could stand to practice every once in a while growth for growths sake— someone said that in one of the first comments and like…right on. idk i feel like the concept of doing nothing eludes me so easily. it’s easy to get caught up in pointless distractions. it’s hard to focus on noticing. on the moment. but i feel like the present moment is such a divine thing if you can manage to capture it. i once went on a hike with a guy i was dating and we didn’t bring our phones, or watches, or any technology—it was so freeing. a little stressful because we knew we had someplace to be that we couldn’t be late for—we tried approximating with the sun as a guide for time. and you know it all worked out. even though he and i aren’t together anymore i remember that trip so fondly as one of the high points of our relationship because it was just us in nature in the moment—no distractions. listening and noticing each other. that’s my rose garden

Julie
>>120462571

Being forced to pay undivided attention to what you're watching is definitely one of the reasons I love going to the cinema. Where I live there's an annual animation and documentary film festival. The lights don't come on until all the credits have rolled, and then people applaud. I love these last moments of quietly contemplating what you've just watched while catching some of the names scrolling by who made the art possible, and then giving it a moment of joint appreciation. Reading your comment made me think of this :)

Lou Corben

Hey gang, nice to be back. I thought I wasn’t going to have much to say yet as so far this feels like it's treading much of the same ground as previous book club books, but then I started typing…. - I read bits of Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’ for a project and found him pretty selfish actually, but this part went hard: “You will hear many men say, “After my fiftieth year I will give myself up to leisure: my sixtieth shall be my last year of public office”: and what guarantee have you that your life will last any longer? who will let all this go on just as you have arranged it? are you not ashamed to reserve only the leavings of your life for yourself, and appoint for the enjoyment of your own right mind only that time which you cannot devote to any business? How late it is to begin life just when we have to be leaving it! What a foolish forgetfulness of our mortality, to put off wholesome counsels until our fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to choose that our lives shall begin at a point which few of us ever reach.” - Art as something unproductive is an interesting one, because on the one hand yes, but also no. Here in the UK we're always trying to get the Conservative government to give us more arts funding and one of the arguments you see again and again from our side is that statistics show that for every £1 the government invests in culture, £5 is generated for the economy. So you'd think it would be a no-brainer, but they still keep making cuts! So it must come down to something more than productivity and economics… What then? Suppression of art as a tool to generate empathy?? It's worked for the bastards so far… (bastards isn't a strong enough word) - “Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down?” is so CJ coded lmfao - I move a lot because it’s hard to find stable affordable housing in London. What happens to “attention to place” if you have to move around all the time? I’ve been feeling very unrooted recently and struggling with it. I’m also struggling between wanting to live in community, but also having very annoying housemates lol. I feel like I either need to somehow find my own place (which feels almost impossible) and build community by throwing regular dinner parties, or sell almost all my worldly possessions, live out of a suitcase and embrace a more nomadic lifestyle without all the shit weighing me down and making it more of a pain in the arse every time I have to move. - I liked the bit about Old Survivor. Here in the UK a 16-year-old and his dad cut down the famous Sycamore Gap Tree on Hadrian’s Wall in an act of vandalism. The tree was planted in that location in the late 19th century but was about 300 years old. My crackpot theory is it’s some kind of dark side climate protest they’re not letting out to the Press (or am I trying to find a cause-and-effect narrative on a senseless act?). Anyway, it was really sad. - Fun to see Donna Harway come up since I keep banging on about reading her book…. I’ve done a few pages lol… Kin and Motherhood is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently - I don’t have/want children but I think I have a motherly approach to my creative work with others. I’ve also been thinking about how I can incorporate more immediate, non-judgemental communal artistic experience like song or dance into my practice more… I’ve noticed a crossover between community, wellness and existing acting exercises…. can we use Ecstatic Dance as a warm-up, for example? Not pictured: my reading spots - a random cafe in Mallorca on a break from a singing holiday with my choir :]], then on the overground at home surrounded my commuters... yin and yang 🍞🌹 🍓 x

