The introduction is called “Surviving Usefulness” which is a fascinating title. It begins with this great quote:

“Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin

The whole first paragraph is excellent. I’d copy down the whole thing, because I have things to say every other sentence; mostly in agreement with the sentiment, but I do have some devil’s advocate takes on Odell’s broad strokes.

A line even more relevant in 2025 than in 2019: “What the tastes of neoliberal, techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than obvious.” That is to say, what I mostly have to offer, along with many other people. The reason for this, Odell writes: “Such ‘nothings’ cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.”

This is a feeling that I’ve had since about 2020, so it’s no surprise this book came out in 2019, around the same time I saw an entire cultural crash imminent. It’s a shame that the book called “Culture Crash” foresaw many of the systemic issues but failed to come to any reasonable or even useful conclusions. I think Jenny Odell wrote a book that not only put a lot of things into perspective about why our culture is eroding at an unprecedented pace, but might offer realistic solutions to the problem. I am hopeful, based on what little I’ve read so far and the quotes I’ve gathered from Sublime. 

[This idea has some good ideas, as it turns out, but I’m going to be disappointed by the end. You’ll see through my notes that while worth reading, I go back and forth a lot on Odell’s direction and how all over the place it is; funny enough it was purposeful but it gets frustrating for me ot read, so bear this in mind.]

Odell describes her book in this way: “It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese ‘nail house’ blocking a major highway.”

I haven’t the slightest clue what a nail house is, and I had to look it up. How about this: Chinese ‘nail house’ means “a residence whose owner refuses to accept compensation and vacate the property to make way for development.” Well, then, I’m very aware of people who refuse to leave and we see it all the time, but in China, they literally put the house in the damn road. I don’t know why Americans haven’t caught onto this idea. It’s actually not only a major statement, but it makes for some pretty funny photos… So yeah, I like this idea.

Moreover, Odell adds: “Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”

‘Conviviality’ meaning the quality of being friendly and lively. Which, um, most people aren’t in 2025.

…

After a sad afternoon pondering the death of decent mass media entertainment and the music industry and common human decency…. what an appropriate time to pick that book about how to do nothing back up, isn’t it?

“It is within a blasted landscape of neoliberal determinism that this book seeks hidden springs of ambiguity and inefficiency.” 

Quite the call to action. It might be a pretty bleak view of the world, but her push towards making people think beyond the status quo and reclaim our agency. 

Interesting that Odell grew up in Silicon Valley, and it wasn’t always so bad… but she was always an “in-between” sort of person. 

Perhaps I should be like “the useless tree” and making myself ever more useless is actually a good thing for me…

“To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.”

“It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.”

As for the form of the self that changes over time: Change is indeed inevitable, and entropy plays a significant role in that process. But perhaps intentionally acknowledging and embracing that change can be a powerful act, rather than simply passively accepting it as an unavoidable force.

I do especially love when Odell wishes to celebrate a form of the self that exceeds algorithmic description. How do we do this? This is where embracing complexity and nuance comes in. We can’t be reduced to simple data points or binary labels. Our experiences, emotions, and thoughts are all interconnected in ways that defy categorization. We must acknowledge and honor those complexities, resisting the urge to fit ourselves into neat, algorithm-friendly boxes.

As for that last bit, about identity not stopping at the boundary of the individual, I think it’s as simple as not seeing yourself entirely as an island, forming a suite of opinions and theories that you use to build your own hill that you’re willing to die on. Once you realize that while your unique perspective is valuable, but that it’s impossible to ever be truly sure of anything, this is when we can actually help other people.

Basically, recognizing the interconnectedness of our experiences and perspectives allows us to approach others with empathy and humility, rather than dogmatic certitude. Acknowledging the uncertainty principle in life allows us to foster more meaningful connections and collaborations with others.

Essentially, Odell is advocating for a more fluid and holistic understanding of identity and experience. I’m just curious to see how much of what she has going forward is rhetorical and how much is actually actionable. At the very least it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever come across.

…

This How To Do Nothing book has a lot of fascinating critiques of modern society, even if there are some specifics of her rhetoric that I take issue with. But there are some very powerful ideas here. I just have to take it slowly. 

Here’s a great quote: Old Survivor, by the way, is a very famous tree in the East Bay, sort of a perfect parallel to “The Useless Tree” parable.

“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.”

Those two phrases deserve a deep-dive. 

“Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new ‘placefulness’ that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here.)”

The idea of ‘placefulness’ is astounding. 

“… I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.” Yes, I can see that. Especially her following remarks of a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture. Oh, boy, has that manifested big time in the past five years.

“Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function.” Yes, indeed.

Ah-ha, this is the sort of actionable language I was looking for: “Thinking about what it takes to afford refusal, I suggest that learning to redirect and enlarge our attention may be the place to pry open the endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity.”

“Ultimately, I argue for 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.”

The last chapter of the book, she tell us, is how she tries “to imagine a utopian social network…” 

“I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of ‘context collapse’ online and propose a kind of ‘context collection’ in its place.”

Now this is fascinating.

“Understanding that meaningful ideas require incubation time and space, I look both to noncommercial decentralized networks and the continued importance of private communication and in-person meetings. I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems when we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.”

It’s a beautiful idea, but I don’t see how it’s all that practical. “Community” itself has already become commodified to such a degree that it will take some monumental reversal to undo the damage.

“… simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.” I need to come back to this concept.

On her hope for the book: “And most of all, 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.”

“To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”

I want to believe this. Odell is onto things that I’ve been hoping for, too, but she’s found the language to put them more clearly… and unfortunately, this book is now going on six years old and while I think there are people who have listened… the effect is clearly not enough to overtake cultural collapse just yet… 

…

Jenny Odell talks about creating “nothing” but what she describes doesn’t sound like nothing to me. This Bureau of Suspended Objects sounds fascinating.

“Part of the reason I work this way is because I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make. The Bureau of Suspended Objects was really just an excuse for me to stare at the amazing things in the dump – A Nintendo Power Glove, a jumble of bicentennial-edition 7UP cans, a bank ledger from 1906 – and to give each object the attention it was due. This near-paralyzing fascination with one’s subject is something I’ve termed the ‘observational eros.’”

Like myself, Jenny Odell is an artist obsessed with context. So I fully appreciate what she’s doing. In some ways, Obscure Curiosities is a text-based version of this concept, taking quotes from all these things I read and trying to fit them into a modern context while also appreciating the context in which they were written… I see these texts as living… as Jenny sees these objects as extant reminders of times long past and forgotten.

Odell and EB White share bird-watching, or bird-listening, or bird-noticing, in common. I was sure to take note of this.

I’m taking fewer notes but this chapter is excellent. And this is an important point she makes about the Rose Garden, built in the ‘30s and almost turned into condos in the ‘70s, because “those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they ‘produce’ can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified – despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.”

She continues: “Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonziation of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.”

Indeed, I was brainwashed by productivity and efficiency. It was only very recently, within the past two/three years that I finally let go of trying to be either. I’m better off being “unproductive” and “inefficient” because I somehow end up writing a lot more and making more meaningful connections between ideas and feelings and how to express them.

I like her stories about the night herons and crows… birds are pretty damn smart after all. And I especially love how she talks about how the ravens who live sometimes in the “rose garden” don’t see a rose garden at all.

…

Aside: One little nagging thing about this chapter is that the beginning of this book happened in the wake of the 2016 election of Trump. I’m not saying this is not understandable; I think many people were depressed by his bizarre and terrifying rise to power. But framing everything in terms of elections and presidential terms is such an unhealthy way by which to allow our own moods to be affected. My issue with that election was that it enabled nasty people to suddenly feel much freer to be nasty perverts and bigots and generally malevolent individuals. Buffoons are one thing; when they are given too much power, they cause damage. 

This is not a criticism of the author herself at all, but rather, how we organize society is not conducive to being a healthy human. We all seem to be of this mindset of candidates being “good” or “evil.” The things Trump does on a regular basis are clearly “evil” in that they are anti-humanist. But Biden’s election didn’t really change anything. If anything, things just deteriorated further and Trump just walked his way back into power. He was just Biden his time. Yes I made that joke. No, I don’t regret it, and I’m not taking it back. 

American politics are a cruel, unfunny joke, and they have been since at least… I don’t know, Lincoln was assassinated? Have we had “good” politicians? I don’t believe so, other than “good” acts they may have done, I think how we think of politics is… let’s let these rich, privileged buffoons deal with all the things we can’t be bothered with…

…

From the last few pages of the first chapter.

“I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that ‘doing nothing’ — in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping ot listen — entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider ‘doing nothing’ both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.”

