Pod Save America - Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

This week, Jenny Odell teaches Jon how to unplug and, almost literally, smell the roses. Pulling from lessons outlined in her book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Jenny makes the case that our attention is precious and what we choose to focus it on doesn’t always need to be productive.

The thing that I feel like I've learned in the last year, especially, is that there's like kind of an opposite loop where somewhere in there you break the cycle. You know, that could be anywhere, really. Put the phone down, just cut it off. Yeah. Compared to like even a year ago, it's like I really I have zero desire to look at the feed of any social media. I just I actually don't want to. That's I want to get to that point. That's my, that's my North Star right there.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Jenny O'Dell, an artist and writer whose first book became a New York Times bestseller and something of an aspirational manifesto for this show. It's called How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy. It should be fairly obvious by now that I have absolutely no idea how to do nothing. I have never been able to sit still.

I've had a fear of missing out on just about anything since I was a kid. I've been a workaholic and a political news junkie since graduating college, and I rarely relax for more than a couple hours. Emily might say a couple minutes. But I picked up Jenny's book this summer when I was feeling particularly anxious, exhausted, and just burnt out by how much time I was spending staring at screens, scrolling through bad takes, going from one awful news cycle to the next. And it completely changed the way I think about how I spend my time. As Jenny explains in our conversation, the title is more tongue-in-cheek than literal. Nothing isn't really nothing. It's just not the hyper-connected, hyper-productive existence that

so many of us have become accustomed to. In Odell's view, stepping out of that world isn't about quitting social media or disconnecting from the internet completely. It's about learning to redirect more of our attention toward the people and places around us. I found Jenny's perspective especially valuable because she's got a different background than most of our guests so far. She's an artist and a nature lover who's found offline fulfillment watching birds or just sitting in a local park. We talk about how her book was a reaction to the 2016 election, why she thinks that social media news cycles are like sleep deprivation torture, what it means to resist the attention economy,

and her advice to me on how I can start doing a little more nothing. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Jenny O'Dell. Hi, Jenny. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. I bought your book a few years ago, but I didn't read it until last September for one of the very reasons that you wrote the book,

which is that it's become harder for me to pay attention to anything longer than a tweet. But, you know, it happens. But I finally took it on a brief vacation in September. I left my phone in the hotel room and then I just found myself like highlighting full paragraphs of the book. So I really wanted to thank you for writing it because it's, it's changed the way I think

about how I spend my time. That's awesome to hear. Yeah. You start by telling the story of why you wrote How to Do Nothing, which was partly a reaction to the 2016 election. Can you talk about how that reaction led to a book on resisting the attention economy? Like what was the connection to Trump winning? Yeah, I mean, it kind of started out in a almost happenstance way in that I live about five minutes away from this municipal Rose Garden in Oakland. And I found that around that time, I was just without really thinking about it consciously, I was going there pretty much any chance that I could get. I was teaching at the time, so I had a little bit of a flexible schedule. But I was just going and kind of like, you know, thousand yard stare, like sitting in the rose garden.

And what has happened? And I, and I think after a while, I started to wonder why I was doing that and why that felt so different from the rest of my day, a lot of which was like, you know, doom scrolling, feeling like a lot of anxiety and information overload and not being able to process anything. And so it kind of just started with that, like, sort of movement from here, you know, where I am in my apartment to this park. And, you know, the more time I spent there, the more I started to think about how the values that were embodied by this garden were very different as well. Like, it's, you know, it's volunteer maintained. It's a space that's very valued by the community, but it's not really productive in the ways that we would, you know, normally use the word productive. It doesn't, you know, create a profit. You don't

get any results from going there that you could sort of quantify. It just sort of gestures towards this other kind of value system, other ways of valuing experience, other ways of being like, I go there, I'm just a person, you know, I'm not a producer of content. I'm not a consumer of content. I go there, I'm just a person. I'm not a producer of content. I'm not a consumer of content. And so I just happened to be spending a lot of time there thinking about that. And then I was asked to give a talk at a conference called IO. So I wrote this talk called How to Do Nothing to give at that conference in the summer of 2017 that is about those things that I sort of thought about and learned about being in the garden. I did not about those things that I sort of thought about and learned about being in the garden. I did not expect it to resonate really with anyone outside of that

conference necessarily, certainly not as much as it did. And I also didn't expect it to turn into a book. That was not my idea. That was suggested to me by someone who was at the conference. And so, yeah, here I am. And it just came out in Korea. Wow. Which is nuts. So for people who haven't yet read the book, how do you define doing nothing? Okay, so it's obviously not literally doing nothing. That could be very interesting too, that you could do that. You know, but I don't necessarily mean, although now during the pandemic, maybe it's different.

