We are once again sitting on the red sofa. Today I even have my reading glasses on. I hate them because I need to move my head to look at things, turning my eyes is not enough as they can no longer focus as well as they used to. I grow old and that makes me sad.
Today I finished Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing. I liked it very much. I started taking notes as I read the book and now I’m posting them here. This must be the longest blog post I ever wrote. I wrote it over many days and weeks. I am a slow reader, these days. I think I stopped reading because I started developing a quiet unease as I was reading. It took me a few years to realize that perhaps all I was missing was a good light and glasses. And now it’s taking me a few years to get used to them, apparently.
Anyway, I am recommending the book, of course.
This book by Jenny Odell opens with an observation:
For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent.
She quotes Seneca:
Look back in memory and consider … how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!
She describes the purpose of her book as follows:
It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy …
Count me in! I’ve said for a while whenever people ask me about what I’m planning to do in my long summer breaks that I have no plans and whatever it is going to be, it is not going to be productive. Or as I recently commented on Mastodon:
Doing fun efficiently is your inner capitalist speaking. Being inefficient is the name of the game when I’m not working. 🎉
Anyway, I’m reading the book on the Kindle and I’m noticing the passages other people highlighted. And I realize what I had forgotten: to read on the Kindle is to read before an army of bots, recording my every move. To read on the Kindle is to play Dark Souls and see the scratched messages of the dead and dying who went before me. Welcome to the corpse book that brings me no joy. I really need to dig out the forbidden Calibre wizardry. I should have pirated this book. 🏴☠️
Then again, if I get a copy from a site where I didn’t buy it, but I did buy a copy – a copy hobbled by DRM, locked into a platform I hate – and I didn’t remove the hateful digital crippling “protection“ – is it piracy? The wonderful, modern world where these are real thoughts by real people. What an enormous loss for the world to waste it on thoughts such as these.
Anyway, I’m following Odell‘s text to the story about resistance in place, to render oneself unfit for the current value system by denying it. To not be as productive as possible in a society that fetishizes productivity.
I love her conversational style, and I like how she manages to connect the environment, the economy, communities, and ourselves. I’m still at the very beginning and already I see much I like. Watching birds. Even though I am a lousy ornithologist I am a big bird lover. I love birds! I love the sparrows, sitting there, both cowardly flying away as soon as they see me, and yet so overconfident in their chirping when I’m gone. “I’m here! This is mine! Bow to me! I am your king! Aaaaargh fly you fools – a human has come!!” I love how they try to shout over each other. How they land in small groups and examine all the pots on the balcony, how they take a bath in a bowl of water. Watching blackbirds sing. How they are circumspect when they approach their nest. Their tongue when they are singing. How they raise their tail as they sit on a branch, nervously. Crows, watching out for each other. Preferring to walk instead of flying. Ah, birds.
I really dislike the idea of turning the things we love into opportunities for making money.
I like Odell’s take.
I hope it can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival.
I read a lot of stuff and sort of nodded along, sometimes thinking it was well-said, but also that perhaps it wasn’t worth putting in into words because it was perhaps too obvious. More about birds, active listening. My wife and I still laugh when we hear other people struggling to discover forest bathing – which we take to be what we always do: to walk slowly, to listen to the birds, the rustling in the leaves, to look at the reflections of the light, to admire the mushrooms, to hope for some deer, to just be in the forest and liking it.
Well, here’s something that wasn’t obvious to me:
So connectivity is a share … sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.
Connectivity is when you share with like-minded people. You don’t need to read the articles, the headlines are enough: you know what your friends are talking about. To listen to other people is harder, and it takes time. The example she gives of a catholic and an atheist watching the sunsets and talking – about religion, among other things, and not trying to convince but just to learn more about the other, that was a beautiful.
I am usually interested in people talking to me about what faith means to them, how they struggle with it. It’s interesting. And I have a perspective on religion, too. Perhaps an atheist one, or a philosophical one, but in such a one on one conversation where I care about the other, we can have an interesting conversation. Where do we find these conversations in a world of hot takes and shit-posting? Nowhere.
Well, Jenny Odell also argues that we need to meet in person. I’m not sure. I’ve found long form email writing and old school letter writing with a fountain pen to be an excellent experience. Different, but good. Slow.
In the second chapter, Odell writes a lot about communes, dropping out, and most importantly, about Thomas Merton who joins a catholic order and wants to live like a hermit, only to then turn around and realize that he is running away from the world. He stays, and participates, aligning spirituality and action, something that is of course more difficult in some way that simply retreating from it.