I’ve been feeling extremely disassembled lately. Odell then says this “practice of ‘doing nothing’” offers us several tools in resisting the attention economy. She talks about turning FOMO into NOSMO, the Necessity of Sometimes Missing Out. ‘Doing nothing’ helps you develop a sharpened ability to listen… and these past several years, I’ve found I can detect bullshit more easily than ever. So while I didn’t intend to ‘do nothing’ it turns out that I’ve been doing mostly just that. 

I like this bit from Audre Lord about what self-care is meant to be: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Well, that message got lost somewhere, didn’t it? Odell writes: “This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase ‘self-care’ is appropriate for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliche.”

She writes about an artist who has made the work of maintenance into her art. It’s a really fascinating concept. It is bizarre that maintenance isn’t seen as productive in today’s society… because we live in a time where it’s better to let things decay so you can bulldoze and build new stuff. It’s really sad that we literally need artists to remind us that maintaining things is, in fact, really important.

So much went down in this chapter, and I only took note of some of the highlights for me.

…

Chapter 2 of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell is titled The Impossibility of Retreat. There’s an Agnes Martin quote:

“A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment… So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.”

I disagree with this notion so much. I think at this point, withdrawing from society can be NECESSARY to one’s mental health. The outsider perspective is what’s needed to wake people up from their feelies-induced comas. 

However, Odell is also correct that framing “digital detox retreats” as a “life hack” is immensely stupid. And it’s not like I don’t want to do “real work” as Odell clearly wrote this book and I appreciate it. It’s that my work has apparently no value because for all her good qualities, Odell is still a professor within the academic establishment. I’m a gay turd.

This isn’t a statement of self-loathing, but of extreme sarcasm. I want to frame things much more positively, but at this present moment, I simply can’t. Like Levi Felix, what people need is a healthier relationship with their tech. I admit, I was very unhealthy. But now, I use tech primarily just to be able to get my thoughts down quickly and keep my notes relatively less haphazard than they otherwise would be in paper form. Yes, I play games, but this is so I don’t fall into some deep dark hole and take three-hour naps that leave me up all night crying and longing for a quick death. And that is really how I’ve felt lately.

And even Levi’s good Digital Detox camp ideas got hijacked after his death and have become corporate amenities… just like Burning Man… fun times.

Odell talks a lot about Epicurus’s garden. It was a school where students graded themselves. I like this school. And I agree with him about living in anonymity. I’ve been forced to do so anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself. “[f]riendship itself was a subject of study, a requirement for the kind of happiness the school taught.” I’d love this sort of environment, but I’m not creating yet another Reddit subthread or Discord server… the world has far too many of those.

And it’s funny because Odell claims you can’t really give up the world, but clearly, well, Epicurus proved that you can. So, um, hmm…

She brings up Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, and specifically: “In that book, Goodman had suggested replacing capitalist structures with a decentralized network of individualized communities making judicious use of new technology and supporting themselves with cottage industries.” Ironically enough, this kind of did happen, but unfortunately, somehow even the cottage industries got sucked into the corporate bullshit by being bought up for absurd silly amounts of money.

On communes, Odell writes: “Much as they wanted to break with capitalist society, those that escaped from it sometimes carried its influences within themselves, like ineradicable contagions.” A bit earlier in the same chapter, Odell says the problem mostly was that the communes were meant to build a new kind of society from the ground up, but hardly any of them knew how to do that, and most people were just there to bum around and be the worst sort of drop out bottom feeders. That’s what she alludes to at least.

And today, people drone on about being anti-capitalist, when in fact, they are, very much, capitalist. They are capitalizing on people’s stupidity. I think this is worse than being nominally but unobtrusively capitalist. 

Telling: “A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.” And as she also says, most communes were almost exclusively white and middle-class and college-educated. Or miseducated I suppose. We’ll go with that.

Anyway, communes got overrun with political nonsense. But yes, while this happened in a lot of communes, some of them, well, succeeded. The ones that weren’t full of pricks, anyway. Others were the founding members of the tech bros… fun times. I keep saying ‘fun times’ entirely as a meta-joke. All we can do is laugh; yes, the late 60’s hippie movement was a monumental failure for the most part, but it did succeed in getting a lot of people to loosen the fuck up. So it wasn’t a total loss. And Goodman had the right ideas. I still think he got a lot of things right. But all capitalists did was take his ideas and pervert them into the “gig economy” which isn’t what he wanted at all. You gotta be part of a subreddit or Discord server to be part of a community and that shit makes me sick.

…

Reading the second half of Chapter Two of How to Do Nothing it’s a lot more about the late 60’s. She writes about the disillusionment of Michael Weiss after trying to write objectively about Spiro Agnew and having his article run only one edition before being squashed for “bias.” He joined the Liberation News Force for a bit before they even gave up. And again, she brings up the Epicureans and how they forsook the world. And nowadays, Epicurean means the opposite of what he intended… What point is Odell trying to make here? You’re stuck in this world, so… trying to leave it is worse…?

However, one interesting part of this chapter is the existence of a book called Walden Two by B.F. Skinner. It’s not really a sequel to Walden, of course, but rather a scientist who visits a “utopian” community called Walden Two. And of course, it’s nothing like what Thoreau would’ve wanted. It’s social engineering to the max. “Behavioral technology” they call it. It’s not that Skinner wanted this, of course, but rather, exploring these ideas of “utopia” to their extreme. I wouldn’t have called the book Walden Two, but it’s at least interesting to read about. What he did want was to avoid politics altogether and work instead on “the design of cultural practices.” It’s all so lovely and vague! 

Odell correctly compares this story to Westworld and another more recent utopian vision proposed by Peter Thiel. As much as my own political leanings seem libertarian, what Thiel proposed, as did Walden Two and Westworld, is ultimately going to be a technocratic dictatorship. We already have a technocratic oligarchy in 2025. So, these ideas clearly are already being put into action. She’s on the right course here in seeing what clearly doesn’t work… but funny enough, Epicurus’s Garden clearly seemed to work? Why are we not focusing on that?

Anyway, Odell brings up Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Human Condition” “in which she diagnoses the age-old temptation to substitute design for the political process. Throughout history, she observes, men have been driven by the desire to escape ‘the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.’ Unfortunately, she concludes, ‘the hallmark of all such escapes is rule, that is, the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey.’”

Arendt then correctly ties this temptation back to Plato’s Republic and his ideal philosopher-king. To which I have been forming a concept of “philosopher queen” to counter this autocratic ideal. (In my case, the queen need not be female, it’s just to differentiate the two similar but wildly different executed ideals.)

Arendt: “In The Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he ‘makes’ his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed.”

I’m not a fan of Plato’s Republic, despite there being actually a lot of good material in it. I’ve come to the conclusion as Arendt and many scholars have that it’s become the blueprint for Western authoritarianism and many of these “utopian” societal blueprints. But whether Plato actually thought it was a good idea to build such a society, whether it was possible, well… he does admit that eventually it would break down… but he saw democracy as the final step before total anarchy. Even if anarchy seems like a better option sometimes…

My idea of a philosopher queen is more of a “mothering” influence. Or “fathering.” Gender isn’t important here. But less of a ruler and more of a director of societal affairs. Building a culture that makes translating knowledge into wisdom a high priority, building systems to provide what is needed and not in excess. To allow people to either be polymaths or pursue their niche interests. I wouldn’t say it would be an “anti-capitalist” society, other than there would be no incentive to stockpile riches for its own sake… how one would actually construct a society where the philosopher queens don’t end up becoming autocrats… especially as a Guardian class would likely emerge, although they would be more philosophical than military in my view. I worry that my more “soft reset” version of Plato’s republic would end up being even worse when it ultimately deteriorates… fun thought experiment. Which is what I think the Republic was intended to be, but unfortunately, it made some ideas relatable enough that some clever evil jerks tried to enact and only made things worse.

While I think that this chapter on late 60’s communes is dragging on a bit, it is an important context I think in which to consider the evils of what is often referred to as utopian idealism. And like me, Odell loves context. Her and I, believe it or not, agree on quite a bit it seems. It’s just like me, she also tends to go in circles a bit too often as she waits for the point she wants to make to arrive. And that point here is that these utopic visions simply don’t last in reality. And interestingly enough, as she cites a psychology professor critiquing Walden Two, they assume that these societies are wholly white and heteronormative. Finally, Odell is making her point! Good girl, now we’re on the same page.  

Odell writes “Like Frazier’s pastoral scene [from Walden Two] with which he wordlessly answers the accusation of fascism, Thiel’s ‘escape from politics’ could never be anything more than an image that existed outside of time and reality. Preemptively calling it a ‘peaceful project’ avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, ‘peace’ is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered. Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt ot reduce politics to design (Thiel’s ‘machinery of freedom’) is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of ‘new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,’ I hear only an echo of Frazier: ‘Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.’”