Willow De la Rivia
>>120507485

This is a bit long but I loved hearing your thoughts and it kinda got my mind reeling Trees. Fuck. Okay. So there’s this book called “The little prince”. It’s a children’s book and one of my top 3 of all time. It’s about a boy that lives on a very small planet populated by baobab trees and a rose which he trims and takes care of every day. Now the kid goes out to explore the universe, ending up on earth and a lot of things happen but the thing I want to talk about is that up until this point he thought that his rose was the only rose in the universe. Until he finds out that there are in fact, thousands, nay millions of roses just like his. So he gets very depressed about it. But then he meets a fox. And the fox asks him to “domesticate” him. And the little boy is like why??? And the fox says well if you domesticate me I would be special to you. Even if there are thousands of me I would be unique to you and you would be unique to me. I also can’t help connecting gardening to Eden. And climate change. How we are fucking the planet. When everything was “right” our one and only task was to take care of the earth. A task God specifically “domesticated” us to do. I think a lot about the little prince (It’s my roman empire. As the kids say) And how much time he spends caring for his rose. How hard he fights to get back to her. How his story is one of choice. I think about having children, a daughter specifically. I think I will try to trim her, like my mother trimmed me. I cut her and she makes me bleed. A repetitive task born not out of hate but out of love. Because that’s what it means right? You do not spend so much time taking care of someone or something if you do not care at least a little. Isn’t that what “motherhood” is supposed to mean? Someone who cares, at least enough to not leave, to do the act of maintenance. To be clear, I also do not buy into the idea that “women are mythical creatures” that is common in so many seemingly progressive spaces. But I still remember the first time I got my period and how harrowing it was for me (my mother did not warn me) but also what one of my classmates said when he found out I had it: ”Can’t you just go to the doctor and make it stop” Now we were both ten at the time so I do not think he meant it in a bad way but it hurt anyway because up until that point that was the correct solution to bleeding. Blood coming out of you is bad. That’s not just a human thought, it is one shared by all living creatures. If you're bleeding you are closer to death. You need to fix it. Go to the doctor and they will fix you and that’s it. But now it was not that easy. Blood was not a sign of the end but of a beginning (can you tell I was raised catholic? lol) Every month for the next 35 or so years I would have to perform the ritual to keep myself clean and to avoid the pain. But you can make babies!! (Doctors words not mine). So while I do not think that one has to bleed in order to be a woman. Or that bleeding makes you one. There is an unbreakable link in my psyche between “womanhood” and maintenance work. To be in control. To keep your garden clean. Lest you burn yourself out and bleed all over the place. It's not that I think of “womanhood” as this separate sacred place, more in-tune with nature and whatever. It’s that I look back to when I was ten and some part of me thought I was going to die and I think that any human, regardless of sex, when confronted with something as primal (and beyond our control) as the reality of life and death will change the way they see the world. Spoilers for the little prince. He wanted to go home but his body was too heavy to carry him across the stars. So he makes a deal with a venomous snake, who bites him so that his soul can go back to his rose and trees (insert Eden parallel here) so that he could take care of her again even with the knowledge that she was not special. I firmly believe in choices. I am as anti bioessentialism as one can be. I’ve read through the comments and while KTI is a very catchy catchphrase I do not see it working for me. So there’s the show called Pantheon (Sorry for the endless references.I am not smart enough to convey my ideas without them.) The basic storyline is that humans have managed to upload their brains into the “cloud” and live a second life inside the virtual world. The theme of the show is wherever this UI (uploaded intelligence) should be considered deserving of the same rights as “bodied” humans. And my answer to that is an unapologetically yes. Your limbs do not need to be “working” for you to be a human. I do not need to see a person for my mind to register it as “real”. We do not know if the little prince made it. I choose to believe he did. Call it internet brain rot, call it faith.

