How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
My thoughts on “success” and the side effects of a UC Berkeley education.
A note before we start: I am grateful and continue to be grateful to have received a top-notch education in the US. This piece is meant only to explore some habits I find particularly antithetical to my personal values, and is a constructive criticism of the university and the larger “grindset” of the Bay Area. It’s also, at its core, just a book review ; )
I’ve just graduated with a dual degree from the top public university in the United States, and I find myself resenting an unexpected side effect of my experience— an obsession with “success.”
In my final semester, I decided to enroll in a 1-unit class called Exploring Your Career in the Arts and Humanities, a class I in hindsight feel perfectly embodies my issues with what I’m calling the “UC Berkeley Mindset.”
The class was advertised to students studying the humanities as a method of getting acquainted with alumni of the school who have “made it” despite not pursuing something directly related to their degree. Think “CEO who happens to be an English major.” Some of these talks were enlightening— a museum archivist has inspired an alternative career to teaching if education in the US continues on its downward spiral. But mostly, it was CEOs and Hollywood execs praising us for getting into Berkeley and living in California (whether for its proximity to AI or LA) and talking about how to make as much money as possible.
Around the end of this semester, I picked up the 2019 book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.1 It was the perfect escape from the rhetoric of this class— a microcosm of my previously unable-to-articulate feelings about what this school has done to my psychological stability.
It’s no secret that super-elite schools (especially in the Bay Area) have a workaholic atmosphere that drives students to unhealthy extremes (p 87). But I majored in Comparative Literature and French… What kind of workaholic tendencies could be touted there? True. I don’t think my tiny, academic, nerdy departments are the culprits. I think the general student population— who have become less and less critically thinking over my four years— is the problem. I can’t walk through the campus sans headphones without overhearing five different, often contradictory conversations: one group will praise AI and the evolution (devolution, in my opinion) of the Bay Area, and the next will scream in my face about how attending this university is a crime while they secretly covet their 4.0s.
I remember arriving as a freshman and feeling utterly distraught to find that everyone, so it seemed, was constantly in study mode. Calendars filled up, “I have to study” became a common excuse for friends, and it seemed the only way to fit in was to overbook yourself. There was a very obvious trend of being both over-busy and too lazy to do the work, a contradiction that garnered tremendous amounts of clout. Classmates would complain about their 25-unit semester and then stroll into class, coffee in hand, laughing about how they didn’t do the reading. At 18, it seemed backward and against my developing personal values of a balanced life, but I sensed the tension when I was forced to admit I did do the 100-page reading and not a single peer could relate.
So after my first semester, I thought, ‘if I’m going to be the nerdy one, I might as well commit.’ I beefed up my schedule in my second and third semesters, took summer courses, and left no time for myself outside of school. Luckily, I have great time management (I consider myself a “pre-crastinator”) and I was able to finish both semesters with my 3.9 GPA intact. But it was a close call.
In November of my sophomore year, juggling 20 units, a love triangle out of a YA novel (bad boy versus best friend dichotomy) and the desire to still be a functional, good friend, I came down with a bizarre illness (I still don’t know what it was). It started with a really bad case of full-body hives. I had grown up with eczema and cystic acne, a whole slew of skin problems, but had never had hives before. It was terrifying to wake up for a week straight with red, raised, burning boils all over my skin. I still remember a particular patch that ran the length of my left forearm— I remember thinking my arm had turned into a cobblestone street, except these patches were burning red and raw. Sometimes I still look down at the spot where it was and shudder.
Shortly after the hives appeared, I developed a horrible sore throat, Uber-ed myself to urgent care, and was tested for strep throat. The doctor told me that if it was positive, I would have scarlet fever. A 21st-century 19-year-old with scarlet fever became a great joke to focus on while I waited for the results.
I tested negative, but was crying and sick and so grateful to have a family willing to drop everything and drive up to take care of me at home for a weekend. One of many instances where going to school so close to home really pays off. While home, visiting my primary dermatologist, the idea of the hives being stress-induced came up. I distinctly remember sitting in the doctor’s office feeling helpless when I was given the prescription “try to just be less stressed.” This felt impossible.