I’ll add, they’re free of any real choices. They’re freeing themselves of their own pursuits of happiness and readily adopt someone else’s prepackaged bullshit. We could’ve come to this conclusion quite a few pages ago, but good job. What bothers me here is that thus far, she’s sort of downplayed and disregarded Epicurus’s Garden when that school was all about friendship! There wasn’t any design! You know, like… he didn’t do anything like any of these communes! There’s just a big hole here in her argument, and I hope she rectifies this…’

OK now, she’s tying all this commune stuff into her bigger thesis. “Of course, the distance between image and reality is an issue endemic to the idea of utopia itself, utopia meaning literally ‘no-place’ as opposed to the all-too-placeful-ness of reality. There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world. And yet, amid the debris of the present, escape beckons. To me, at least, the stories of the 1960s communes exert as strong an allure as they ever did, especially now.”

They’re not alluring to me at all. It’s almost like Odell had to write this very convoluted study of a chapter to convince herself that they were, in fact, not ultimately a good idea. Again, though, she is overlooking the Garden… which I thought with her mention of the SF Rose Garden, she would tie these together. But maybe I am expecting too much… and Odell is onto something, things I’ve sort of already come to a similar conclusion about, but nonetheless, I’m gaining some context here.

What bothers me about Odell’s argument is that I think the Garden was ultimately successful in its aims. And now she seems to be writing it off just like another commune. No, you can’t break entirely from society, she says… but really she means you can’t break entirely from other people. You can’t entirely dispose of politics. And these concepts make sense to me. But she’s writing of Epicurus, when he was actually onto something. It is about friendship, about crossing barriers that society puts up between race, gender, and social position. THAT is the solution, and you don’t have to entirely dismantle society to do that. The only reason the Garden was so remote is that the political machinery of the time recognized it for what it was, an extreme danger to the status quo. Odell is focusing on what DID NOT work and the utopian visions that are visionary but bad, yet lumping in the greatest lessons of the Garden, something people in the 60’s also tried and actually succeeded in educating people that otherwise would’ve never been… why isn’t she focusing on that?

I’m very frustrated by this book because she takes the one great example of a vision for society that might actually work, something in the Epicurean model, but ditches it because they turned their back on the world entirely. Odell argues you can’t leave permanently. I don’t think this is true. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to do, but also remember, the last five years hadn’t happened yet. But she has a cushy professorship and the freedom to make cute art projects. Why would she give that up? I’m just frustrated that she could go so much further… she talks about becoming radicalized, but if it’s just, oh I wish I could join a commune for awhile… that’s not being radical, that’s just escapism…

If anything, this book has introduced a new word to me: Haupstrom, which in German translates to something like “main stream.” Odell writes: “The Haupstrom that occurs in the space between art and life is helpful for understanding the most important and obvious legacy of the communes: even if only briefly, they opened up new perspectives on the society they had left.”

Basically, this history of communes left the rest of society with a net positive. That’s encouraging.

“Even the crowd-shunning Epicurus, who taught that one shouldn’t speak in public unless requested to do so, showed some orientation toward the outside world by using his house as a base for publishing the writings of the school. It’s only for this reason that in 2018, someone (me) is reading them in another garden.”

Ah, there’s the connection with the Rose Garden! I saw this coming! Good, she made the point I was going to make in these notes if she didn;t. Epicurus wasn’t TRYING to forsake the world. It was the world that had forsaken HIM and his SCHOOL. Jenny got it! I think she didn’t give Epicurus enough credit, though!

“…so instinctively do we understand the value of an outsider’s perspective that history is full of people seeking remote hermits and sages, desperate for knowledge from a mind unconcerned with familiar comforts. Just as I need someone to observe things about myself or my writing that I can’t see, mainstream society needs the perspective of its outsiders and recluses to illuminate problems and alternatives that aren’t visible from the inside. That same journey that takes the seeker toward the sage takes him out of the world as he knows it.”

Ok, Jenny, you are definitely onto something now. Yes, I entirely agree with Epicurus…

…

What this book has done, helpfully, is to break down a lot of the people you may just look at now and think were nuts, but realize… There was an impetus to try these desperate measures of detaching from a society that was clearly broken. If anything, these actions made enough of a positive difference that it’s taken a couple more generations to get back to this point where a second civil rights movement may be necessary not just for minorities but to be a sovereign individual at all.

As Jenny says, (yeah I’m calling her Jenny now apparently), Miss Odell has gone on a deep dive into the history of communes and these are her findings. And she does conclude that, indeed, Epicurus was onto something by sharing the writings of his school. I need to read some of this… but anyway, the organization, or rather lack thereof, of this chapter is frustrating for me. These couple paragraphs saved the book for me.

…

Finally, Jenny Odell comes to her point… that you can leave the world for a while to contemplate and refocus, but eventually you need to come back to share what you’ve learned. You know, exactly what I did, but no one listened to me. Although this Thomas Merton person sounds very interesting… he went off to a monastery and wrote a religious book that sold millions of copies, but years later, disavowed it and actually wrote against the Catholic Church. His book Contemplation in a World of Action sounds very interesting.

Jenny writes, “Removal and contemplation were necessary to be able to see what was happening, but that same contemplation would always bring one back around to their responsibility to and in the world.”

Someday, someone, somewhere, will understand what I have to say, and me pointing to the books that helped me gain the wisdom necessary to produce these works is probably even more helpful. If anything, books like this open my eyes to new books and ways of thinking that only increase my wonder at how our society can be so fucked up when wisdom like this exists. It takes Odell a long and winding chapter and an archaeological dig to discover her point, but she’s showing her work and that alone is worthy of praise, even if it makes for a frustrating read for someone who just wants her to get to the point!

Merton writes in that book, “If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is… an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.”

I totally agree with Merton on this point. But my own attitude at this point is that people are unreceptive and therefore, it’s not worth my energy to try and “spread the word.” I’m putting all my energy, limited as it is, into creating the works that will serve to set up future ones. If I ever compile all my notes, even just the best bits, it will be many volumes long.

“This question – of how versus whether – has to do with the attention economy insofar as it offers a useful attitude toward despair, the very stuff the attention economy runs on. It also helps me distinguish what it is I really feel like running away from. I’ve already written that the ‘doing nothing’ I propose is more than a weekend retreat. But that doesn’t mean I propose a permanent retreat either. Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit – for most of us, anyway – sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place, that I will elaborate on in the next chapter.”

Odell already sort of hinted at this in the introduction. This part was written first, but now her intense studies of how communes failed makes a bit more sense in context, even if she went a bit overboard just to flesh out the book. I wouldn’t call it filler, because it’s actually all rather interesting, but in my view, you should be throughlining this thesis throughout the chapter, not just stacking all these failed attempts at exits. I think she got a bit heavy-handed with that point.

I’ve come to accept that the time in which we live is extremely hostile to actual ideas and actual success that doesn’t involve being part of some clique or having some bullshit credentials. As much as I admire Odell’s efforts here, she is part of the academic establishment. I do praise her for turning on the attention economy, much as I have, though.

Epicurus stumbled upon the greatest solution; we all need to sit down and learn together. But this doesn’t mean creating groupthink; the diversity of his students proved that true diversity lies in civil disagreement that leads to productive ends. These communes, as Odell pointed out, relied on the same groupthink and clique mentality that Discord servers and Reddit subthreads do. And many times, they’re run by super religious nutjobs anyway (and yes they exist at both extremes of the political spectrum.) My very existence is seen as an affront to their “values” and “morality,” and I’m never going to reach these people. Some people now are coming to much the same conclusions as myself, but in relative isolation. People that would happily come together are being isolated and made to feel hopelessly lonely, myself included.

What Odell wants to escape is how social media is being used to “foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves.” Foment is such a great word. She words this beautifully.

“Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of ‘arms race’ of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. The result is something like the sleep-deprivation tactics the military uses on detainees, but on a larger scale.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use this language in regards to social media. We’re all prisoners-of-war for the media and news cycle to shuffle around and torture, essentially. I knew she’d come to her point eventually, but wow. The scene really is a goddamn arms race, just like Fall Out Boy said. And that’s why I checked out of it once I no longer needed to pretend to have a career in “social media marketing” which is just a hamster wheel of existential dread.

This chapter’s conclusion is really strong. She should’ve just gotten to this point so much earlier. Basically, the point here is you have to define what it is you are trying to escape; otherwise, you just fall prey to dreams of “utopia” which doesn’t work. Or you end up in a monastery. Or you end up living on grass and squirrels in the middle of a national forest. Surprised she didn’t use the last example.