Halley

First off, fabulous title. very thought provocative. I like her openness in setting up the book and her perspective in it. I feel like she's drawing a constellation of points together to get at these questions we're all stuck with but need people to articulate so we can even comprehend what we're dealing with. "If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? 'what's the point of this- things condemning things? You are a worthless man about to die- how do you know I'm a worthless tree?" I'm listening to 'A Wizard of Earthsea' by Ursula k Le Guin concurrently and enjoying how magic is described in that story- how naming things, knowing something's true name, is a source of power. I really liked this part ('a rock is a good thing too, you know' https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9153266-the-master-hand-looked-at-the-jewel-that-glittered-on ) for also touching on this idea of the usefulness of not being useful that Odell wrote about with the tree stories. There are so many ways of being valuable besides being useful to some narrowly defined end! "what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention... there's a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as "not useful" and which cannot be appropriated are the first to go." (who am I if not exploited?) "A view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places." I'm exhausted of being asked who I am. I'm still figuring it out, still becoming her. Every time I introduce myself, apply for a job, fill in a bio or 'about me' section I feel like I have to put myself in boxes, contorting my expression of self to what is expected for the context. "In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine... The removal of economic security dissolves those boundaries so that we are left with twenty four potentially monetizable hours." This is the part that really hooked me and made me feel SEEN. The tricky 'freedom' of freelancing and the anxiety of waiting for work to appear. My job is made up of parcels of work with no guarantee of more, no security. I'm always available and grateful for whatever work I can get. I'm afforded a deceptive freedom of working for myself, but in reality if I take a trip there is always the anxiety of landing a job while I'm away and not actually feeling like I ever have time "off". Sometimes I'm busy with many small projects or a big audiobook for months, working as much as my voice and back will let me each day, and other times anxiously waiting for anything to come into my inbox and wondering if it ever will, if I should start looking for a new career, but not knowing if I can in case I suddenly end up with another big project. "Time becomes an economic resource we can no longer justify spending on 'nothing'. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive... just as we lost noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial." The overwhelming possibilities of the internet and connectivity create this massive feeling of guilt, knowing that if I were just more clever or dedicated or lucky I constantly have the possibility of making money at my fingertips. Not knowing how makes me feel like there must be something wrong with me, when I see so many others succeeding in this space. I do still spend a ton of my time on nothing, but it comes with this guilt. I end up thinking, maybe if I spent more of my time trying to grow an online business instead of making art and going for walks and reading I'd have that economic security I so desperately want and can't seem to find? "It was comforting that these essentially wild animals recognized me, that i had some place in their universe... they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week. And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am" I was delighted to see her reference David Abrams, as I just finished reading the last chapter of his "The Spell of the Sensuous" after savoring this treasure of ecological philosophy for over a year now. There is a lot of congruity between their ideas and in how O'Dell applies his philosophy, such as the focus of citizenship in one's own bioregion and understanding oneself through sensuous interaction with other beings and one's earthly surroundings. "symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care...'I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages. Kin is an assembling sort of word." This reminds me of Kimmerer using the Anishinaabe words 'ki'(sg.) or 'kin' (pl.) in place of 'it' when referring to living beings in an effort to reclaim the grammar of animacy. I also thought about this article I saw recently comparing dreams across cultures: (https://neurosciencenews.com/social-dreaming-culture-24952/) I've been ruminating about repair and maintenance, keeping that tab open in my mind. practicing finding joy in the chores, showing my gratitude for the things that sustain me. I think life is made up of good spots and moments. This desire for 'what we will' and having the space for it.

J

(first time poster, sneaking into the back with half formed thoughts, hello.) I struggle with attention and memory (and sensory experience to some degree) on a neurological level that predates internet but was not helped by it. I can agree with Odell's ideas on the whole (for other people lol) but I find myself carving out little pieces of nuance to carry in my mind going forward in the book, for my own relationship to attention, to place, to my physically present relationships. For one: I definitely do spend time--a lot of time--doing "nothing," zoned out in reflection, but I feel the quality of it is limited when my brain makes its own distraction so easily. (Musing on the meaning of life? Time for Mambo No. 5!) And the time I do spend on reflection, idleness, rest, doesn't often translate into action when I feel like it should. I struggle to start and finish tasks, so I'm bad at doing nothing AND bad at the capitalistically "productive" uses of time. Since social media wasn't the original thief of my attention, I don't feel like pulling away from it, as I have been lately, has taken all my attention back. I can try so hard to notice, to be present, and yet can't seem to hold on to much, and from what I remember and hear from family, I've always been like that. Odell's talk about learning the names and calls of birds reminds me of all the love I have for naturalist pursuits despite my inability to hold many facts within reach in my brain. The poem "Someday I Will Visit Hawk Mountain" by M. Soledad Caballero made me feel very seen on this. (A lovely reading can be found on the Poetry Unbound podcast).