I didn't necessarily mean lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. But I, it's sort of tongue in cheek, right? It's like nothing is supposed to mean nothing from the point of view of a very sort of capitalist, cut and dried, you know, objective way of thinking like producing X and Y results. Kind of to go back to the garden, the maintenance of that garden from the point of view of producing something looks like nothing. There's so much work that I've learned from being there. There's so much work that goes into roses all through the year. You have to do all this stuff. Even in the winter when there's like nothing, it doesn't look like there's anything going on. And so there's all this stuff that

falls into that category, like care, you know, caregiving, maintenance. I kind of, I have a fraught relationship with the phrase self-care, but you could put self-care in there as well, right? So really nothing just means things that don't sort of appear in the value system that we typically have when we talk about productivity or, you know, like producing value. Well, it also seems like it's defined in opposition to sort of the habits that the attention economy has sort of incubated in all of us. Yeah, right. Which is, i know the subtitle of your book is resisting the attention economy yeah definitely i mean i think in the context of the attention economy it's so reactive right it's like do you like this or do you not like this do you hate this or do you not hate this and then there's like this other option of like

what if i just wasn't there? Like, what if I, what if I just walked away from this question? Or what if I thought about it some more and put it in some historical context or something? And what if I talked to a friend about it? Do I really need to be in this state of constant reaction? Which I think is what I was feeling around the election was like, I had gone so deep in the sort of the rabbit's fur, right? That I couldn't get any perspective on, on myself. Like, I honestly think it's a really interesting exercise even now to like, when you're in that state, just like pretend you're a fly on the wall and look at yourself. You're like probably in a little ball, you know, and your face is really strained. I think about this all the time. Sometimes I catch myself because when

I'm like really into Twitter or I'm reading the news and like hours pass, I think like if I was looking at myself right now, I would just see someone staring at a screen scrolling and my jaw would constantly be clenched. I do that a lot too, especially when I'm like stressed out and I would look like a, I would, I would look like a crazy person. Like it's not. Um, so it's like, why do I do that to myself? I mean, what, what were your, so, so much of this is about social media and the internet, um, which is what our show is about. Like what were your social media habits? Like when you first started thinking about, uh, why you should try to change them? started thinking about why you should try to change them? They were, so they were pretty bad by my current standards. I will say in my defense that I taught digital art at Stanford.

So I had to be kind of aware of things that were happening. And a lot of, you know, a lot of my friends were making new media work. So we're kind of like in that world. But I definitely, you know, it would be really interesting to go back and look at like journals from that time because I actually have no idea. I have no idea like what my screen time was at the time. But I definitely was feeling like it's like I'm sure many people know this feeling. It almost feels like you're sick, right? Like you're just like, your heart rate is kind of weird or you're like, you feel too hot or you just like, it's just bad. It's bad. You feel really bad. And I, it got bad enough that I think I was trying to feel my way out of that. Like it finally reached a point and everyone

has their point, I think, even if you come back later, but there reached a point and everyone has their point i think even if you come back later but there is a point where you're like this feels so intuitively bad that i need to change something it's a little too like either if you've ever eaten too much in a setting or drank too much like it feels like you it feels fine while you're doing it, but like the second you stop, you just start feeling bad. You know, it's like there's a hangover effect to using social media that even as you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, it's just like at some point you don't feel very fulfilled as you just keep trying to scroll more and more and more information. It's like too much. Yeah. Yeah.

more and more and more information. It's like too much. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is sort of a weird comparison, but during the pandemic, I played this video game called Stardew Valley. It's very popular. I don't know if you've ever seen it.

