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.

Finding Your Savior

I think it’s safe to say that we all have trouble putting our phones away. With this new wave of technology we all tend to use our phones for so many different purposes. Whether it’s for work, school, news, or even entertainment we all struggle with taking time away from our phones and becoming more invested in our lives. Not only is spending too much time on our phones bad for our mental health, but we lose that human to human contact that we so desperately need. The real big issue is that it isn’t just phones. It is television, computers, video games, and new developing technology that also keeps us from taking time for the nature and people that surround us. One thing that we could all benefit from is a savior. Not necessarily an angel from heaven, but something that can take us away from our phones, away from our stressful workload, and keep our minds fresh or at peace. On page 30 of “How to Do Nothing” Jenny Odell tells us about an experience she had while going on vacation. She talks about how she went to stay in a “cabin” for a while and didn’t plan on going off the grid. This cabin was her savior. It didn’t literally save her life, but it was an experience that led her to accidentally stage her own digit detox, which ultimately helped her realize what she was missing out on. She goes on to say that the experience gave her an entire new perspective on technology, and that with the real world waiting for her back home, it would be hard to continue to give up everything. Although Odell would eventually have to go back to work, she now knows how to take advantage of her time on earth. I completely agree with Odell, and after reading this passage, can completely relate to this story.

In order to explain her experience with more reasoning Odell uses an example of a man by the name of Levi Felix. Felix was one of the early proponents of digital detox who wrote a narrative about his experiences. He had been working 70 hour weeks, which caused him to be hospitalized from stress. This hospitalization was Felix’s “cabin”. Although it was an awful way to receive a wake up call, the hospitalization was his savior because it helped him realize he was doing too much. Felix needed a break and to find a new way of life without constantly working. After he realized he needed a change, Felix went on a trip to Cambodia to completely unplug and meditate. When he returns home Felix writes, “Every restaurant, every bar, every cafe, every bus, every subway was filled with people looking at their screens.” Felix had found his savior, and now realizes that he used to be like all of those people, and he is living a much better life than before. After seeing how much people are taking for granted of their life, Felix opened a summer camp called Camp Grounded. Although Felix and Odell’s experiences are both similar and different, they both involve a savior. While Felix realized he needed a change because of a bad event, Odell stumbled upon her savior. We one day will all find our savior to get us out of this never ending technological development. It may not be clear or come in different ways, but we need to take advantage of it when we receive it. 

I can greatly relate to this type of experience. Recently I went to go see some friends from a summer camp that I am really close with, but they all live very far away in Pennsylvania. The drive there was about 2 hours away and not hard with directions from my phone, but because it’s deep in the Pennsylvania mountains there is no service there. After we enjoyed our time together and it was time to go home I realized that I had no service or any way of getting directions to get home. Instead of panicking and worrying, I just drove. Going up and down the mountains listening to the radio in my Jeep with the top down was an amazing experience. There were beautiful views and so much to look at. Instead of worrying about my school work due the next day, who is texting me, or how I would get home I just enjoyed the joy ride. I felt free. Eventually I got service and found my way home, but more importantly I found my savior, my experience. A way for me to get off my phone, not stress, and enjoy the life I’m living is to go on a nice long drive. I really think that what Odell is trying to show us here is that there are so many ways to take time off our technology. A switch just has to flip, as it did for me. It may be on purpose, by accident, or you might not even realize it, but there is always a way out. What’s really great about this message is that it doesn’t just apply to technology. It applies to everyone going through any kind of trouble in their life. There is always a way out, a way to fix it, a way to break those bad habits. I believe that everyone will find their cabin, their savior. Yours might be right around the corner.

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.

Odell’s Meaning

The main focus Odell is trying to get across in her book, How to Do Nothing, is to show how we have the ability to stop and listen every day. And by doing this, we may see the world in a new way we never would have imagined. Our lives have gotten so busy we have lost the ability to sit back and listen to everything around us. We all get opportunities, but we are so involved with technology we truly never get to take in things going on around us. Odell makes it clear that the few sanctuaries we have, such as the Rose Garden, are in danger of being privatized and turned into apartment buildings. This is happening everywhere; the great outdoors is slowly drifting away and pretty soon there will be no public outdoors, true outdoors. The world today revolves around capitalism and the solution to this issue is almost impossible. Everyone, individually, wants their freedoms as well as equality in choosing a lifestyle. Everyone is too selfish for any other method to work; we all want the latest goods and services. We spoil ourselves and are unable to give up these ways of living. But not everyone, even today, is given the same opportunities; some go through more struggle and hardship while others are set up for success at the best schools with supportive parents. But this also makes everyone unique coming from different backgrounds. Odell talks about the outdoors, at the Rose Garden, and how the outdoors allow for our feelings to change just by walking through a park. One aspect she brought up, bird watching, opened her eyes to so many different things; not simply hearing and seeing birds but also noticing all the things she had been missing out on. One of these were all the bird noises she had been ignoring, most likely due to stress or work. Odell wants us to try these new things that might bring us out of our shell of working nonstop and to see the big picture of the world. Odell used her father as an example, going back to his company after a leave and a change of mind. Changing jobs to become an engineer because of his new way of viewing the world. This change in mindset is not easy. We are taught to work hard, find a job, make money and live a happy life. No where are we taught to relax or step back and look at what is going on around us in the world. She wants everyone to work on changing their mindset and becoming a person who views the world in a new and different way everyday. Everyone’s path to this will be different, but we must go out of our comfort zone to truly feel and see change. Whether that is talking to more people for their point of view on life or just get outside to go on a hike, she wants us to take action. Odell wants us to find a rose everyday and look beyond the thorns. She gives an example of driving home past the night herons everyday as her rose after she had a bad day; everyday, they would be there and provide her with comfort. Everyone is able to do this, but we are so worried about our lives that we are unable to step back and look at what happened good everyday or what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.   Odell doesn’t want us to truly stop everything we are doing, she wants us to stop and truly listen and see the world as it is. See all the issues with race, environment and economic injustice in the world. We blind ourselves with constant work and everyday issues that really aren’t that big. If we all do that, we can see the true horrors of our day in age and work towards fixing these issues and making for a brighter future.  Odell herself seems to be drawn to things that stay the same, do not change, such as the night herons staying in the same spot everyday or the Rose Garden staying as beautiful as she imagined everyday. She uses these places to bring attention to resisting capitalism. She describes how the community came together and resisted the building of apartment buildings in this park. She wants us to stand up to common ideologies that are outdated. She wants us to stand up for the common good of all for everyone’s future. Spencer Smith