Adison

INTRODUCTION Oh hello book club. Long time no see! And what a wonderful place to jump back into everything. The introduction and chapter 1 spoke to me in a way that theory has not in a long time. I’m screaming under my breath at the coffee shop i’m currently in about how I AM REAL! I AM A BODY AND I DESERVE SPACE TO EXPERIENCE IT ALL!!! Some quotes to give this response some structure… “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.” (ix) “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.” (xi) FUCK PRODUCTIVITY! Not really, no, there is spiritual and community importance in getting stuff done, but boy howdy is our perception of productivy broken. I’m feeling very seen by this view of productivity, and its prioritization of care, maintence work, and experience. I’ve always felt very constrained by this idea that we have to work all. the. time. and that looking at the sunset is a waste of time if you don’t use it to create something profitable. I dont’ want to be profitable, I want to be alive, and this book really validates my conviction to resist the all encompassing pull of the grind. “This rootedness is something we desperately need when we find ourselves in an amnesiac present and the chain-store aesthetic of the virtual.” (xvii) I also really love Odell’s voice and her ability to construct beautiful sentences and images. I appreciate how the art moments and philosophical convictions blend together to create the experience of reading this book. I’m simultaneously enraged, in awe of the human experience, and learning! “I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce on another.” (xvii) “To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: spacing laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.” (xxiii) WE MIGHT JUST FIND THAT EVERYTHING WE ALREADY WANTED IS HERE! ____________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER ONE quotesquotesquotesquotes….. “‘When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.’” (5) (steinbeck quote) This Steinbeck quote is absolutey gorgeous. It made me feel this sense of love and awe and fragility and I just wanted to gush over it for a second. I also love how much animals feature as a grounding force in this chapter. “The KFC is near Lake Merritt, a man-made lake in a completely developed area that, like much of the East Bay and the Peninsula, used to be the type of wetlands that herons and other shorebirds love. Night herons have existed here since before Oakland was a city, holdovers from that marshier time. Knowing this made the KFC night herons begins to seem like ghosts to me, especially at night when the streetlights would make their white bellies glow from below.” (19) “These alien animals perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me with not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.” (21) “This got me thinking that perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions.” (11) Like I said above, Odell uses animals and our relationships with animals as both a grounding spiritual force, and metaphors for relationship to ourselves and the world around us. There is productivity in the collective. There is intelligence in just living. Te KFC night herons are a grounding force, but also a haunting reminder of what was always supposed to be here. They give me a similar feeling as looking across the Colorado plains and trying to imagining what they would look like without any of us here. It’s an intensely existiensally sad and fulfilling exercise, a communion with the world around me and the direct confrontation of human civilization. And Odell captures that feeling perfectly thourghout this chapter. “Most people have, or have known someone who has, gone through some period of ‘removal’ that fundamentally chanted their attitude to the world they returned to.” (9) This happened to me, and it something I am always going to be thankful for. She’s right that stepping away from your understanding of yourself and your life can have a transformative impact on your ability to engage with everything. “A public, no commercial 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.” (13) “That’s because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they ‘produce’ can’t be measure or exploited or even easily identified— despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.” (14) (I love the WPA we should bring it back. Big WPA fan here) I am so glad that the first chapter focused on the necessity of public space, and the constant threats that face it. Where I currently live we have an immense amount of Open Public Space that anyone can go to at anytime. It runs through the plains and the mountains and provides this connection to the outdoors that I can’t imagine living without. But within the city, third spaces are beginning to disspear. I shouldn’t have to buy a coffee to engage with a community space. UGH! “Time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.” (15) “It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happened online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time.” (18) “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.” “The life force is concerned with cyclicatlity, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like ‘disrupt.’” (26) To end this super long post, I’m going to rant about maintenance work! This section feels like it was made for me (it wasn’t) and I’m going to make that ya’lls problem! Not but really I feel so seen. I take immense pleasure in maintenance work, and I have always been confused by its lack of appreciation. It takes sooo much work to maintain any kind of space (including bodies!) and Odell is right to point out how crazy it is that it is undervalued. And how feminized it is! It is actually insane that this kind of work is often treated as secondary. Reminds me of Pirsig, and how much spiritual importance he placed on the ability to maintain yourself and your things. To maintain something, you must care about it and understand how it works. There is a running theme how Care and Love as productive values are undermined and ignored. And I think the thing I take out of the introduction and chapter 1 is that care and love are vital to the successful operation of anything. And I will do my best to inject that anywhere I can. <3