I'm not a big video game person, but yeah. But okay. So it's, you know, you're like living on a farm and you have your little farm or whatever, but the days in the game are seven minutes long, which means that you always think you have time for another day. Seven minutes, right? It's not that long. And the game only saves at the end of a day. So if you start a day, you have to finish it because otherwise you're going to lose everything that you did. And when I started playing it,

my boyfriend was like, you got to watch out. Those days are going to get you. And I had no idea what he was talking about. And now I do, or I'm like, oh my God, you just always fall into the next one. And then what was interesting to me was that it's exactly physically, it's the same feeling that I remember from before. Like, oh, this is just the same thing, but like devoid of like, maybe like some forms of like terror, but, but in terms of like how it actually just like feels in my head and like in my body, it kind of really reminded me of that. And I was like, oh, this really is just like the hamster wheel, like dopamine thing. Like here I am. It's the same. I'm trying to figure out when it all

changed because just before this interview, I was thinking about when the iPhone first came out, one of my close friends got it first and I was asking him about it. And it was like, what's the big deal with this thing is you know different than a typical cell phone you know and he said we will never be bored again he goes that's how I can explain the iPhone he's like now that you have an internet in your pocket whether you're standing in line whether you're waiting around whether you're by yourself there will always be something to do and at the time I don't like being bored. No one likes being bored. And so I thought, this is perfect. What a wonderful invention that I'm never going to

be bored again. And now it's like a careful what you wish for kind of thing. Because now, what do you think the difference is between doing nothing and being bored, which has more of a negative connotation? Well, actually, it's funny you should say about being bored. I guess maybe this is like one way of illustrating it. I was recently given something that I would describe as something where you're never bored. And it's a jeweler's loop.

I don't know if you've ever seen a jeweler's loop. It's like a little, I wish I had it so I could show you, but it's a little 10x lens that folds out. And people use it to look at moss. It's like one of, I wish I had it so I could show you, but it's a little 10X lens that folds out. And people use it to look at moss. It's like one of the common uses for it. So a friend of mine who had one and was like raving about it and saw how much I liked using his, he got me one for Christmas. And you're just going to have to take my word for it or find somebody who has a loop. Because you could look at anything.

for it or find somebody who has a loop because you could look at anything like you could look at like this tissue or I don't know like anything like you know moss obviously but also like rocks or your blinds it is just endlessly fascinating like it's not going to be what you think and it has this sort of element of surprise that I think we're all very addicted to right which is like you have to get really close to something with the loop. And then all of a sudden it like pops into focus. And it's like this plant that you thought was smooth. It's like really hairy or something, you know? And I remember when he gave it to me, I was like, I'll never be bored again. I'm like, it's exactly what you're describing. But I think the difference is, I mean, there's a lot of differences. Like one is it fills me with like wonder instead of dread.

Yeah. And another really big difference is it's i'm looking at something that's actually in front of me um not something that is you know being said by a stranger far away out of context right like one is hyper contextualized it's in front of your body like in your eyes and the other one is really not yeah and i think that those like lead in two very different directions. Well, that brings up, you know, you argue that the internet and the idea of social media aren't inherently bad. What do you think is bad about them? Or what has become bad about them? I mean, there's obviously, I mean, I think like the biggest thing is the whole sort of business model of social media runs on constant maximum engagement, which already is a problem. platforms are structured, but also just kind of unspoken rules that people kind of learn about what gets engagement tend to favor certain types of expression, like outrage. There's a lot of like,

I find like mic drop kind of statements, you know, it's not really inviting dialogue. It's like every statement has to be a mic drop. Yeah. And, and so it just a lot of louder for the people in the back kind of stuff. Yeah. And I, and I'm like, I'm, I'm so sick of that. I'm just, it was making me hate myself because it was like, I think that's what I realized. Like, you know, in changing my habits was like, you're going to feel the way that, that people treat you, right? Like you hang out with friends who, who treat you the way that you want to be seen.

So if you're spending all your time reading statements that no, they're not personally addressed to you, but you're reading them that way. And they're all talking down to you. And they're all like, you know, written in this kind of like sanctimonious shaming tone. Like you're going to develop so much shame. That's what happened to me.