Luckily, two very important players (who were notably outside the UC Berkeley ecosystem) came on the scene around the time of the hives.
First was my therapist. I had grown up with a taboo around therapy so I only started going when I was out of the house and had built up the confidence to try it. In talking about potential causes of the stress hives, however, I learned a lot of important lessons about slowing down, being mindful, and actually taking care of oneself (in the Audre Lorde sense, not the influencer “self-care” sense).
Second was who I’ve decided to call “College Boyfriend” (previously referred to in the OAAP Universe as “First Love”). College Boyfriend went to UC Santa Cruz, a school notorious for guitar-playing, barefoot stoners. He fit every bill. And it was awesome! He taught me so much about how to relax. How to calm down by sitting in the woods and listening to the trees talk to you. I’d wake up in his dorm and be greeted by swaying redwoods and sleepy kisses, rather than the immediacy of a clock tower and a schedule ticking away.
I credit therapy, College Boyfriend, and studying in France for cracking me out of the UC Berkeley Mindset. They taught me to slow down, to understand that success comes first and foremost from a nourished body and mind, that being alone with nothing to do is one of the greatest gifts of our modern bustling world.
Which is why I was so disturbed by this Exploring Your Career in the Arts and Humanities course. By the end of my college career, I was pretty much oblivious to the UC Berkeley Mindset. I had my solid crew of people who did not think that a “grindset” was the key to success, who saw “success” as cultivating human connection and joy, not net worth and fame. To be thrust into dialogue with adults and students who wholeheartedly believed that human connection was made more valuable when it translated to a LinkedIn connection was extremely disorienting. I felt like all hope was lost for anyone to understand that all I wanted to do with my number-one public school bachelor's degree was to move to a small town and teach high school French.
Cue Jenny Odell.
This book is worth a much longer and more intentional review than what I am offering here. I recommend you read it, first of all, and dig into the myriad primary and secondary sources that are cited in its pages. But I’ll be using it here as a jumping-off point for parsing through my personal experiences.
Odell is an artist and a teacher at Stanford, another university in the Bay Area with the same harmful “grindset” energy that UC Berkeley embodies but in an elite private school environment. She has witnessed the harm of social media and the need to be the best/ most rich/ most innovative first hand, growing up in Cupertino (also a techy city in the Bay Area, home to the Apple Headquarters and neighboring my hometown) and working in the Bay Area as both a teacher and artist.
The book first breaks down what the Attention Economy is and how to acknowledge our commitment to it. Then, it goes through chapters on how to break down this commitment, remove ourselves from it, and be active members of change. She talks about the ways social and environmental justice thrive in real-life communities, communities that can be aided by the connections we can make online, but cannot be replaced by these. She talks about how birding has significantly improved the way her attention functions, has forced her to slow down, and notice things— what she claims is the first step to being an agent of change. She claims that doing “nothing,” (ie taking time and space to care for the self and assess where our energies are being directed) is the key step to being happy, to finding community, to understanding and engaging in the world around us.
It’s a fantastic book for anyone who feels jaded and upset at the world, who needs a little hope. This book is a treasure of real ponderings on how to coexist among the horrors of technology and steer it toward good. It argues for action over ignorance— she doesn’t stop at “delete your Instagram and go touch grass.” Instead, she gives concrete examples of art and philosophies that run directly counter to the capitalist, “productivity-is-god” society that we live in. She wants us to rewire our brains, do nothing as a way of providing space for something new and nourishing to grow.
So, in short, go read this book.
But I want to talk here about the book’s most important ideas to my life, as I navigate graduating from a techy, research-forward university in the Bay Area and wanting to remove myself from those worlds as much as possible. It has given me a vocabulary with which to explain my post-graduate choices, and to reflect on why I feel so strongly about them.