Adison
>>120663486

Hello J! I really feel you on struggling with both “doing nothing” and being capitalistically productive. It sometimes feels like I’m sitting in this underwater space where I’m both disconnected from myself and unable to do anything about it. And the phone never helps lol.

Adison
>>120523723

your point on personal growth harming communities, others, and positive change really resonated with me. there’s this self-optimization trap that is so easy to fall into and i can totally see how that could impact everything outside of ourselves. it really reminds me of the idea that you should never love someone unless you are fully healed or perfect or whatever. it seems like a message of self love (loving yourself instead of relying on others for that love) but in reality it can cut you off from the people around you, and you can’t only receive love from yourself.

BrEaNs

For myself, I want to jot down brief notes about where I was when I read each weeks chapter (sometimes with pictures if it makes sense). It feels appropriate for a book about leaving the attention economy and hopefully it will be a cool thing that I can look back on in time. - Phone screen time average the week I read these chapters: 8h 57m Hopefully this goes down over time. I have to use my phone for my job, so that's part of why that number is so bad...but still. - I read these two chapters outside my grandmother's house, sitting up against a tree. My cat watched me from the window long enough that I eventually opted to let her come join me. After briefly looking around, she sat herself under the shelter formed by my legs and stayed there while I read. Imgur Link: https://imgur.com/a/PHTetUC --- Introduction --- -- Quotes -- - "What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?" (p. xiv) - "Escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here" (p. xxiii) Both of these quotes beautifully capture this sense of freefall that has dominated the last 10 years or so. We watch as the world is ending, but we maintain the ability to find beauty or feel something true by looking toward other people. -- Observations -- - Excited about connecting to the "more-than-human community" I've long had this feeling that appreciating the non-human world is necessary for our future. I didn't know that this was part of this book, so I'm excited to hear more of Odell's take on this. I'm spending way too much time writing this bookclub post and this topic will be relevant later, so I'm gonna leave it there. - On social media and employment I wrote a paper about our digital brands at some point in college. The main thing I remember about that paper a few years later is that some companies are less likely to hire you if you don't have a social media presence. I looked this up again right now, and the first post I found was from Recruiter.com on the subject of "what if a candidate has no social media footprint?" The article goes to uncomfortable lengths to assure recruiters that the lack of a social media presence does not mean that a given candidate is a psychopath (apparently a significant enough concern), but states that it might be useful to ask candidates why they don't have a social media presence just in case I guess. This focus on assessing social media presences that some employers seem to have troubles me because it implies, as Odell talks about, that we don't get to stop performing in the modern age. It speaks to an anxiety I have around what the internet (or more accurately, as Odell pinpoints, the captitalist logic that dominates the current internet) does to people (some times in some ways -- this paragraph an overly cynical take in many ways). --- Chapter 1 --- -- Observations -- - data as property In Braiding Sweetgrass, a point was made about how European-American culture's notion of property soullessly carved up the world and lacks a notion of reciprocity/relationship with the land (it's been a bit since I've read that early bit of that book, so this probably is not the best summary). I feel like this notion of property has metastasized in the digital age. By connecting something to a series of binary bits, we make that thing a physical object that can be owned, be bought, be sold. The very real experiences we have online are routinely smushed down into values in a database that companies hold ownership over and sell for profit. I feel like this process encourages us to think of aspects of our immaterial selves in terms of property sometimes. Like, we see recommendation algorithms sort us into categories, we perceive ourselves as a product in some way, and then we experience a cognitive disconnect between our intangible identities and the processed data representing us somewhere out there. I feel like sometimes the knowledge that my identity is carved into a series of objects legally owned by mysterious capitalists without my informed consent makes me wonder exactly ~how~ I'm being rendered as data, which makes me consider myself as a series of discrete, marketable parts in that moment. Our ability to divide nature into ownable objects has spread upward maybe and forced us to chart out our psyches for profit or something. I don't know. - that ad with the guy and the sandwich + health and optimization I looked up the NEC ad Odell talks about on pg. 16, and it is weirder than I expected -- that sandwich is so far away from that man. It really bothers how food and exercise and wellness and whatever are so entangled with optimization in our culture. I feel like I'm not entirely the person to speak about this so I leave it there and say "listen to Maintenance Phase."

