It's not at all about doing nothing. It is all about reclaiming control over the deployment of our most liberating tool of mental direction and physical agency. That's doing something, against the inertial drift of so much of our media-mediated/-saturated virtual lives now.
Maria Popova has often sounded a similar theme in Brain Pickings. She and Odell understand that our contemporary experience is much diluted and distracted, by the Internet and by our passive feeding and consumption thereof. If we want a better experience, we must attend with greater acuity and sharper intention. We must take a directed interest. James:
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My 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.Color us gray, lately.
Odell says her book is a cross between activism and self-help, but that undersells it. Some of her insights:
Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.”
“I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out,”
I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.”
“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.”
“Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Franscisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.”
“What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”
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.
We should refuse such dams first and foremost within ourselves.”
...the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms 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.” (See nyt essay on living in a simulation...)
reviews-nyt...wapo...guardian...nation
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