Jenny points out that while social media is being propagated for nothing but “infinite” growth and profit margins, it’s being co-created by people who simply don’t recognize just how badly they’re fucking themselves. Yes, I’m typing a couple very long paragraphs because these are great points…

“But the storm is co-created. After the election [Trump in 2016], I also saw many acquaintances jumping into the melee, pouring out long, emotional, and hastily written diatribes online that inevitably got a lot of attention. I’m no exception; my most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed.” 

[I did this too, and it actually got a lot of people on FB to block me and tell me I was horrible.] 

“In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.” [I love that imagery.] “Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.”

Jenny is making a point that I’ve been trying to make for awhile. By calling out these takes, by lambasting Trump and his goons, you’re only making the problem worse. It also makes the minorities of fascist right-wing nutjobs and left-wing virtue signalling hypocrites control the narrative. Probably 80 percent of people are letting themselves be swayed without much critical thought about what is REALLY going on. Things are both worse than they appear and not as bad as they appear. Social media creates these little alternate realities within our skulls… the analogy of firecrackers setting off a chain reaction within our puny brains is apt.

Jenny continues: “In such a context, the need to periodically step away is more obvious than ever. Like the managerial employees who wandered away from their jobs, we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to. More than that, as I’ve argued thus far, we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all. William Deresiewicz warns of this in ‘Solitude and Leadership,’ a speech to an audience of college students in 2010. By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, ‘[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.’”

And this is something I figured out in 2020. Once Emily and I met, I finally saw social media for what it was, a great tool with amazing potential to connect people and create productive discourse commandeered for profit and audience manipulation. What I had made my career was in fact, completely useless and worthless spinning my wheels. The content I was creating, even well into 2022, was a product of thinking I knew what people wanted to read. I just wanted to be part of something, but all I was doing was feeding the content machine… none of it was fulfilling for me anymore and since there was no monetary reward attached, I walked away. But only because I was finally in the position in which I could… 98% of people in my same position are still stuck running that hamster wheel until they are old, gray, and dead.

And circling back to all those examples: “The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you’re Peter Thiel, in which case there’s always outer space). [We can add Elon Musk to that list now.] The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.”

I’m grateful that Jenny wrote this book, as meandering as it is at times. She could’ve spent less time on communes, honestly, because she more than made her point… many dead horses have been beaten relentlessly. But I don’t agree that Epicurus was sitting around “contemplating potatoes” in his garden. Hell, I think that’s not a bad idea at this point. But overall, Jenny is making some solid points. And also, this was published in 2019, before things truly went toxic wasteland online.

Now this is interesting: “Some hybrid reaction is needed. We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of these movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call ‘standing apart.’”

“To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world – contemptus mundi – but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.”

“To stand apart is to look at the world (now{ fromm the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.”

What Miss Odell suggests is impressive… even if seemingly unrealistic at the present time.

“Both apart from and responsible to the present, we might allow ourselves to sense the faint outline of an Epicurean good life free from ‘myths and superstitions’ like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, and other fears with no basis in reality. This is no idle exercise. As the attention economy works to keep us trapped in a frightful present, it only becomes more important not just to recognize past versions of our predicament but to retain the capacity for an imagination somehow untainted by disappointment.”

“But the most important, standing apart represented the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the ‘wrong way’: a way that underlines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.”

I find myself still frustrated because while in theory what she’s saying are seeds of a solution, I don’t see this refusal actually taking root anywhere. If anything, people have gotten only more fearful. Any time I try to find an actual community, I’m on the outside looking in. This book is giving me alternate avenues to explore and language to describe just how evil the attention economy truly is, and really, she hasn’t put forth the most obvious solution: starve the fuck out of the attention economy.

…

Chapter 3 of How to Do Nothing is called “Anatomy of a Refusal” so this is where the book should really come into its own. I feel that chapter two about communes and such went in a few too many circles, but such is the nature of writing books; you’re going to end up with chapters that go on a bit too long for their own good. Part of why I don’t like writing books and any future releases I make will turn out to pretty much all be loosely related essay collections.

The chapter begins with a story about a Finnish performance artist named Pilvi Takala, “known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions.” Miss Odell focuses on The Trainee, where all Takala did was become a trainee in a company’s marketing department, but everyone in the office freaked out because it looked like she was just sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. She also would just ride the elevators up and down all day, to “see things from a different perspective.” That sounds familiar. Sounds like what I would do, as long as I could get away with it.

Why were people so ready to see her off? As a Pumphouse Gallery writer in 2017 noted, “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown… The potential of nothing is everything.”

Of course, it was an act to prove a point. I like this Takala lady. 

“Looking at The Trainee,” Odell writes, “it’s clear that the reactions of others are what make such acts humorous and often legendary. Stopping or refusing to do something only gains this status if everyone else is doing what is expected of them, and have never allowed that anyone would ever deviate.”

This is why an office environment is so stifling for me. I always have to appear busy. Even if there wasn’t anything particularly pressing for me to do. 

Oh hey she brings up Tom Green and his “dead guy” act! It drew quite a crowd. Awesome.

“At their loftiest, such refusals can signify the individual capacity for self-directed action against the abiding flow; at the very least, they interrupt the monotony of the every-day. From within unquestioned cycles of behavior, such refusals produce bizarre offshoots that we remember them many centuries later.”

Well, this chapter started off strong. Let’s see how this unfolds. She gets into Diogenes, who Plato called “Socrates gone mad.” As Diogenes was in fact influenced by Antisthenes, himself a disciple of Socrates, it made sense. Odell writes, “He was thus heir to a development in Greek thought that prized the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs, even and especially if they were commonplace. But one of the differences between Socrates and Diogenes was that, while Socrates famously favored conversation, Diogenes practiced something closer to performance art.” Basically, he was the Greek predecessor of Tom Green. “He lived his convictions out in the open and went to great lengths to shock people out of their habitual stupor, using a form of philosophy that was almost slapstick.”

Of course, as Odell explains, “This meant consistently doing the opposite of what people expected. Like Zhuang Zhou before him, Diogenes thought every ‘sane’ person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance.” It’s even worse now. “Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving. Asked how he wanted to be buried, he answered: “Upside down. For soon down will be up.”

Basically, the modern world copied Greek society, but only the crappiest aspects… 

Odell continues, “Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon.”

I would’ve loved to meet this guy.

So the conclusion of this experimental performance art is essentially this: “For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.” And oh boy, the unexamined alternatives are often so much simpler and less exhausting.

Diogenes is generally seen as a hero nowadays. Miss Odell concludes: “We need a Diogenes not just for entertainment, nor just to show that there are alternatives, but because stories like his contribute to our vocabulary of refusal even centuries later.”

I’m putting a lot of phrases in boldface today. Even as my allergies are rudely interrupting my train of thought.

Bartleby the Scrivener is an interesting story. I have heard of refusals like this, where it’s not even a direct “no” but rather a “I would prefer not to.” Obviously Melville took Bartleby’s refusal to the extreme, where he locked himself in the office and even after the lawyer changes offices, Bartleby remains, and eventually gets locked up. 

She also brings up Cicero, thanks to a commentary on Bartelby concerning the nature of free will. “If we believed that everything were merely a product of fate or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice. In today’s terms, we’d all just be algorithms. Furthermore, we’d have no reason to try to make ourselves better or different from our natural inclinations.”

And that’s where we’re headed. While feelings are important, and data can be manipulated to lead us to the conclusions others would like us to make, you still need at least a modicum of reason to temper your emotional reactions and natural inclinations. In 2025, most people have become slaves to algorithms. In fact we now have “The Algorithm” which is silly because there isn’t just one algorithm on any given platform, even YouTube, but rather various algorithms constantly being tweaked that work in tandem. But it goes to show that people have become subservient to a machine learning centered overlord. Fun times.

The idea of performance art being a test of endurance fascinates me, although it also baffles me. It’s impressive in either case.

Of course, we have to bring in our boy Thoreau. He is probably the most famous individual who sought out a third space. That’s part of why I take so much issue with the title of that book, Walden Two, and I’m sure Jenny would agree with me… the great irony is that Walden Two is the very opposite of what Thoreau sought.

“Civil Disobedience” is a hell of an essay, too. For some reason, I have a feeling it’s going to become even more relevant in the near future.

Oh yeah, and Bartelby died in prison, by the way.