Social Media
There’s a lot of talk degrading TikTok and Instagram on this platform. And for the most part, I agree with the arguments going around— I physically feel the effects of “brain rot” and scrolling and try my best to avoid the notes section of Substack. But I’ve never felt these essays wholly encompassed how I felt about social media. There was always a cruel irony to me as I saw people at once denounce social media and then continue to write note after note like “Substack is for the girlies who (insert something about liking books or being awkward at a young age or an image of a famous white actress reading a book with messy hair).” It often feels so individualized, so “brand-making” in a way that runs exactly counter to the arguments being made.
Odell helped me figure out what the conflict was. Social media’s main problem, notably with feeds that seem endless like on X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, is that they take necessary context away from what’s being shared. A nice quote is not as powerful when it is extracted from its source material and put over an image of a sunset as when it is in conversation with the whole body of art from which it comes. A call to end genocide cannot possibly be taken seriously when it’s sandwiched between selfies and challenges and pop songs. I think this list of Odell’s feed that she inserts into the book says it best:
Importantly, Odell still has all these social media platforms (at the time of writing, 2019). She takes a moment to emphasize that it isn't as easy as deleting your internet presence and going off into the woods. The importance lies in noticing the absurdity of the feed, taking the posts that matter and noticing them in the depth and with the context they deserve. Linger on them for longer than the millisecond your eyes afford them during a scroll.
I am less interested in a mass Exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together. (93)
Attention
So what does it actually mean to take back our attention? In my own words, it mostly is an act of noticing. Deleting my social media certainly helped in reshaping my tendencies, but I still like to check Instagram once a week or so from my laptop to see what my long-distance buddies are up to. Mostly, not having it on my phone— something I can and often do access at any point in the day— forced me to spend my waiting time differently.
Waiting for a class to start, waiting for a friend to arrive to hang out, waiting at a bus stop— all of these are activities that are objectively pretty boring. But I find that embracing boredom is a good sort of “eating your vegetables” moment. Being able to be alone with your own mind is a gift, one that is constantly being preyed on by ads and apps. Practicing conscious waiting has given me the chance to breathe, to focus on my needs and feelings at a certain moment, to slow down and reflect on how I’m spending my time. And all of these activities have drawn me towards hobbies and ways to actively spend my time differently.
I need to be bored, and I need to share space with others, because once “...the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.” (122)
Just like Odell, I find “bird noticing” (a term she uses that I adore) to be a really great way of slowing down. And just like Odell, I’ve noticed my noticing catching on.
My friends, at least when they’re around me, will ask “what bird is that” when they hear a call, something they may not have even heard prior to being around me. Slowly, I’ve noticed that my friends have their own ways of slowing down that I have started to adopt— my best friend will slow down for every box labeled “free” on the side of the road on our walks, no matter how late we are or how unpromising the box looks, and it’s become a fun adventure I can expect when I hang out with him; Chef/Lover introduced me to not watching YouTube during meals, rather actually noticing and appreciating food as we eat it.
Odell writes on how forms of attention can be highly influential:
One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I've also learned that patterns of attention— what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. 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. (p xxiii)
Uselessness/ Nothing-ness
So then how do we actually shape the “pattern of [our] attention”? By doing nothing.
In defining the attention economy, Odell evokes 4th-century Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s idea of “useful uselessness.” In a dialogue between a man and a tree, the tree becomes upset with the man who deems him “useless,” simply because he does not provide timber or fruit. The tree replies “If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?” (p xv). Odell comments on the story:
This formulation—the usefulness of uselessness—is typical of Zhuang Zhou, who often spoke in apparent contradictions and non sequiturs. But like his other statements, it's not a paradox for the sake of being a paradox: rather, it's merely an observation of a social world that is itself a paradox, defined by hypocrisy, ignorance, and illogic. In a society like that, a man attempting a humble and ethical life would certainly appear "backward"; for him, good would be bad, up would be down, productivity would be destruction, and indeed, uselessness would be useful. (p xvi)
I love the idea that “nothing” is actually a very necessary thing to be doing. Going on a long walk with none of your worldly belongings and getting excited by birdsong and bugs. Sitting in a park and watching people be in love, be alone, be in company with others. These activities make you remember what it means to be alive, and human, and on this earth with others in a highly impactful way.