This is an objection I felt whenever I read about the spiritual life of monks and hermits. To renounce the world completely is like dying prematurely but not going to your grave. What is life but to interact with the world? To withdraw is not to live, and not to live is to be dead. Dead inside.
But a certain amount of withdrawal is required: the problem is that social media surrounds us with an environment where we can set each other off, and the big sites earning advertising dollars believe it to be in their own best interest to pour oil into the fire. The headlines are enraging, our fellow human beings are enraged, and say so, and we engage, feeling angry about the present and fearful about the future. I feel this myself. And the only option is akin to the cooling rods in a nuclear reactors: they are inserted in order to absorb neutrons. Nothing else happens. They just reduce all these chain reactions. So we need to withdraw from the kind of news that is so incendiary. If it makes us angry, we shouldn’t read it. If it is followed by inane comments, we shouldn’t read it. This kind of brain hygiene is a skill we all need to learn.
In my own world, I do the following: I don’t watch TV. I don’t read the daily news. I don’t read the “free” newspapers, neither in print nor on their app. I don’t follow any news outlets or journalists on social media. I unfollow people that consistently attract inane comments on social media because this tells me that they don’t practice mental hygiene: they don’t block these commenters either because they don’t read what they say, or they don’t mind what they say. They are offloading the mental hygiene onto us and I don’t like it.
… faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal.
I think this is important. I work for money, and when we meet in the cafeteria and some of us say how much they love their job, and somebody looks at me, I’ll say that I just do it for the money. Awkward pause. Yeah, I’ll add. If you want to do it for free, you’re welcome to do it, but if I were not paid, I wouldn’t be here. I refuse to play along, to fake a joy I do not feel.
The refusal to go along with other people is tricky, as we can see during the ongoing pandemic. Are they right for refusing to go along with the official counter measures? Or are they going along with what their influencers are saying? The line needs to be drawn where our refusal hurts those who are weaker than us. If we are healthy and refuse the vaccine and force asthmatics and immunosuppressed folks to stay at home, we are hurting the weaker part. If the retailers want to give us super saver cards to track us, to refuse this means to deny a corporate person worth millions a tiny sliver of their profits. That’s fair. More than fair, for even to them their profit is small, but to us our freedom from surveillance is dear and we just don’t react to the surveillance because we don’t see it. Perhaps a readiness to refuse helps us withstand the small pressures to conform, to reject the sale of our freedom from surveillance from 1% of what we pay. Instead, we should ask: why are those that cannot afford to pay the 1% extra forced to submit to surveillance? Why do we accept loyalty cards instead of demanding lower prices for all of us? I refuse to participate to answer the question of whether I want to use the card or not and challenge the existence of the card instead.
What hurts, of course, is the knowledge that you are alone. That the others do not mind going along. That the world doesn’t change just because we don’t like it. It is a conundrum. Do I fight for what I believe every day of my life? Or do I at the very least not go along with the things I train myself to refuse? I refuse the smart TV, the smart kitchen appliance, but not the smart phone. I try and it doesn’t always work.
This jump from the individual to the collective entails another version of what I’ve so far been describing as *voluntate, studio, disciplina*.
The thought of hundreds of engineers and interaction designers and malignant marketeers trying to direct my attention, trying to make me do the things I don’t want to do, that want me to lead the life I don’t want to lead, is aggravating. Immediately, I feel the rage well up in me. This is the frustration of somebody who sees himself lose the battle all the time. When I hear how Odell summarizes Vivrekar, I feel like shouting. “Yes! Yes!!”
“Empower me to do what? Good for me according to whom? And according to what standards? Happiness, productivity? … being interested in gaining control of my attention rather than simply having it directed in ways that are deemed better for me.”
I smell the stench of benevolent dictators who know better than I, who want to take my agency away from me, reduce me to a meat blob, a worker drone, and I hate them for the sentiment. Even if in some cases people seem to be acting against their own best interest – and I’ve been thinking this a lot during these pandemic years! – this denial of agency arouses our anger just like it did when our parents told us that we didn’t have to repeat the mistakes they once made. Oh yeah? Well, perhaps the making of these mistakes and the learning that follows, the growth this implies, perhaps this is life. This is what it feels to be young and in control, to be yourself. Other people denying us this better have very, very good reasons.
As the book moves on to talk about our experiences changing how we see the world, how the knowledge of things changes how we see the world – even if mediated by apps like iNaturalist for Odell or Flora Incognita for me – it suddenly takes a turn towards the dark as she witnesses someone having a seizure, staying for a while, and then moving on, trying to remember what she had come here to do, trying to remember the trivialities of another life. I remember a similar reaction when Claudia got cancer. A different world emerged and I felt closer to people suffering from trauma: the anger at the superficiality of other people’s lives; the feeling of having broken through into another, darker world; starting to suspect the disease and death beneath the veneer of normality. Yes, everything seemed cruel and unfair back then but one also realizes that throwing a tantrum will not help, that life must go. You have only this one life. And here we are.