I mean, there's so many, you know, problems with it, but I think that's a really big one. And unfortunately, I think that just kind of emerges from like the structure of the the implicit goal of this game is to get the most engagement. Right. Like, yeah, of course, you could go on there and not do that. But that would be I don't know, that'd be like going to a soccer field and like not trying to get the ball in the goal like you're just kicking the ball around or something i mean one of one of the many places in the book where i found myself nodding furiously was um where you compare uh social media driven news cycles to the uh sleep deprivation tactics that the military uses on detainees and you're you're right that uh quote one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. Why do you think, what is it about us that keeps checking back in, even though it makes us more anxious?

do you think what is it about us that keeps checking back in even though it makes us more anxious you know i think i have an even worse opinion of this than i did when i wrote the book i think i i thought it was like well no i still do think it's like an emotional thing of wanting to wanting to know what's going on and then wanting to be seen and heard right like wanting to be connected to other people especially when something dangerous is going on right that's a natural thing right but i but i've sort of come recently more to think that it's like like i said it's just the sort of like hamster wheel like dopamine thing like it just turns out that like we love checking things yeah like it could really be that simple it's just that um that's just something that our brains like to do. It's like a loop that you get into.

Yeah. And it's like, it's sort of like this addiction to new information all the time. Like, has anything changed? Is anything new? Is there an update? Which I don't know why I thought about this a lot. Like, why do I always need some kind of new piece of information to keep going? Why can't I just be like happy with what is right now?

Yeah. Well, and sometimes I wonder if that's not even necessarily a problem. Like, OK, this could, you know, this is just me, but I am obviously a nature enthusiast. Right. Like I write about that in the book. I think, you know, people might think of being outdoors. It's like very peaceful. It's neutral.

You're like, it's quiet. Like nothing's going on. It's not like that to me. It is an absolute riot. It's like, you know, and even more if you have this loop thing,

right. But even without the loop or binoculars or whatever, I think, and I think that's what I was trying to get at in the book was like, that you can train your attention to be able to look for these kinds of changes. And I don't want to call them updates, but there are,

you know, I'm looking at my window right now. This update is like a guy just walked up the street. Right. So like, maybe there's nothing wrong. I was just thinking this, you know, last week I at my window right now. This update is like a guy just walked up the street. Right. So like maybe there's nothing wrong. I was just thinking this, you know, last week I was in the mountains and I was like, maybe this is like the one place where I'm never bored is actually here. Was it always like that for you? Or you talked about sort of training your attention to focus on those kind of changes?

Or was this just were you always just a nature enthusiast and this came natural to you? of changes or was this just were you always just a nature enthusiast and this came natural to you i think i i don't know necessarily about the the nature context i think i sort of i'm familiar with that from childhood and i i came back to it but i think what i i always had was i've always been very curious and that's just sort of an orientation that you know no matter what you sort of direct that at, you're going to be looking closely and waiting for things to change and seeing that things are changing. And so, I actually, it's like you hear people say, oh, people need to learn how to be bored again. And I don't know that I agree. I think it's more just like you should embrace

your desire to learn new things and perceive new things. And maybe the problem isn't that. The problem is the context in which you're applying it and the fact that it's being exploited by a social media platform. But in itself, I think that's like a lovely thing. It means you're like alive and you're paying attention to things. Offline is brought to you by Kariyuma. It's the middle of winter and time to get real about layers, lining, everything that's going to keep you warm

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Can you talk about that a little? Yeah. So that, I should say, is not my distinction. It's a theorist, Franco Bifo Berardi, made this distinction in a book called After the Future. The way he summarizes that is basically connectivity. You could almost think of it as like ports in a computer, right? Like it's either compatible or it's not. And if it is compatible, the information goes through.