“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech. (4)
I do just want to add to this sentiment that “nothing” is a luxury in that you have to have free time from a job or school in order to do it. For those who are constantly working to make ends meet, moments of “nothing” are hard to come by. For those who can afford it, however, I would argue it’s one of the most important ways you can spend your time; the more of us that keep our attention intact, the more we can work towards the systemic changes that will give all workers a chance to experience “nothing.”
One method of “nothing” that Odell talks about is the concept of engaging in bioregionalism.
[Bioregionalism is] first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem. … When I travel, I no longer feel like I’ve arrived until I have ‘met’ the local bioregion by walking around, observing what grows there, and learning something about the indigenous history of that place… Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. … this place can no longer be any place. (p 122-23)
Odell brings up bioregionalism as an extension of her love for “bird noticing” and it’s really made me reframe some of my own curiosities. When I ask myself “what’s the name of that mountain?” in a long car ride and debate with my fellow passengers, comparing maps to one another and trying to situate ourselves in the grand landscape we're racing through, we’re practicing bioregionalism.
More than this, though, I think bioregionalism gets at the something behind “doing nothing.” Bioregionalism asks you to stop and slow down enough to do nothing and then realize the something that comes out of it. Taking the time to do nothing gives you space to engage in the real world, and the power of a newly rendered attention, I think, really lies in that engagement.
Community
Something else on Substack that I’m really sick of seeing is the “where are all the third spaces?” posts. I’ve seen a lot of counters to this discourse that note that third spaces are made by people involved in their community, investing time and money into consistently showing up to events and not hiding behind their Didion- and Plath-inspired think pieces (2 authors I can’t stand, by the way).
At their core, these posts are longing for community, offline, in what Odell calls the “real world.” She notes that engaging in the real world— through living presently, talking to strangers, offering aid to neighbors, getting to know people in your proximity that you’d otherwise never have a reason to talk to— renders us an actual contributing part of our communities.
It's a bit like falling in love-- that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these "strangers," not just now, but for life. (p 183)
A recent essay I saw that I loved was this concept made by a couple in San Francisco called “Stoop Coffee.” They spent countless weeks drinking coffee on the sidewalk outside of their apartment (embarrassing, yes. But interacting with strangers and not knowing their response is. Getting over this embarrassment is the key to forming a community. I have an essay planned to talk more about this soon). Eventually, their building-mates and people in the surrounding apartments started to say hi, and the couple began a neighborhood WhatsApp chat, offering aid, planning hang-outs, and continuing their Stoop Coffee tradition. Instead of living in the increasingly isolated San Francisco Bay Area, this tiny block got over the fear of knowing their neighbors and created a genuine community by finding common interests and investing time in their real world.
Current work environments + wanting to escape to the woods
When COVID first hit, my computer engineer dad wasn’t too phased— his whole job was on computers, now they didn’t have to pay office rent, yay! Five years later, our dining room table is still his office, and he is basically always working. Unless he’s physically away from his computer (and even then, constant notifications on his smartwatch don’t help), he is on the clock. He will wake up at 4 in the morning to help a branch of the company based in the Philippines, and decide there’s no point in going back to sleep if he can just work until his 6am meeting for the California office. I watch his exhaustion, his constant commitment to his job, and I see him in this quote from Marxist theorist Franco Berardi that Odell raises in the book:
In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine... The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary. (p 15)
I shudder at this prospect. I know I could apply to be a copywriter for a tech company and make a lot of money doing it, but I refuse to even apply to these spaces. I want nothing to do with the corporate world because I know they will treat me as a mere cog in a machine. Even if the HR department is great and the company has a mission I really care about, I refuse to put myself in an environment where my time becomes commodified in this way. I don’t want to be like my dad, working a 24-hour work-day because my job becomes my life. (Side note: my dad has the job stability to take vacations where he can be released from “the grind” and really does like his life. I think it’s mainly because he’s grown up outside of the hustle culture of my youth and is a fully-grown man with a home, a wife, two “successful” kids and a stable life. He loves his work so he’s happy to commit most of his time to it and spends his weekends doing what he loves. I don’t think I am the same.)