simon_meowell

INTRO I, like many others, really loved the Useless Tree story. I began re-reading this after reading her latest book Saving Time, and it certainly enhanced/highlighted that story for me. It's on tree time! Non-human time; a reminder that, in the eyes of rocks, humans (and maybe even trees) move quickly, and in the eyes of fruit flies humans are slow as hell. And then later "I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity" (29). So many lifetimes of happening happen in a single moment!! Remembering these other frames of reference exist allow us to engage in the "resistance-in-place" of "refusing the frame of reference" (xvi). This state takes willpower. "Doing nothing is hard" (xvii) "simple awareness is the seed of responsibility" (xxii) reminds me a bit of Radical Acceptance (or at least as I understand it from Tara Brach's book). We can't face what we owe to ourselves and to each other if we're stuck in a trance of unworthiness - a state that is certainly fueled by the attention economy. We are so hard on ourselves, always thinking we're not good enough or doing enough, and it's only once we let go of that and notice how we're actually feeling that we can actually be moved to act, repair harm, be enough for ourselves. Letting go and taking notice are functions of attention, expanding simple awareness. I'm so not explaining this well, but just thought I'd share that connection to a text I've found grounding in my life. "patterns of attention...are how we render reality for ourselves" (xxiii) CH1 As CJ notes in their comment on next week's post, the Trump hand-wringing didn't age particularly well (comes off as almost corny? now) but the solid substance of the chapter vastly overshadows those moments in my opinion That whole Deleuze quote on p4!! mamma mia "attention-holding architecture" "a structure that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it" (6) I'm not one for performance art personally, but I like getting out of my comfort zone with some of these projects she's describing (even if it feels wildly pretentious). And they give rise to magnificent categorizations like this - visceral description of holding open contemplative space, building against several pressures. As a few others have flagged: "This got me thinking that perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions" (11) I especially like this quote in the context of her dad's story. It's a great reminder for anyone who feels a bit stuck in the corporate grind that it's only one part of your multi-faceted life - reminding yourself of the complexity and vastness world can also remind you of your own multi-faceted interior. "To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. Hempton: Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything" (23) Reminds me a little bit of the two ways of describing what "white" and "black" are in color theory - if you're going based on pigment, white is the absence of all color and black the presence of all color and if you're going based on light, white is presence of all and black absence. We're told that the chatter is presence, making our voices heard, but as Berardi put it on page 18, the proliferation of chatter has a silencing effect - and on p29, Odell remarks that her phone is "its own kind of sensory deprivation chamber". Meanwhile, silence appears to be an absence, but it opens the door to deeper substance. Selfless care "is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience" is so moving and hopeful and beautiful to me!

