Pandemic Opportunities

Link: https://gbendfel.medium.com/pandemic-opportunities-60b59259ddcb

My piece shows a correlation between the spread of COVID-19 and the mental state of those enduring it. Their depreciating health has been a rising concern for me so I hoped to address it with multiple ideas within Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing.” In a capitalistic society, one’s well-being is often overlooked, especially by large businesses. I hoped to use Odell’s ideas to show different ways people could be filled with emotional sustenance that could help with those suffering during the pandemic. It also focuses in on the major use of social media and different ways it can be either beneficial or detrimental to one’s health.

Social media and its influence have an impact on everyone during times like these since most of us are stuck at home. I hone in on staying away from this and diversifying so that people can’t be suffocated by the pressures social media has. I even include my own experiences of the outbreak. Since this a problem all over, it’s something that should be solved together. This piece could be a call to activism, to find one’s self, and enjoy life in the best way while we are stuck at home.

Writing 4: Forwarding or Countering Odell

           As the title says, Jenny Odell is trying to tell us how to do nothing as a form of activism. This irony is a big part of her book because this in part causes us to resist the “attention economy” she talks about. A lot of people are more focused on productivity and an environment that takes advantage of our attention for their own uses such as big corporations. She wants us to take back our attention and see the world around us. It’s to ask ourselves what productivity is and to see who we really are. It’s to enjoy life to the fullest and learn about resistance. Taking control of your attention can mean “the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them.” Thought, a lot of people do this as a detox already so they will be able to get back to work more productively after a refreshed mind. Odell doesn’t believe in this and wants us to be in the middle of reality without disturbances that can divert our attention from life, such as cell phones. Odell says there was a camp in Cambodia that acted as an escape, but this camp eventually went from learning a “healthier relationship” with technology to something like a “corporate retreat.” It goes against a lot of what the original owner of the camp stood for where he wanted people to have a “reevaluation of one’s priorities.” Odell only wants us to learn the art of doing “nothing” for the betterment of the people and environment.

            Odell has a lot of valid points that I agree with, but her points don’t apply to everyone. Everyone has their own form of escape and way to live life. She probably realizes this and made this book a lot more for the people who need a better experience of life. Though, getting away from technology isn’t always the answer. Our world has become heavily technology dependent, but there are beautiful and amazing things that can be done with technolog which can be used as a form of escape too. There are people that are too technology dependent, but to get away from that, they do need to first make the decision to start living for themselves before they can actually start doing it. This is a hard decision for people who are used to it. Humans have always liked sticking to the norms so making this decision is the first step to even diverting their attention towards something new. Diverting one’s attention requires a person to have an interest in something in the first place. They need to have an interest in the outside world to be able to see what it’s really all about. As she quotes from Epicurus, all over the world, “you can find men who live for empty desires and never have an interest in the good life.” As a result, a lot of people don’t even know what they have. People need to look around them, make the decision on what is the good life for them, and stick with it. It all depends on where one’s interest is and if they can act on it. Most people need a push in the right direction to actually do it and come upon certain realizations. Odell’s book can be just that for many.

            In the past, I’ll have to admit, I was subjected to doing what is considered to be “normal” due to social media and society itself. A lot of these times, my life was just flipping through a book, just waiting for an interesting chapter or page to pop up until it gets to the end. Only recently, I began to take my life into my hands to make the most of it. A lot of my failures have been the causes of realizations such as not meeting people’s, society’s, and my own expectations. Also, it comes from insecurities and not being able to act on certain things. It just causes unnecessary stress that definitely needs to be removed. Instead, I have looked at it more as what I can do for myself and the world around me. This is a point that hits home for a lot of people reading Odell’s work. That includes starting to living in the present and taking any opportunities to make one’s life better and more fulfilling. So far, this book may have made me to look at myself even more and to want to spend more time on seeing the world around me. Getting to one’s self turns out to take a lot more time than one might think. Hopefully we can all see what really makes us happy one day and act upon it.

Writing 2: Odell’s Project

The world today is fast moving and very technology dependent. The common saying of “time is money” says a lot about our society today. Jenny Odell tries to teach us a lot more about doing “nothing,” a paradox often said throughout her book “How to Do Nothing.” This paradox doesn’t tell us to be lazy and not do anything, but to “question what we currently perceive as productive.” Society today is all about productivity and efficiency and therefore, people always feel the need to be doing something. The author wants us instead take a step back and see the real world and be able to experience it for ourselves. That is why she deeply advocates the use of “deep listening.” It allows people to focus their attention on different things rather than relying on a “productivity obsessed environment” that thrives on “myopia and dissatisfaction.” She wants us to take back this attention to help all kinds of people who can “help restore communities, human, and beyond.” We can recognize the beauty of the things around us in different types of ways. As she says, this applies to “any person who perceives like to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized.” There are many social media platforms that don’t show this such as Instagram and Facebook. Social media platforms can cause insecurities and takes a lot of our personal information to be sold online. Profiting from it causes a lot of people to hate social media because they aren’t focusing on people’s “maintenance.” So instead, her ultimate goal is to “wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

            The author uses a lot of personal experiences and stories she’s heard to help support the importance of doing “nothing.” She also uses certain places in her life to connect her ideas. One of such places is in Oakland, the city she currently lives. She relates one of the trees, the “Old Survivor,” to the story of the “The Useless True” by Zhuang Zhou to teach some lessons herself. In her city, this tree was the sole survivor of old-growth trees and has become famous for its resistance. The lessons she tries to teach are “resistance” and the tree being a witness and memorial. As she says in the book, “to resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” She doesn’t want people to be conformed to the thoughts of others and society. It’s important for people to be their selves and make the experience of life their highest goal. She relates this to the story of the tree since it was able to survive by appearing useless to loggers and being hard to find. In addition, she says that the tree is “above all a physical fact, a wordless testament to a very real past, both natural and cultural.” The tree becomes a witness to the past that can help us see what we have lost in the past. She also uses the Rose Garden as a place to escape to. This is where she did most of her work and came up with most of her ideas. It was an escape from the “terrifying world” that she was surrounded by to a beautiful one. The more she worked there, the more she began to realize the importance of the garden. She says “the garden encompassed everything I wanted to cover: the practice of doing nothing, the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance.” These places had a significant impact on her ideas and so did a lot of texts she has read throughout her life.

             Odell is able to connect her ideas through different places because it connects to her personally and the things she has went through throughout her life. Also, various texts she has read have impacted her more significantly, allowing her to use them in her reasoning. The book appears to be more of a journey that just a straight answer. As she made the book, she “saw and experienced things during the course of writing it-things that changed my mind and then changed again.” Although all of these points may not be in a regular writing from, they definitely all connect to each other to form a “logical whole.” Overall, the book has opened my eyes a little more to everything around me. Her project is aimed at people to take responsibility to see the world around them and be more grounded in the real world. Only then can people see what’s really going on in their life and make life experiences last longer.