I love how she moves from this experience to the empathy choice we have. To imagine the people in our way to maybe have legitimate interests, the unfriendly people to have bad days, and how the truth of it doesn’t matter – it the thought that counts, the attention paid to the scene, the decision what to emphasize and what to dismiss in the sense impressions flooding us every moment of our lives. I know that my wife feels like I’m a hopeless optimist when it comes to other people. I keep inventing excuses for them, explaining what I see in charitable ways. This is important for my mental health! This is, I keep telling her, how I maintain a sense of proportion instead of a murderous death wish. Just today I read about the principle of charitable interpretation.
… interpreting a speaker’s statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. – Principle of charity
I care about this.
The book moves on. As Odell says, it’s an ongoing conversation. In fact, the part about the boundary of self is interesting because it helps me find words for a situation I had trouble verbalizing. It all started with the realization that I have a hard time focusing on boring tasks, unless there is a kind of flow to them. This is easier when I’m tired, or when I have drunk some alcohol perhaps, but I want to focus on the other aspect of this; we all know about flow, interruptions, and all of that. But what about boredom working alone? I used say: Amy monkey brain is more engaged when I’m in a conversation, when I see faces, when I sense bodies nearby. But perhaps that’s not all. I also used to say that motivation and inspiration hardly ever come to me when I am alone. I call it “mutual inspiration“ – that fantastic feeling as you go higher and higher on the swing (“sich gegenseitig hochschaukeln” in German), agreeing, adding, pulling in associations, resulting in new ideas, in a positive feedback loop. It’s like improv theatre. Never say no. Don’t block. It’s all “yes, and!”
How is this related to the book? Odell writes about the inability to be alone, a self, having independent thoughts that are unrelated to anybody and anything. Be it books, animals, or people: our relationships determine our interactions and these influence our thoughts, our ideas. It’s hard to say where ideas come from because we live in networks and the interactions result in change. The fantasy of genius creators is simpler for capitalism to exploit, for sociopaths to exploit – but it’s not true and this truth shines through when we hear people saying that “we are standing on the shoulders of giants” or “genius is knowing what to steal”. We are not alone and many of the things we feel and think are dependent on the people, animals and books we surround ourselves with. Maintaining good social hygiene is important for the soul. And the self may or may not be an illusion but the hard boundaries definitely are.
Later, Odell talks about Audre Lorde advocating for more flow within a community, quoting Lorde:
Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic
I was recently talking with a friend about the workplace where I had said that what we lacked was a leader that sparked enthusiasm and bonkers joy. Instead we have a nice guy, friendly, cautious, an administrator if there ever was one. I like him as our boss. He is nice! But perhaps he’s also not the one that lights our souls on fire. And perhaps neither am I. I keep thinking about the things I need to do, the weight of responsibility and hours and bills. When I think about work, I am of two minds: wanting security, regular pay, doing the things we have always done; but at the same also restless, wanting to shout from the rooftop: why do all the people working for us seem so similar to each other? We don’t seek those differences that can spark creativety. No, we’re afraid of the fire and look for the good fit. Company culture is a given and we look for a fit. It’s true, we have avoided narcissists and sociopaths and for that I am grateful. But we also don’t have visionaries. The hope being, I fear, that those visionaries should also shoulder the burden of making sure their ideas are ready for the market, and developed in your free time, while continuing under the same workload as always. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just gloomy and I don’t have the answers. But those differences leading to more interesting encounters, to a richer life, to more creative sparks, that is something I would like and I don’t care about the marketability of all of that.
Odell keeps hitting me where it hurts. Here she is talking about Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, wondering why people no longer fight for their rights:
Once they understood that something was not just their problem but a collective problem, requiring collective action and identification with a community to be solved, it was preferable to them to just drop it.
Sadly, I feel this as well, everyday. And it has gotten worse with the pandemic. As some acquaintances have revealed themselves to be shallow egotists online, as we read about politicians pandering to the loudmouths, as we see the comments left by the troll bots or their radicalized victims all over the commercial web, I keep retreating into myself, wanting more of that filter bubble, missing that vague society of “my people” that I can’t seem to find and that I suspect I could not stay in touch with even if I found them. I just wouldn’t know how.
