My Periods of Removal

In Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, the central recurring theme she expounds upon is the idea of “removal” or “detox” from the attention economy. It is so easy to become completely overwhelmed with work, school and technology. It is imperative that individuals take time to “do nothing” and learn a healthy balance between productivity and relaxation, as an act of self care and maintenance. In this essay, I recount several experiences, all involuntary, where I underwent some sort of removal or detox, and learned to be better at “doing nothing”. 

The goal of this essay was to adequately express the variety of “removal periods” I went through, the different lessons learned, as well as to reiterate the point made by Odell, that true detoxification takes much more than a mere weekend getaway. The first experience I mention was a time where I was without my phone for two days, the second being a serious prolonged injury, and the third being my adjustment to life during quarantine due to Covid-19. While all extremely different, each experience was essentially a “removal” from some facet of my typical life, where I learned a lot about myself, and altered the way I saw the world.

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https://medium.com/@maskey/my-periods-of-removal-f7c1a7460fb7

View at Medium.com

Have you ever thought about the good feeling you have when you detox your body?  You feel fresher and fitter and healthier. Now think about digital detox a break from social media, your phone, laptop and products like that. We totally need a digital detox. Like jenny Odell in a cabin on her trip to Nevada or Levi Felix hospitalization. It was a digital detox for him and made him realize that he was a lot happier  than he was before and he opened a camp grounded a digital detox summer camp for adults in California, or me losing my phone on a trip to New York. That was my digital detox, I was really upset that I lost my phone, but it helped me to pick up a great lot of matters and communicate more with people around me.

Jenny Odell, “Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leave us no time to think.” They use their tricks to keep us on their platforms for too long like red color and number of notification badges, intermittent variable notifications and textual ads these are some of their tricks that keeps us busy without even knowing that we are  being tricked by social media . People have lost their attention to the economy. Our care has shifted on media and not the economy anymore Thinking about our society and capitalism reminded me that  a few years ago I saw an experimental video, a math teacher passed a lot of homework to students with an unrealistic time hack  everyone were so upset but not even a single student said anything. Next day when they were asking them why nobody said anything. They said we thought somebody else will. Just like our economy. no one wants to do anything for the economy we live in. our economy needs our attention and the only way we could make a change is that everyone participating. Thiel, “

the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism”. Jenny Odell talks about how she believes that people are losing their ability of refusal and I agree. We are becoming overly busy with media that we do not pay attention to the world around us. Why can we refuse to not smoke, drink, eat, or anything that is not pleasant for us, but we cannot refuse to not support the capitalism. Ability of refusal is important and effective. Pilvi Takala, Diogenes and Bartley are perfect example are refusal. Refusal is an ability to say no to unwanted situations for instance capitalism if people use their refusal ability and do not promote media. capitalism will be gone, and people become more productive. I think what Odell was trying to say in those chapters are people are losing their refusal ability and not paying attention to the economy. Our economy needs us and if we do not do anything about it, we will face sever consequences.