So with people that would be like, you know, you and I have the same preferences on paper where, you know, we sort of checked all the same boxes. So when I recommend something to you, it's not even really like you just sort of accept it and I didn't change in the transmission of that information and you didn't change. So that's pretty cut and dried. And it happens quickly. It can happen really quickly. Sensitivity is more like you have these two

kind of like oddly shaped, maybe incompatible people, bodies, whatever you want to call it, entities. And they are communicating, but it's much more of a process. Like they both might change in that interaction and the information might change in the interaction. So, like, you know, really easy example would be if you have a long conversation with a friend or someone you know who you respect, but you don't agree on something. And it might be really fundamental. So, the example that I give in the book is someone who is Catholic. And then I'm basically, I don't know what I am anymore. But at the time, I described myself as an atheist, right? And that's kind kind of how she saw me and we would have these long evening conversations i was at a residency about science

and um and religion and like the meaning of life you know and we didn't we didn't come to what we would call like an agreement but we did have an exchange and we were both changed by it and my mind was changed and her mind was changed. So that would be an example of sensitivity, obviously not favored by social media. Understatement of the century. When I got to that part of the book, that's when I was like, you know,

sort of furiously highlighting because I'm interested in a lot of how this connects up to politics and democracy. And I think, like, there is no sensitivity on social media, like, it's just not built for those conversations. But I think sometimes there's the illusion of that, right? Because we're all connected to each other via social media. And so we're having these conversations, but you don't really get to have conversations with sort of the nuance or the context where you're allowed to

disagree or you're allowed to change people's minds you try to change people's minds like that sort of all disappears and i kind of wonder what that does to all of us yeah it can't be good i i mean i i suspect that people approach social media with a lot of fear about how they look. Yeah. Because that's, you know, what social media is all about. And there's so much about, you know, likes and, you know, upvotes and downvotes. It's so numerical, right? It's like a score and you want your score to be good.

And it's almost like a credit score or something. and it's almost like a credit score or something. And so like, I think people are already kind of approaching these topics and spaces with like a lot of fear and a lot of defensiveness. And I'm just so struck by the difference between the way like a disagreement might play out in social media versus like the times that I've had close friends or

like just someone I know say something to me that only maybe even like years later, I realized that was like a very deep critique of something about what I thought. Like that was really like, it's not a sort of surface level thing, right? It's like, I think you're wrong about something. And I think, you know, I And I think your politics are wrong. But when I go kind of remember that moment, that's not how it felt. It felt like a conversation. It felt like a respectful conversation where I learned something. And it's like only later do I realize like, oh, actually, that was actually someone seriously

disagreeing with me. Well, and it is incredibly rare to find that these days. And I know that because, you know, like I had done some episode the other couple of weeks ago and, you know, the negative comments were like five words in a tweet that just sort of, I brushed off at this point or I didn't pay attention to. And then you remember like someone did like a, you know, seven part tweet thread was like, hey, I went into this conversation open-minded, but I didn't like this and I disagreed with this. And I sort of like took that critique to heart, right? And I thought, I understand that. And I want to learn from that. And that's interesting that the person pointed that out. And it's just so much more effective than someone saying like,

I saw that you did that do better. And then that's it. Yeah. What are you supposed to do with that? What am I supposed to do with that? That's not persuading me. Yeah. And I honestly,

I think that's part of the mic drop effect, right? It's like, it's like, you almost don't think about how the person continues to exist after you said something. Right. Yeah.

It's like, I'm just going to leave this here and walk away. That's like, that's what everything is. Right. It's like, I'm just going to leave this here and walk away. That's what everything is, right? It's like, no, well, I'm still here and I need help understanding this. Right. So you want, yeah. I first learned about your book because it was on Barack Obama's book list, my former boss.

And I was like, I was wondering why he was so into this book. And then when I got to this line in the book, what if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? I was like, that's why Barack Obama really liked me. But I do think it's sort of the way that social media operates really is just a lot of people shouting past each other all the time. And there's just not a lot of sort of one-on-one conversation, but that's the way we are most of the time. Yeah. And I,

and I just, I get that frustrates me because I think if you look at it from a kind of like crass, like numbers point of view, right. It's like if you, if you make a statement and it gets, you know,

thousands of whatever retweets or likes or whatever, like that is a measure of something. Right. That's not nothing. But then I think about things like, you know, if someone, this is really like overdetermined example, but like if someone wrote, made a zine, right? Yeah. And they only mailed it to 20 people but those were the 20 right people like and those are 20 people who are gonna like sit down and spend time with this and talk to other people about it yeah maybe write something in response and then they respond and then you

