Reflections on Walden Pond

What could a book written 150 years ago have to offer us now? Everything!

In Walden, Thoreau addresses many societal issues, from the slave trade to housing affordability. His words are still poignant because some of the topics he addresses are still persisting or have had rippling effects with which our country is still grappling with today.”

In this essay, I show you what Thoreau has to say about social issues, how Odell agrees with him, and why they are both right. Careful, this paper could change your life. A year from now, you may be living next to a pond in a shack you built from lumber you cut down and eating the vegetable you grew in your backyard.

https://jbgainey.medium.com/reflections-on-walden-pond-7e05d94ec386

How to Do Something

View at Medium.com

How to Do Something

Social media is not worth holding onto in its current state – and possibly ever. In my essay I attempt to convince you that social media provides more harm than good to our mental health, relationships, and communities. There is something you can do about it; I give examples of what removal of social media looks like and provide the personal benefits you may gain from it.  

“In our current attention economy, we find ourselves in the same plight as the longshoremen. We are victims of similar injustices regarding our time, personal space, and dignity. It is not our employers who are abusing us and treating us as a commodity, it is our social media outlets which are cleverly disguised as being helpful and even entertaining means through which we connect with the world. The social media companies are harming our well beings for their personal gain, just as the longshoremen’s employers were exploiting them.”

Be Invasive

Joshua Gainey – Writing 4 – Forwarding or Countering Odell

In Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing, she speaks of what a “Third Space” in the attention economy looks like. It is a mental wherewithal to exist in, refuse, and shine out of as a beacon of freedom. Odell uses a description by Crates, a Greek Cynic of an imaginary island called Pera. The text speaks of an island that is unaffected by the troubles of the day where “there is respite and peace from the struggle for riches and honor.”

To get to this “Third Space,” a disillusionment of the life you are living and the powers that got you where you are is required. This is described in the book where Odell speaks of an “accidental detox retreat” where she booked a cabin that had no cell reception or internet. This disconnection turned her electronics practically useless and forced a revaluing of her possessions and connections which lead to undoubtedly focused and thoughtful work. Better yet, she tells of Levi Felix who had a “reevaluating of one’s priorities” experience in Cambodia and then started a digital detox camp to help others have a similar experience. This shows that the best first step in getting to the “Third Space” is abstinence from the addictive nature of the attention economy. This is necessary to change the mind. When you take a step back as Odell did in the sierra Nevada it gives you the clarity of mind or diversion of attention in order to see what you are missing and expose the trite nature of what is keeping you addicted.  So, it is a devaluing in your mind of the erroneous pieces in life that takes you to the “Third Space.” And when you have your mind in this space (arguably a cynic) then refusal-in-place is easy. You refuse to participate. In this sense I like to think about Neo in the matrix – the outside, cynical view makes you “The One” in the world of attention sucked zombies and the attention economy is powerless against you.

On page 90, Odell contemplates abstinence from Facebook and other social media outlets. She says that it is “fighting the battle on the wrong plane,” citing that for those who have quit Facebook for political reason, the meaning of their departure is often lost on the friends left behind and often interpreted as a social distancing. She goes on to quote and agree with Portwood-Stacer that it requires an individual with a certain “social capital” to have “the power to switch off.” Here is where my disagreement starts. If you believe that social media is bad for your health and/or out of control, you should expel it from your life. Or even if you have achieved the “Third Space” existence and you know that your participation in the platform is keeping you from living your best life as well as hurting friends and strangers (who haven’t been enlightened to the issues Odell raises) to remain enslaved to the attention economy, then continuing to use it makes you complicit. You are also allowing the companies that put that platform in place to continue to profit from you and feed on your friends. I believe a better tactic is to quit the platform and tell your friends (if you aren’t actually socially distancing yourself from them) about Odell’s book and make sure they have your updated phone number.

Speaking about your friends, some of them may have a more addictive personality than you. They may be so reliant on the platform that it’s not enough to use willpower to remove them from temptation. Your mind sometimes needs help; we are creatures of the path of least resistance. I think of social media like alcoholism. It is often not enough for alcoholics, especially when they begin to get sober, to just have the willpower to abstain from alcohol. They must also physically remove the temptation from their house and stop going to bars or other establishments where alcohol is readily available.