The concept of the ‘spot market’ is brought up here. It’s why the “job market” is so ephemeral and bullshit. “In the global ‘spot market,’ companies are driven only by the need to remain competitive, passing the task on to individuals to remain competitive as producing bodies.” We all get driven to compete with each other… and I’ve seen firsthand what happens to people’s livelihoods in the “gig economy.” It’s ugly as hell.

And so many people, like the longshoreman of the 1930’s, had very little say in what they could do… unfortunately, I can’t see cities rising up like they did back then to improve the longshoreman’s lot, even though collective action is sorely needed.

“A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”

This is inevitably a good chapter and really gets at some really big ideas.

…

Chapter four of How to Do Nothing is called Exercises in Attention. It leads with a quote:

“In Zen they say: if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” – John Cage.

This is a fascinating concept. The Zen mindset, in general, I think is rather popularly misunderstood.

Apparently Jenny Odell grew up in Cupertino, the home of Apple, my favorite company… it’s amazing how much I dislike the company while I use their tech constantly! Not surprisingly, Cupertino really doesn’t have anything that sets it apart from most other surrounding cities; outside of Apple being there.

This concept of the “phenomenology of seeing” is very interesting. Painter David Hockney started experimenting with photography, Polaroids in particular, in pursuit of what he called a “living impression.”

He says: “From that first day, I was exhilarated… I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not at all once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world… There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful.”

Hockney was preoccupied “not just with the subject of depiction but with the relationship between representation and perception.”

The whole project is interesting in concept, but I’m a bit baffled by the execution. It’s esoteric even for me.

Basically the guy is using Photoshop to “join” hundreds of photographs together to create a sort of cubist work. Of one particular work: “From far away, the general composition looks like a familiar landscape, but we soon notice that the STOP AHEAD letters on the road balloon toward us in an odd way. Bits of roadside refuse seem out of proportion’ the Joshua trees that are far away are somehow as detailed as the ones that are close to us.

“These disjunctures and discrepancies in size undermine any sense of continuity or punctum. Without the familiar framework of a consistent vanishing point, the eye roams across the scene, dwelling in small details and trying to add it all up. This process forces us to notice our own ‘construction’ of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception.”

Hockney defines looking as a “positive act.” Odell writes, “For him, actual looking was a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practiced; there was ‘a lot to see’ only if you were willing and able to see it. In this sense, what Hockney and countless other artists offer is a kind of attentional prosthesis. Such an offering assumes that the familiar and proximate environment is as deserving of this attention, if not more, than those hallowed objects we view in a museum.”

…

The part I’m reading now is about John Cage’s philosophy of “everything we hear is music.” I happen to entirely agree with this philosophy, so I don’t need to be sold on it. Hell, that’s sort of the whole underpinning “magic” system of Tunes and Tails, after all. I love that some of Cage’s performances end up so absurd that the audience starts laughing… and this is intentional. The idea is that you start listening to things you never noticed before.

This part is important, though. Miss Odell talks about this film called The Exchange, which is a bizarre conceptual film, but the idea behind it is fascinating: “It has to do with how endlessly strange reality is when we look at it rather than through it.”

So is this the problem most of us have in modern society? Are we looking through everything around us rather than at it?

That film in particular doesn’t have much of a plot, but it doesn’t really need much more than a PhD student realizing he forgot something at home and goes back to get it. But when he gets home, he “finds that his apartment looks unfamiliar at that particular time of day.” I know that feeling. Odell parenthetically remarks: “I’m convinced that many of us have had this experience as a child, coming home sick from school in the middle of the day and finding that our home feels strange.” Indeed I have, because our brains are so accustomed to being elsewhere. It’s sort of like when you’re on summer vacation from school… it’s disorienting. 

Anyway, our PhD student friend in the film doesn’t go back about his day like normal. Instead, as Odell writes…

“Critically unmoored from the familiar, the man spends the rest of the film doing things like pushing a paperweight matter-of-factly off a coffee table, throwing a stapler out a window, standing in bushes, or lying on the floor of his apartment’s basement level. In place of a man going about his business, he becomes like an alien who encounters people, objects, and the laws of physics for the first time.”

I’m starting to think that with how engulfed people are in their screens, if people were forced to put them down for an extended period of time, they would likely have a similar experience.

Is that the solution to the world’s problems? We all need a bit of unmooring? We need to look at the familiar in brand new ways?

Miss Odell writes, “This way of looking, in which we are Alice and everything is a potential rabbit hole, is potentially immobilizing; at the very least, it brings us out of step with the everyday.”

When I was a kid, I was always out of step. My imagination always went down rabbit holes. It still does here and there, but these holes have dug deeper into some very dark places in my psyche more recently. 

Again about The Exchange: “Indeed, the only real drama of The Exchange happens between the protagonist and everyone else, especially his girlfriend, to whom his actions appear insane.”

Yeah, if my partner was doing all those odd things mentioned earlier, I’d be concerned, too. But again, we are only concerned because our minds are concerned with the wrong things. We get tunnel vision. We get these ideas in our heads of what needs to be done next, when many times, those things are nowhere as interesting as the mundane and seemingly uninteresting when you look at them directly. We rarely take time to appreciate the environment and the objects in it the way that we did as children… and that’s where our “innocence” goes, I think. 

The PhD student wasn’t insane at all. Reality broke him to a point where simply forgetting something at home completely sent his day into a black hole. It’s like he was looking at everything for the first time again. I think that was the hidden point here; all it takes is a seemingly minor break in routine, and the whole “reality” we convince ourselves we’re living in evaporates. The programming of our compulsory education, job training, and all the things we were taught about “existing properly” in the world simply ceases to be compelling to us anymore.

“So why go down the rabbit hole?” Odell asks. “First and most basically, it is enjoyable. Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known.” [That is a beautiful way of describing curiosity!] “Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven’t seen tat you’d like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner. Although it’s never seemed a choice to me, I live for this feeling.” [You and I, both, Jenny.] “Curioisity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself.” [And oh boy, there are times I’d much rather forget myself. I think we all need to forget ourselves a lot more often.]

And here is the point that I’ve sort of been circling in my mind just now. Jenny makes it for me.

“This leads into a second reason to leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice: doing so allows one to transcend the self. Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding – seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions – and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”

Instrumental understanding was the phrase I was looking for just now. We live in such an object-oriented society. Even the people we know, essentially, become no more than objects. Humans, I don’t believe, were meant to be like this. We were never meant to know everything, but never give up seeking all the same.

Odell then discusses Martin Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou. I-It is essentially what we just discussed with instrumental, one-dimensional understanding. I-Thou, on the other hand…

“In contrast to I-it, I-Thou recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. In this configuration, I meet you ‘thou’ in your fullness by giving you my total attention, because I neither project nor ‘interpret’ you, the world contracts into a moment of a magical exclusivity between you and me. In I-Thou, the ‘thou’ does not need to be a person; famously, Buber gives the example of different ways of looking at a tree, all but one of which he classifies as I-It.”

So what are these ways?

“He can ‘accept it as a picture,’ describing its visual elements; he can consider an instance of a species, an expression of natural law, or a pure relation of numbers. ‘Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition,’ he says. But then there is the I-Thou option: ‘it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an it. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.’”

“Here, we encounter the tree in all its otherness, a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us.” [It’s not a productive one, and has in fact, become one of humanity’s most destructive self-taught beliefs, internally and externally.] “The tree exists out there: ‘The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it – only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of relation: relation is reciprocity.’ (In his translation from the German, Walter Kaufmann notes that ‘it confronts me bodily’ uses a highly unusual verb – leibt, where leib means body – so that a more precise translation would be ‘it bodies across from me.’) Does this then mean that the tree has consciousness in the way that we would understand it? For Buber, the question is misguided because it relapses into I-It thinking: ‘must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.’”

Odell cites Emily Dickinson’s ”A Bird came down the walk” as an example of this. “Just as Dickinson’s bird ‘row[s] him softer’ to some unknown ‘home,’ nothing indicates that something exists beyond you as much as its departure into the sky, as sudden and unceremonious as its arrival. All of this makes for a benign that cannot be ‘understood’ or ‘interpreted’ (I-It), only ‘perceived’ (I-Thou). And that which cannot be understood – a once-and-for-all matter – demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter.

History isn’t about dates, places, specific events, or even individuals. It’s about how they all relate to one another in a complicated web of cause and effect.