But I kind of already knew that I didn’t want to be a slave to capitalism before I read this book. What Odell puts forth that really touched me was the idea that rejecting these lifestyles is not always possible, but rejecting the “expected” method of interaction with them is:
But most important, standing apart represents 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 undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it. (p 62)
I will still be contributing to an economic and political system I don’t believe in as a teacher, because I am not the kind of person who can reject it all and start a homestead in the woods. I don’t have the financial privilege to do that. What I can do is exist in this messed-up world while acting against it. I can engage in tiny acts of resistance that leave my attention, my values, and my energy intact.
As my final semester of college flew by and Odell’s words swirled in my brain, I had an extremely important conversation that truly made me feel like my life goals and ideas of “success” based on community-oriented values were valid and worth pursuing.
When I was taking my first wobbly steps into the study of French (the culture, not the language), I was lucky enough to enroll in courses that touched on the French-speaking world more globally— courses that were far more interesting to me than reading Moliere and Voltaire. A Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for one of these early courses became something of a mentor and a friend.
Early on in my final semester I shadowed one of her classes for an assignment, and found myself smiling like a fool in the back of the room. This was one of the first times I had watched someone doing their job and seeming like they really had fun with it. Growing up hearing about how jobs were the worst, how college was the last good time in a person’s life, I was watching a woman command a classroom with a joy and excitement I could only really comprehend, I think, because we were friends and close-ish in age. She was glowing in front of the chalkboard, giggling and joking with her students while maintaining their respective roles, all in the environment of a 50-minute grammar lesson. Here was a community being cultivated, right before my eyes.
Shortly after this shadowing session, we grabbed coffee and chatted in the tiny room the university passes off as the GSI office. She had been accepted to teach at a small east-coast university in the fall, and was ecstatic about it. But she told me many of her colleagues from UC Berkeley (a research institution) seemed skeptical. They kept asking how she’d have time for research with a full course load of undergraduates to teach. She smiled.
“I’m not sad about not doing research. I like to teach. I want to teach. That’s all.”
I was dumbfounded. My entire college career, I had been force-fed the idea that research was the key to success in academic spaces. I was knee-deep in my senior thesis project— which I liked writing, but wouldn’t want to do for the rest of my life. I was struck by the fact that I was sharing space with someone less than 10 years my senior, who landed a dream job in a quaint town teaching French— she was “successful,” truly, in my eyes. Which means I could allow myself to be the same.
When grad school acceptance season rolled around, I woke up every day checking my email. I had applied to a French-funded program to teach English abroad for a year and had still not heard anything by mid-May. A few good friends had gotten into NYU Law, LSE, Oxford. I’d overhear conversations about people planning European Summer trips, landing high-paying jobs, being on track for their goals. And I had a few teaching fellowship rejections and an empty inbox under my belt. The UC Berkeley Mindset snuck back in for these months, telling me I was a failure if I didn’t have a plan before graduation.
But I know so many friends who don’t, so many folks who didn’t, and every one of them is going to or did turn out okay. If there’s one thing I’ve started to learn by talking to my community, it's that getting to where you want to be is not a linear process, and never really ends.
Finally, after months of waiting, I was accepted to the program, and then accepted to teach secondary school in Grenoble— my number one choice. From anyone outside my community, this acceptance was not impressive: the monthly stipend is not huge, the prestige not well-known outside the French academic communities. But for once, I did not care.
I know the alumni network provides hefty scholarships for master’s programs in the US, I know the draw to leave the Bay Area is stronger than almost anything else in my life right now, I know I want to earn a master’s degree and go live a life where I inspire some 22-year-old in the back of my classroom to find a job that makes them smile. These are the pillars of my personal “success,” and whether my alma mater understands them or not is none of my business.
Recommended by Chef/Lover, who requested I credit him.
Your words are so powerful. You manage to put a mess of feelings and unease that I have similarly experienced over the last four years into such a precise and thoughtful analysis of the environment that has created to them — I feel seen and heard! I’m excited for you to keep cultivating this life you have deliberately made for yourself and know that you will make many students will feel the same way GSI did for you.