It is true that “a real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind.” This is an individual battle for a sort of digital enlightenment. Everyone needs to take a step back and evaluate for themselves, “What does this platform afford me? How beneficial or useful are the connections I have on it?” For me, the only thing Facebook gives me is an inlet for acquaintances, coworkers, and long-lost friends (who I don’t still have any meaningful relationship with) to write “Happy Birthday” on my wall once a year.

I’m sure you have heard of invasive plants before, but, you may not know what makes them invasive. They are typically plants from another country that spread aggressively in a similar climate to their native one but that have escaped the natural predators from their home country so they are no longer are controlled by an outside population. When you are in the “Third Space” you become invasive. What is predating others is no longer attacking you. But it is not enough to just escape, you must also spread aggressively for a movement to happen.

How valuable is my time?

Our time is worth more than the value businesses have placed on it. Whether that business is the attention economy (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or our personal brands on that said platform, or an actual job expecting us to be available and connected at all times of the day, we need to stand up for our rights and learn to step away from our ever-connected lives so that we can truly live. We are no longer comfortable with ‘turning off’ and even feel guilty when we attempt to do nothing and shun productivity for even a minute. This constant pressure to actively engage has caused an anxiety stricken community in which members are constantly doing and comparing themselves to the others around them. Even when we relax we still feel the need to watch something or catch up on social media. Not to mention the attention economy platforms are actually designed to keep us scrolling as long as possible and creating a fear of missing out. I’ve fought this fear for at least 10 years. I noticed when I was in high school that Facebook was this hole that I would get into and stay on all day and get absolutely nothing done. I have since quit using Facebook, but in this society it is so easy to pick up anther platform and have it start all over again. I was very conflicted with just creating a twitter account for this class because I know the dangers of social media and have been attempting to control my connection to them for so long. 

We have been conditioned by our society and the businesses that run it to believe that we need to make the best of our time always. But when we are truly able to do nothing, we discover what it is to again be part of the natural world. And, in a sense, we rediscover our humanity. We rediscover our compassion, our innate kindness, and all because we are able to open our senses to see and hear other people and other species around us. One example Odell writes about is A Paradise Built in Hell where communities struck by disaster bind together and show a shocking amount of compassion for one another and they “feel a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and connection they felt for their neighbors.” The author, Solnit, thinks that the alienation of everyday life is the “real disaster.” I believe (and I also believe Odell is in the same thought) that the neighborly connection would be commonplace if we weren’t always in such a hurry to get things done – where everyone around us is an obstacle to our productivity. We see people as traffic keeping us from where we’re going, a cue at the checkout, and opposition to our agendas on social media instead of other humans. Anyone who has played competitive online video games (Call of Duty, Counter-Strike) with chat systems or been in disagreement on social media has seen how digital amenity strips compassion away. 

Odell also speaks about usefulness. There is an anecdote in the introduction about a huge tree that is overlooked by a carpenter because it’s wood would not benefit his need. But this tree does have tremendous benefit to the animals that use it as shade. It is the uselessness of the tree to the carpenter that allowed the tree to grow to such size that it could become useful over the centuries to the rest of the ecosystem. She makes the connection of this uselessness with productivity and “resistance-in-place” – “to make oneself into a shape that cannot easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.” Just because our time spent doing nothing is not useful to the corporations, that does not mean it is without value. It could very well be an integral piece of remedying the stress and anxiety that plagues so many of us.

The point I think Odell is trying to make is that a counter-culture movement needs to happen that pushes against our ever-connected world and allows us to open our eyes. This counter-culture idea is derived from a number of sources she uses such as the labor movement, John Muir, and Elenor Coppola. Though she does not mention a counter-culture per se, she does use many examples that are very different from mainstream thinking. She isn’t even suggesting that we remove the distractions from our lives, she is mostly just wanting us to know the value of our time and use technology in a more beneficial way. Odell advocates the counter-culture notion that we at least sometimes do nothing so we can recharge our creativity, anxiety, stress, and humanity.