…

Aside: Many people prefer to annotate and highlight their books. I see this as messy and destructive to the original work. I prefer to leave books as they are; I do not discard books that have such annotations or highlights, though, as these are scars left by a previous borrower. Yes, I say borrower, not owner, because ownership is a very tenuous thing. Possession and ownership, I don’t think, are mutually even the same thing. We only own something because there is some agreement that we have exclusive rights to that thing. It’s why I haven’t been a fan of the concept of marriage since I realized that there’s nothing sacred about it at all; it’s a property sharing and distribution agreement, nothing more. What we can own are our own life experiences and individual impressions. We can’t own ideas. We can’t own the essence of objects outside of ourselves. Hell, we aren’t really our own selves… we are the embodiment of everything we have experienced; a part of us belongs to everyone we have ever met, every place we have ever been, and our thoughts, while certainly our own, are all that we take with us into oblivion when we pass from this mortal existence. 

And so then, books are a sacred channel through which these thoughts are passed onto other conscious minds. I don’t always appreciate what they have to say, but even those I disagree with happen to say a couple things I find worth writing down.  I copy down entire passages because in doing so, I am helping to better familiarize myself with not only the words themselves, but the cadence of one’s own rhythms of thought. Some people go as far to copy down books word for word, the most extreme form of notetaking. But that’s not really notetaking as it is a sort of transcription that must be done with a particular intention. Are you really furthering the scraps of that consciousness related through symbols on a page as a continuation of that mind’s art, or are you simply busying yourself with transcription so that you can say you accomplished something? I think it’s the latter, unless you’re a priest actually trying to preserve something special and rare. At one time, transcription was the only way to publish something multiple times. Kind of crazy to think about. But when I see people do it now, if they are just blindly rewriting every single word, what are they really learning? It’s not a conversation with the text at all, but just ‘say as I do’ not ‘do as I say.’ But being selective in my transcriptions, then pondering them and commenting on these excerpts at length, this is much more productive.

…

I’m not still down with the idea that photography and paintings are inherently all that different… Odell talks about people who say that photographs are like windows but that paintings exist in the same reality as the viewer. This is a quirk of perception that I understand conceptually, but I’m not sure it’s as useful as what she says next about artwork that appears to be nothing but monochromatic panels in which “nothing” is going on.

“These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default. As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.”

She is onto something really big here. But I’m not sure it’s what she was thinking it was. What we get out of art, whether it’s a painting of a scene, or a photograph, or a work composed of four monochrome panels that are each large as a person… it’s what YOU bring to the artwork. So she has the attention part right. But she makes it sound like the art is what does it; it’s because the lack of any discernible detail allows us to perceive more intensely the color, the texture of the paint used, the very pattern of the brushstrokes. We are experiencing the result of work, not an image. 

I think what she’s really saying here is that these types of artwork are useful because they don’t ‘say’ anything but rather just exist for us to experience. But as an art teacher herself, I sense a sort of elitist view [and I don’t really think it’s entirely her fault, this is what the university environment does to one’s soul] that she prefers this sort of artwork to more traditional forms because all you can really do is stare and them and wonder how someone could spend so many hours of their lives producing… colored panels. However, the John Cage performances of incidental and everyday sounds being music, that I’m totally down with.

Interestingly, she moves onto an app called ULTIMEYES which I’m familiar with as an app that trains university baseball players in visual acuity. She discerns the difference between ocular impairments and brain-based impairments; the app is meant to deal with the latter. It’s dealing with what’s called ‘inattentional blindness.’ It’s pretty incredible what we actually see and hear is so much more than we are consciously aware of most of the time. Simply moving the focus of our attention can dramatically change our perception of everything that’s coming at us at a given moment. 

This visual bias goes even further to other types of unconscious bias, like stereotyping and racial prejudice. It’s a behavior that researcher Patricia Devine is aiming to simply “make unconscious patterns conscious and intentional.” Of course, the point of this research she and her colleague Will Cox are doing at the Prejudice Center is to shed light on these biases, but not only that, you have to make people not just aware of it, but also “motivated to change, and have a strategy for replacing it.”

There’s a part here about how “there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention.” I wonder if this is true of neurotypical people, but not neurodivergent ones. Believe me, I can choose to sustain my attention for a very long time. Odell talks about William James’ The Principles of Psychology and comes to the conclusion: “Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention – no small task.”

The neurodivergent brain, though, as I’ve experienced it myself, involuntarily focuses on certain things, often things that aren’t particularly useful at the moment. I find it extremely difficult to ever let my attention truly wander, as neurotypical folks seem so wont to do without any effort at all. Neurodivergence is, then, a blessing and a curse simultaneously. When the focus is where you want it to be, it’s wonderful. When it’s not, you run into massive brain fogs and keep thinking about the most unproductive things…

I have about ten more pages of that chapter to go. But clearly that is a lot for me to process. Just my point. 

…

This is an important line from How to Do Nothing: “If attention and will are so closely linked, then we have even more reason to worry about an entire economy and information ecosystem preying on our attention.” And it’s gotten so much worse since this book was published in 2019.

Also a great quote from technology ethicist James Wiliams in a post about ad blockers on University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog. I found the post itself and I’m archiving it, comments and all: https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/

“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words if Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.”

Yeah, the attention economy really screwed me up badly. I’m still recovering, honestly.

Odell also brings up how people talk all the time about “authenticity” but what does that really mean other than catering to the “aspirational self.” Authenticity has become such a buzzword that it’s kind of sickening anytime people use it now. And even in 2019, Odell and others were beginning to realize that our “aspirations” are being used against us for fun and profit (usually the ones getting the profit get the fun and not the end user, though.) This is something I was already thinking about at some level, and like this book has done already on multiple occasions, it’s given language to some of my sharper impressions.

This is a great line: “To me, the only habit worth ‘designing for’ is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do.” Odell is absolutely right here. And no AI can do that, which is why so many people discount its use entirely. I take no issue with the AI luddites. But i believe it’s much more productive to use the tech in the way like I use it… to synthesize cogent points from a mess of thoughts. 

The argument is that using AI to turn thoughts into prose destroys a writer’s mind and process, and I agree it can if it’s relied upon… but there’s nothing wrong with seeing what it comes up with, as long as you’re not so focused on the end product coming out of prompting AI. You can use AI to be more creative, even just as a relatively simple counterpoint that’s able to sometimes needle the thread before you do.. It’s just the AI output should never be the end goal, but rather a further extension, because it will “think” of things you may not have. 

Back to the attention economy… AI wasn’t nearly what it is now when Jenny Odell published this book. It was on the horizon, yes, but not to the degree it’s come six years later.

Another very important point: “There are more reasons to deepen attention than simply resisting the attention economy. Those reasons have to do with the very real ways in which attention – what we pay attention to and what we do not – renders our reality in a very serious sense. From the same set of ‘data,’ we draw conclusions based on our past experiences and assumptions.”

“It’s in the realm of the poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to ‘empower’ us by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other. Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly.”

I like how Odell uses her teaching Blender to students, and when they go to render an image, they accidentally deleted the virtual light source so it comes out a default gray, even though there are objects in the scene. I feel like people are deleting their light sources (internally) all the time, which is highly ironic considering how much blue light we subject our eyes to on a daily basis as a society.

William James wrote in 1890: “Millions of items of the outward order and present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. Y experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.”

Odell writes, “As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing.”

She talks about finding more things to look at. I remember as a child poring over the Audubon guides to plants and animals (I still have them actually) and putting names to everything like some modern day Adam of Eden. As Jenny learned about the trees and birds and bugs around her, she began to realize they were always there before, “yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.” She was learning about what is known as bioregionalism, “based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors.”

Jenny learns about a creek that she’d only been vaguely aware of as a child and now in adulthood she and a friend who grew up downstream of her in Cupertino decided to explore it with her. She was surprised to see just how far it went, going through a tunnel underneath a newer shopping center called Main Street Cupertino, all the way from where her school was to the Apple campus, apparently.

“Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation – a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, review – but rather on a giant rock whose other lifeforms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away – all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.”

She’s also glad she shared it with someone, making it a shared experience, realizing this creek was there all along together. “Realities are, after all, inhabitable,” she writes. “If we can render a new reality together – with attention – perhaps we can meet each other there.” I’m hoping that happens soon.

I’ll get to reading Chapter 5 Ecology of Strangers tomorrow. But I wanted to save the opening quote before then:

“There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than “you” can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.” – Gary Snyder, The Practice fo the Wild. That’s quite a quote. I love that imagery of a roaming bobcat in the dreamworld. I can use that.

…

A couple of impressions from Chapter 5 so far.

After witnessing someone on her walk to the store collapse with a seizure and tending to her, Jenny has a hard time even remembering why she was at the store in the first place, “Just as earthquakes remind us that we live on floating plates, once I’d been confronted with the fragility of another person’s life, I was momentarily unable to see anything as given.”

I’m confronted by my own fragility all the time. So I know this feeling.

This experience made Jenny think about David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” which I’m familiar with from somewhere else. In the commencement speech that piece originally took, Wallace brings up a “hideously, fluorescently lit” grocery store.