Hannah Jones

The timing of reading this book is excellent! I want to create pockets in my life where I can be aimless. I find it hard to find the right words here. Before, when I thought about doing nothing it was all about scrolling or watching series, numbing and soothing my brain in preparation for productivity time. I’m trying to get in regular contact with the nothing Odell talks about. There is a stillness and belonging to it, when I practice it I don’t feel alone. However, I find that I can only practice it when I’m on my own and I find that challenging in urban environments. My parents have a cottage in a small village surrounded by forest in northern Sweden, it’s 9 hours by train from where I live, but I go there as often as I can and I spent a lot of time there as a kid. I have a spot by the lake under a pine tree where I love to sit and visit with the surroundings. I know the hills against the horizon, what every increment of the seasons look and feel like. It’s where I feel the most grounded in the now, where I can be completely aimless. This is harder where I live now. I love it here, there is so much life and concerts and a wonderful network of friends so the social butterfly in me is well-fed. But I haven’t yet found a way to be as aimless. There are beautiful parks scattered through the town, but I just can’t fall as deep into nothing with people around. I can’t fully let my guard down as I can by the lake where no one ever walks by. The closest I’ve gotten is going on aimless walks. What Odell said (I’m taking the audio route, she doesn’t read it herself but Odell said just came naturally to me) about public spaces being commercially unproductive spaces and thus under threat made me think of how this applies to wild spaces too. A scary thought. I don’t know, there is something about wilderness, something to connect to when I turn off my active thinking self. Does anyone else relate? What Odell said about greeting the birds also made think about wild things. This summer, I attended a course in wild medicinal herbs. In a similar way to what Odell described there are plants in my surroundings I didn’t notice before that I now greet. I’m happy to notice them by a bus stop or on a lawn, like “hey fancy seeing you here”. I also read a collection of Swedish folklore about trees and plants that I noticed deepened these relations. Like there was a story about the oak tree. One day the devil approached God and said “Hell is quite empty, how about I get all children born when the oak tree stands without leaves?” God agreed to this proposition, but since that day the oak tree does not stand completely bare. Apparently even if they are brown and dry, oak trees will carry leaves all through the winter. I haven’t noticed this before and I read this in the summer so I’m excited now to observe the oak trees in my surrounding and see if they are bare or not. Something about that story made me feel like I stepped in to the mind palace of people before me. Like sure you can see it as a silly story to explain why not all leaves fall. But you can also see it as a way to build relation, here’s an oak tree - a protector of children. Quite the tangent but yeah anyway. I’m excited to do more of what Odell describes as doing nothing, unsubscribe to productivity, connect to life (people and non-people) around me and get rooted in a place. I want seek a way to be more rooted in southern Sweden even if I still feel like a transplant here compared to back home.

reva
>>121200575

i do my best to do nothing while just sitting in my room sometimes, or like while waiting at a bus stop bc it helps to clear my head. but it does not feel the same as being in wilderness feels, i agree with you on that. it really doesn't feel like "doing nothing" when you're in nature, it feels like you're connecting with something really big and complex all around you, and it engages all of your senses! your spot by the lake sounds really wonderful :)

saba
>>120940411

that pigment and light metaphor is fucking genius and you hit the paradox of it all on the fweaking Nail of the Head idk wjjat the idiom is but damb

JustConnor

well, im starting a journey to complete the KTI catalog working my way back starting here as ive already done KATN. fuck i dont know why but the title and vibe of the intro made me think that i wasnt going to like this book but after chapter 1 idk what the fuck i was thinking. as someone who has delved deep into the productivity space getting addicted to the idea of self improvement this first chapter was a 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨. first thing that stuck out to me was the "eight hours work, eight hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will" and in the song attached the "what we will" being about "rest, thought, flowers, sunshine." LIKE FUCK, i crave that shit. my main problem that i hope to be addressed (ive only read chapter 1, im going to post every chapter along the way) is that my nothing makes me feel like shit. when i do nothing its normally binge watching tv or youtube, and honestly i think that's unhealthy and not what my nothing should be. honestly if i actually gave time to "rest, thought, flowers, sunshine" i think it would be hard to avoid my phone or video games. i feel so goddamn corrupted. its not even social media (i dont struggle much with that), its just entertainment (youtube or tv). "those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they "produce" can't be measured or exploited or even easily identified" this hit hard, im not sure why. maybe its the third place/notjustbikes in me. maybe its the fact that i dont feel like i have a place like that yet i crave it? i dunno but its a good quote. "it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are." FUCK SHIT SO GOOD. loving this book a lot cant wait for chapter 2 :)

