Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimised, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to number evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For one, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognise that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
🔥2❤1