“If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?”

“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.”

Jenny writes about how she’s on a streetcar in San Francisco, looking at the many faces on Market Street from her window seat. She says, “Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life – of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine – this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing.”

She adds: “Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.”

I need to write this sentence down: “When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from.”

This entire paragraph is speaking to me right now. She’s talking about how our favorite songs rarely come from Spotify mixes, and instead, they sort of just sneak up on you:

“My dad, a musician for much of his life, says that this is actually the definition of good music: music that ‘sneaks up on you’ and changes you. And if we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when i hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me. For a person invested in a stable and bounded ego, this kind of acknowledgment would be a death wish. But personally, having given up on the idea of an atomic self, I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive.”

The ‘atomic self’ is an interesting concept. And my own ego has never been stable. These encounters Jenny is speaking of, we won’t find them through algorithms and not on social media long as those algorithms keep doing their thing; and they’ve only gotten better at their jobs over the years since. And all the music I like sneaks up on me, and when people see how bizarrely slanted my musical tastes are, they might question my sanity.

This here is the problem with algorithms:

“By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic ‘honing in’ would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. It certainly makes sense from a business point of view. When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to ‘be yourself,’ what it really means is ‘be more yourself,’ where ‘yourself’ is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriate, like units of capital.”

I gave up on personal branding awhile back. I’m glad I did. That way I can just be the person I am in the moment, not try to conform to some “reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments.”

Jenny writes, “Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of ‘myself,’ I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in ‘Civil Disobeidence”: as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it – imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self – I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down.”

That last sentence is what’s happening to content as AI becomes more responsible for drafting much of what we read on a daily basis. AI is simply smoothing over the rough spots in the algorithms. And Thoreau was right, and now today, we have far more people than ever dead before their time. Most people aren’t living at all. For quite some time I wasn’t either. Most if not all of us are facing plenty of threats to our identities and bounds of self on a daily basis. But the self is not static, and nor should it be.

“What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of ‘efficiency’ is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined ‘self’: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It’s also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and for a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.”

I hate gentrification. I see what it does. But nothing is being done to stop it.

By Chapter Five, I think Jenny and I are getting close to being on the same page. I don’t agree with all of her ideas, but most of them I can identify with at least. Those last two sentences, in particular, are extremely important.

…

One of the most interesting aspects of “How To Do Nothing” is that Jenny Odell clearly changes as a person as the chapters progress, and she hints at this shift in the introduction. And the book isn’t about doing “Nothing” but instead, something that many people today would consider to be doing “Nothing.” In this case “nothing” is in fact everything we’ve left behind in our instant-gratification obsessed “aspirational” capitalist culture. 

I don’t particularly agree with Jenny’s taste in art, but I don’t have to. That’s kind of the point. She chooses to quote people who trash-talk photography, which is something I certainly don’t appreciate. But the fact she brings up such, well, controversial arguments makes me respect her. I respect Jenny Odell a lot. She’s bright and unafraid of pissing people off. She has frustrated me in several places in past chapters, but the past two chapters she and I are starting to share some language of how we perceive the world. She’s even given me the language to make some sense of the world we’ve been given to work with. It’s much worse now than 2019. And as usual, people saw this coming a mile away. 

Most people aren’t living any more. Maybe that’s what I felt today… seeing people who aren’t really living, and I’m also in that sort of liminal space between living and dying. It’s an awkward place to be. But so are they; yet I am fully aware of it but don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information.

I think this Michael Pollan quote from “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors” as his traditional self disperses during an ayahuasca experience sort of explains where I’m coming to:

“The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. And yet something had succeeded it: this bare, disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to reality but as something other than my usual self. And although there was no self left to feel,exactly, there was a feeling tone, and that was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego.”

…

Aside: I’ve long suspected that there is life after death, that our awareness, our consciousness never truly evaporates. It’s not quite reincarnation, but rather a communion with everything, everyone, and everywhere you’ve ever interacted with, intentionally or not. It’s a beautiful thought. It helps me sleep at night. The “self” that exists in the physical body is but a vessel for a short time, relatively speaking, helping us to complete some tasks that can only be accomplished in corporeal form. I believe in spirits, but not in a religious sense; that energy that makes up our consciousness, those quantum level interactions that allow us to do such fantastic things… they must go somewhere. But they are beyond what we can currently conceive of or measure meaningfully.

I don’t believe that my ego was ever my own; I believe what I could’ve called my ego was a defense mechanism to protect my intellect from corruption. It wasn’t entirely successful, perhaps, but here I am. I survived. But what even is “I” really? In my dreams my family and “friends” still haunt me most nights. I carry them with me even as they shunned me, as I made choices that lay outside of any reasonable sense to them, and yet… I not only persist but flourish, especially when it comes to the freedom with which I can now type these words.

I don’t believe in an “authentic” self and the more people talk about “authenticity” the more I ask how much they are faking how they show up in that particular moment. I don’t believe it is possible to ever be a truly “authentic” self. We always adapt to the moment, the situation, who we are speaking to. We rarely tell our loved ones exactly how we feel, about ourselves and about them. Many times we just don’t know how they’ll react, or we just don’t have the language to properly express what that is. I sometimes believe the “self” is a prison for something bright and inextinguishable, and when our mortal bodies die, we free that bright light to roam once again, where it may or may not be captured by a mortal coil once again. 

Perhaps reincarnation is true after all, and after my life ends, I will live another, but not as me… and yet, also as me, but in the body of another with very different life experiences. I would say in some ways simply ceasing to be is more comforting than the idea that we’re imprisoning starlight for an average of some 80-odd years, and for what? Humanity has gone to great lengths to enslave the vast majority of its own population… and to what end? Money? Power? Fame? Sex? None of these things matter in the end, although the sex can be awfully nice.

…

Here’s an interesting sentence: “If critical distance is what we’re after, I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.”

I agree. But sometimes you need some isolation to gain perspective.

Now Jenny and I are definitely on the same page.

“Conversations, whether with oneself or with others, are different [than public opinion]. The book you are reading – as I would guess is the case with most books – is the result of many conversations I’ve had over the course of many years, in my case with both humans and nonhumans. Many of them happened while I was writing this, and all of them changed my mind. Now, as you read it, this book forms a conversation with you as well.”

And isn’t that the aim of every book? To start a conversation with you as the reader and hopefully change your mind about something? I’d say she’s been successful, at times changing my mind towards being more receptive but also giving me language to pair with impressions and thoughts I’ve had for a while. And yes, you can have a conversation with trees, birds, flowers, and bugs. They may not speak back, but their very existence says a lot we need to consider.

I would say then, life is about having the right conversations. And we should want our opinions, notions, impressions, and feelings to be challenged on a regular basis. We must always be in a state of growth. Sometimes the world as it is doesn’t allow this growth to happen without taking drastic actions. That may look like isolation. But believe me, as isolated as I may appear, I’m well aware of the state of things, perhaps not the specifics, but I see how people are suffering, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it yet. All I know is that I cannot be distracted by the [curiosity driven] work I’m currently doing. These notes are proof that I’m getting somewhere, when I thought I had stalled out completely just a month ago.

Now we are at what’s becoming my favorite part of the book, where she sees the world so much differently than before.

“When I try to think about thinking, for instance, retracing where an idea of mine came from, the limitations of English forces me to say that ‘I’ ‘produced’ an ‘idea.’ But one of these things are stable entities, and this grammatical relationship among them is misleading. The “idea” isn’t a finished product with identifiable boundaries that one moment sprung into being – one of the reasons artists so hate the interview question, ‘So what was your inspiration for this?’ Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me.”

And apparently there’s cognitive science to back this up. I’ve long suspected that there is no barrier between the self and nature. We can see this in children and the environments in which they grow up. Mankind has somehow increasingly made environments for our youth more suffocating with each passing generation. Some children are fortunate enough to not experience this; even I was relatively freer than most children, but that’s only because no one really knew where to place me. People took a wait-and-see approach with me, which ultimately turned out to be mostly the right decision, although I could’ve used a bit of direction when I realized that university life was going to be entirely a waste of time for my faculties and skillsets.

She quotes David Abram from ‘Becoming Animal’: “If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us – we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us,” 

Odell says, “This is of course a relatively recent problem of language.” I would add that it’s how we’ve been taught it. The English language itself is fully able to make these adjustments, but only if we adjust our own internal monologue into more of an ever active dialogue with the people, places, and objects we encounter. 