JustConnor
>>120416879

hell yes exactly what ive been feeling. i feel like i attempt to consume "good" shows and "good" youtube videos and then i end up still feeling shitty. the key is actually just stop and consume the fucking life youre living. to take "a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are." also nice escape from LA pfp :)

phil e the theyby

I like the act of posting about KTi books I missed as I read them. It’s an intentional practice of reflection on the books, of breaking up the “consumptive” mindset of just flying through the chapters as fast as possible. From the intro and chapter 1, this book feels a lot more transgressive than it looks, and I’m curious how it got so much mainstream traction. It’s obviously speaking to a pretty universal feeling of overstimulation, and a longing to slow down, and a recognition that the attention economy takes our normal, valid desires for community and gives us a tall glass of salt water to satisfy that thirst. The idea of NOTICING feels really powerful. There are obvious connections here to mindfulness, which Odell doesn’t discuss explicitly, and I think that’s a good thing; mindfulness can be used for anything and directed at anything, and it is often direct towards serving the needs of corporations rather than people. But Odell explicitly directs noticing towards the nonhuman world (elsewhere called “other than human,” which I feel is more accurate), the land, and the people around us. She also connects noticing to racial and economic justice, which feels really resonant to me. I’m a counselor, and I have VERY strong beliefs about…everything. I can speak very persuasively. If I came into sessions with my clients with any particular goals, I would be at huge risk of basically steamrolling the people I’m meeting with. So I explicitly don’t have any goals; I have my clients directly frame the space around what they want, and how they’d like things to be different. If there was a point in the future where they were good with ending therapy because they’d gotten what they were looking for, what would be different? And then I just…notice. Follow them where they’re going. Offer tools and strategies when they say that what they’re needing are specific supports. If I don’t follow or I feel like we’ve changed directions (that is, I notice an internal sense that “I’m not following”), I say that, and we work towards mutual clarity and understanding. It seems like, inevitably, attempting to meet my clients’ goals leads back to the same basic needs. The need to feel that their unique qualities (those that are innate and those that are learned) have social worth. The need for the things they do to have meaning. Space for rest and quiet, where no one has any expectations of them. Making sense of the things that have happened to them. Feeling that other people care and want them to have the things they need. I make a conscious effort NOT to look for these things. I make my biases and assumptions explicit. Yet these things always seem to be the heart of what people are looking for. Yet I always have to remain mindful that, even if it’s happened every time, THIS time may be different. Because the moment I think I “know the answer” is the moment I stop truly listening. I’ve been thinking a lot lately around my relationship to other people. There’s a LOT of social change I want to make, but I also recognize how utterly ineffective it is to try to change other people, or to wish that they would change; I have to focus on what I can do, and what power and influence I have. I think the idea of “noticing” gives language to the influence I want to have on people. I want to help people truly see certain things about other people and the world around them that they may have missed, lack the language to describe, or intentionally turned away from. When people refuse to notice something because noticing it would be too painful, I want them to know that I see them and support them, and that I want to help them face that pain. I can’t control if people ACTUALLY end up noticing, but I can take steps to make it easier and safer for them to notice, and to act on the things they notice. I’ve recently had the idea of revisiting certain books on an annual basis, because there are some books that are so rich and so layered, or that connect me to something so fundamental, that I think they’re worth regularly revisiting (currently, ZMM is the only book on my “annual reread” list). But I think this might be the second one. It seems like it not only helps set the foundation for stepping back from the attention economy, but also pushes readers in the direction of ACTING on the quiet wisdom that comes from doing nothing, and tying that action to the change we want to make in the world. I’m excited to continue!