Is this context collapse? In the next chapter Odell writes about it: how we present differently to different circles, tell different stories, how Mark Zuckerberg‘s statement at the time makes no sense: and, multiple identities are not a sign for a lack of integrity. They are a necessity for maintaining deep and interesting relations. If we lose them, we get the blandest world of them all, where we are careful not to offend anyone and keep the rest a secret. Our society is not ready for social media that goes back for years and years. Your friends never comb through those archives, but should you one day be about to gain a position of power and influence, your enemies surely will. Your stalkers will. The narcissists unbeknownst in your environment surely will, should you one day disappoint them.
It’s a tricky thing to navigate: I keep most of my posts on this blog online; I delete all of my social media posts after while, including all my likes and all my shares. That is, I reserve the right to change my opinion on social media and believe that my opinions on my blog are more stable, or perhaps more under my control. Who knows.
In any case, I think that the effects of social media as described are in fact a turn for the worse: not because they are what they are, because I engage in social media as well. No, it’s because of secondary effects: deep thoughts get drowned out by all the shallow things that are also posted, and if we’d only post deep thoughts in long posts, people wouldn’t want to read them all. And there is no time to think, too. When I’m reading a book, writing a thing, I really must not get distracted by social media. Now, the neoliberal view is to say that obviously I want this. It is my own lack of moral fortitude that leads to this. Or I could say that we all have monkey brains still and need to collectively defend against it all. We have laws so that the stronger does not take from the weaker. We definitely wish we had, in any case! We have laws so that the richer do not unduly influence our children. Or we wish we had! Why not have laws that protect us from the ads, the dark user interface patterns, the tracking, the omnipresent surveillance capitalism? Why not collectively make sure that we are all protected, capable of reasoning through difficult issues, make sound political decisions, at least every now and then when election time comes around?
The problem is, of course, what exactly to regulate. It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible. We can at least start thinking about it, write about it, talk about it.
I think Odell’s point here is that no matter what the scope of the problem, having more time to think things through and the opportunity for deliberation with real people is of the essence. Social media sabotages this.
This is why I am writing this super long essay as I read the book. To have more time to think, to force myself to think. This is why I try to stall whenever there is a rallying cry for this or that. Before boosting those messages, before pulling out the torches and pitchforks, let’s wait a day or two. Flatten the curve, make time to read and listen, to think and ponder. And then, if other people have already said what needed to be said, perhaps the moment passed and nothing needed to be said in the first place. And most of all: let people closer to the problem handle the things they can actually influence. I often feel this way about the news. I really don’t need too many details about the things I cannot affect. Then maybe, if I’m curious, I can always dig deeper. But I hate it when I am pulled into reading a heart wrenching story, a people story, a sob story. Please, make it drier so that I can more easily stop reading. Don’t manipulate me into spending all my emotional energy on these issues until I have no more fucks to give, for that is a terrible position to be in. Emotionally drained. Spent. Sarcasm taking over when empathy has run dry. Don’t put me in that position.
I like how Odell comes to a conclusion that has been hovering at the edge of my mind for a while, now. When the going gets tough, when there is terrible news to read, work to be done, difficult decisions to make, I’d rather watch the birds. I’d rather see the sparrows taking a bath in that little bath we set upon the balcony, I’d rather listen to the blackbirds sing, I’d rather watch the crows walk around and looking out for each other. Oh how I would love to see that shiny kingfisher again. I’d rather watch the cats, those terrible bird killers, or the tiny lizards. I want to see the flowers come and go, each having their season. The snowdrops (Galanthus) are out, now. I want to look at them, and to take pictures of them, even if nobody else cares. Looking at the environment is the first step in caring for it.
Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.
Indeed. The fear of regret when I die is a driving force in my life. I have to work and I do regret it. I need the money to live freely. But I go-e that we all will manage one day to rid ourself of that yoke and to finally get back to the world that surrounds us. The plants and animals, the fungi and the clouds, the rocks and the water.
Perhaps when I grow old I shall own a piece of land with three or four trees. I’d like to give “do-nothing farming” a try. Most likely I’d be too late, of course. But still, I should read The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka. It sounds like something I’d like to do.
#Copyright #Philosophy #Books
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“I think I stopped reading because I started developing a quiet unease as I was reading. It took me a few years to realize that perhaps all I was missing was a good light and glasses”
This resonates with me; presbyopia in one eye, I don’t enjoy reading as much.
For RPGs I prefer reading on the tablet, pinch zoomed in for nice huge fonts🙂
– starmonkey 2022-02-20 04:57 UTC
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Yeah, huge font size is definitely a plus for the tablet! 😀
– Alex 2022-02-20 08:36 UTC