She is, however, absolutely correct that native peoples had better language to conceive of the nonhuman actors around them, including mountains. And yes, a mountain is much more than a rock formation… It’s an actor in a long geological story. Even supposedly detached scientists will agree… They are home to ecosystems and have hidden wonders to betray, especially when they erupt like St. Helen’s did. We do name them, after all. Part of us, as human beings, knows they are more than inanimate rock (and they aren’t entirely inanimate, of course… it’s just that their movements are generally imperceptible to us.)

Jenny brings up the fascinating concept of ‘ecology of the self.’ She writes: “If what I’ve said about the ecology of the self is true, then it may only be among the most elaborate web of the nonhuman that we can most fully experience our own humanity.”

Odell says bioregionalism is something we must pay more attention to and become a “meeting grounds for our attention…” I think this is a good idea. “I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point. At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7 [and that time may be closer than we want to admit], you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliche of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.”

Upon talking about atmospheric rivers, which I’ve never heard that term before, Jenny comes to a very beautiful conclusion about ecology.

“I find something comfortingly anti-essentialist in the way ecology works. As someone who is both Asian and white, I am an anomaly or a nonentity from an essentialist point of view. It’s not possible for me to be ‘native’ to anywhere in any obvious sense. But things like the atmospheric river, or even the sight of Western tanagers (a favorite bird) migrating through Oakland in the spring, gives me an image of how to be from two places at once. I remember that the sampaguita, while it’s the national flower of the Philippines, actually originated in the Himalayas before being imported in the seventeenth century. I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind.”

That last bit really is sticking to me hard. I understand scientifically the cycles of air and water that encircle our globe. The carbon that makes up all living things on earth was once created inside of a very ancient star. But the thoughts… Indeed, thoughts themselves are rarely entirely our own. Even Henry Ford of all people realized that thoughts are already in the air, waiting for us to discover them.

“An ecological understanding allows us to identify ‘things’ – rain, cloud, river – at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that – while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud – when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a ‘cloud.’”

Just like the self. “Resisting definition like headwaters resist pinpointing, we emerge from moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do. Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized. Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding – anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching – does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed.”

Phew. I was remarking earlier to Emily about how wasteful and destructive human beings really are. Apparently I don’t know the half of it.

Audre Lorde once wrote: “My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I rig myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.”

Aside: And who are these different selves? Past selves, present selves, the selves we are yet to become? Or is the self not a linear thing at all, constantly in flux, and it is only the containers we inhabit that live on an entropic plane… I used to think of entropy as a bad thing, order constantly moving towards a state of disorder. But is it disorder or simply a different form of order we can’t yet fathom? There is a distinct intelligence that exists within our universe, vast, ancient, and like mountains moving, practically imperceptible to us except over many generations of human history. 

I don’t want to go on a tangent here, and I really hate how overused the word ‘quantum’ has become, but we know with some certainty that once you get down to the quantum level of things, reality as we understand it doesn’t exist. There is superposition, for example; quantum realities are a thing. The whole universe is based on probabilities, but with so many inputs that we can’t possibly know them all. We can only hazard the most rudimentary guesses. 

Quantum entanglement is one of the most fascinating principles to me; whatever we interact with is changed forever somehow. We coexist with all our potential selves all the time; it’s why we’re always considering ‘what if’ scenarios without having any sense of what must conspire for those scenarios to become reality. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they don’t. I feel like I’m in a moment where many different selves of my own are overlapping, each fighting for dominance over another. Or is it that I am fighting to retain some semblance of self that is but a construct I’ve created out of social habit? The self that I am becoming is a byproduct of thousands of past selves along with countless potential present selves which could extend into infinitely more future selves. Perhaps I am overthinking this and it’s why I’m so fatigued. I’m becoming someone unrecognizable to my own experience and I don’t know how to exist “correctly” any more. At least I’m not alone in this.

Lorde also once said in a speech. “Difference must be not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening.”

I’ve been saying the first phrase for a long time, but Lorde backs it up in the best possible way I could’ve considered.

…

The final chapter of How to Do Nothing, Chapter 6, is “Restoring the Grounds for Thought.”

My boy Thoreau is quoted here. It’s from “Walking,” another great piece of his.

“We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid to waste.”

Oh Henry, if you saw the state of minds today…

I just love how Odell worded this, “…practices of close attention can help us see into nuanced ecologies of being and identity.”

Important to keep in mind. Pauline Oliveros once wrote in Deep Listening: “When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects, or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received, Your presence may be the difference between life and death for hte creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!”

I’ve been aware of this ever since I was a child. But it’s amazing to me how many people don’t seem to realize this nor care.

Odell brings up something about social media that sort of echoes a feeling I had when I first left Twitter. Part of the reason I left is that so much of what I read on there was so all over the place that I couldn’t really make sense of it anymore. It was all too much. Jenny says that’s because it lacks context. And as an avid lover of context like her, it makes sense that because social media feeds strip context both spatially and temporally away, especially when it suggests posts from years ago (YouTube even loves to do this), people can feel lost. It’s actually depressing when you see all this stuff without any context of how any of it fits together.

She writes: “Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.”

That’s a great way to describe it. What’s sad is that as early as 2011, a study by danah boyd (yes no caps) was done that proved the “context collapse” on Twitter… which is how the alt-right gained so much traction on the platform. We all know what that led to…

The term ‘context collapse’ actually came from a 1985 book by Joshua Meyrowitz called No Sense of Place. Basically these days it seems you have two options online (as much in 2011 as 2025). One, you speak your mind and offend an unintended audience. Or you go the direction of most social media influencers and be as bland and inoffensive as possible, racing towards a “mediocre bottom.” Of course, there’s a third option: ragebaiting existed back then, but it’s been dialed up to absurd levels in the past several years. Offending people on purpose seems to be the most profitable route at this point. 

Perhaps one of the most damaging after-effects of social media becoming so prominent is the fact that your image on social media (the person you convey there) is basically your only image. You can’t easily change your mind or change anything meaningful about yourself or your whole online persona self-destructs. And these days, it means your persona in the eyes of anyone you know online self-destructs. You delete facebook, you’re deleted from a lot of people’s existence. I was okay with this. I’m still OK with this. But it’s a problem for a lot of people; people stick with it because that’s where most everyone they know is…

There’s a lot of good stuff that I’m not writing down, because at that point I’d basically just be rewriting her book with my thoughts…

But here’s another big reason I left social media:

“I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd – not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its ow form of ‘research,’ and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.”

When my social media feeds became progressively quieter until I was getting no interaction at all, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do to get interactions. I finally gave up and quit everything. And suddenly I had so much more time. It’s absurd how much energy people pour into social media, especially when the return is often so not worth it.

Hannah Ardent once wrote: “The only indispensable factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present can power remain with them.”

Now social media has ironically isolated people to a point where they are powerless. Even ‘communities’ are vulnerable to bad actors taking over the whole show and controlling the narrative in their favor. I’ve been bullied out of so many online groups I lost count, just for having a polite difference of opinion with the moderators. Those that do have power only do because they are great at creating mobs that serve their purposes.

There is still a healthy bit more in the conclusion. [And it’s a frustrating section to read after the paradigm-shifting thoughtwork in Chapters Five and Six, as I’ll get to…] But the idea isn’t to actually Do Nothing. Just tune out of the attention economy. Well, I did that. I certainly pay more attention to bringing more useful context into my life. I don’t go out in nature nearly as much as I should, and that’s something that should change. 

Unfortunately, the promise of these decentralized social networks hasn’t panned out all that well. I struggle mightily to connect with anyone these days. Right now I feel like a massive storm is on the horizon about to wipe a lot of what we know out, and I’d rather wait it out and see what happens.

…

The conclusion of this book is frustrating for a number of reasons that I’ll get into in future. But there are good bits to share.

Called “Manifest Dismantling,” it begins with this: “If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that’s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress.”

She’s absolutely correct. And the destruction of culture and biology has only accelerated exponentially. Sure, people are still trying to stem the tide. But it’s a losing battle at this rate.

I do appreciate this quote from conservationist Aldo Leopold in “The Round River: A Parable”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

I do like her concept of manifest dismantling, returning things back to the way they were, or at least, returning areas to nature where human “progress” screwed up, like the dam they removed in California to save the Trout. 

In direct opposition to manifest destiny, Odell writes: “Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction.”

That is perhaps the best way to describe “manifest destiny” as an engine of destruction, for what it really was.

She continues: “I am interested in manifest dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation, something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly. It provides a new direction for our work ethic.” And I’m sure there are people still working with this in mind, but it’s been overtaken by more destruction than ever.

A statement I agree with: “One of the points I’ve tried to make in this book – about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space –  means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and the environment.” 

This is the entanglement we should be worried about.

More to come.