get somewhere right there's traction i don't know like that's a different way of measuring i guess like impact like i don't even know what to call it but like that's a different way of measuring, I guess, like impact. Like I don't even know what to call it, but like that's also something that feels like substantive to me. And I'm kind of more and more interested in that and bored with the other thing. Yeah, well, it's intentional and it's designed to try to persuade people to make people think or act differently, which I think is sort of the basis for, you know, a democratic society. I mean, we've been talking a lot about sort of the effects of social media and overconnection on individuals, right? It can make you anxious, it can make you feel bad, it can make you distracted. But you point out that a social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think or act. And I have been thinking about this a lot more is like, what does it mean for the country as a whole if we're just all so distracted all the

time? And what does that mean for social movements? What does it mean for labor movements? What does it mean, you know, like for civil rights movements? Because I think, as you point out in the book too, because I think, as you point out in the book too, that sort of collective action requires discipline and organization and a lot of attention. And I wonder if we're sort of losing that capacity. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I don't know, but I mean, I was just reading an article actually a couple hours ago

where it was basically organizers talking about this and saying that, you know, like they were comparing it to going door to door and having conversations with people and finding out that, you know, if you actually tell someone what something is beyond a slogan, they'll oftentimes maybe not agree with you. But it'll be something other than the like, no, like door in your face. Right. And it's, and so I think, yeah, definitely like the capacity to listen is, is probably getting eroded. I mean, I talk about deep listening in the book, which is Pauline Oliveros' term from music, but deep listening requires like a stance basically that is, would, you know, be described as almost like passive or nonjudgmental or whatever. But it's basically like, let me actually like hear this thing first before I jump into like analyzing and all of that. Not to say everything needs to be listened to, but just that, you know, that there's, if you want to have an encounter

that involves like that sensitivity and the exchange that requires you not to do the mic drop, basically. So you wrote this book a year or so before the pandemic, and I've seen some people say that it was, you know, well-timed to a period where doing nothing was forced on many of us. But I actually found that being stuck at home during the pandemic made doing nothing in the way you define it even harder. It's like I was glued to my screens and social media, and it made, made like even a news addict like me feel even worse than usual um what what was your experience like during the during the pandemic what has your experience been like since i guess unfortunately we're still in it yeah it's well i feel like summer of 2020 i kind of started approaching a point that was reminding me of the moment that had spurred how to do nothing where I was like oh this feels familiar you know yeah and that was a rough summer

that was like the the protests plus the wildfires in California plus the pandemic it was just everything I couldn't I couldn't walk because the air was too bad. And it was just, yeah, I was feeling very, very sort of trapped in that. And so I had sort of like moment number two of I can't do this. And ever since then, you know, I'm on social media. I will like check for messages. And, you know, I'll kind of, yeah, I'll dip in once in a while because there are important things like the fact that people who read my book often connect me to other things that I would like to read. That, you know, it's like I find out about

this other stuff that's in conversation with what I'm doing. And that's really important to me. However, I religiously avoid feeds of all kinds, all kinds. Like I will not look at the Twitter feed. I will not look at Twitter moments. Wow. I will not look at the Instagram feed. I can't look at my Facebook feed because I have something called Facebook newsfeed eradicator, which I highly recommend. Yeah. That's if I went on Facebook, I would use that. Yeah. I, I, I barely look at Facebook anymore because that's turns out if you don't have a newsfeed, then there's no reason to be on it for more than two minutes. So, yeah, so that's, I kind of had, I had almost like a

second moment of reckoning. I'd love to hear your thoughts on like what you think we can all do to resist the attention economy, both as individuals and as a society. I mean, I think it's important to point out that you don't, you don't believe we should all just stop using social media. You know, you, you point out that you're less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than a mass movement of people regaining control of our attention and redirecting it together. Can you talk about what that means and what it might look like? Yeah, I think it's maybe helpful to think of it in terms of feedback loops. So there's a bad feedback loop, and then I like to think there's a good feedback loop. The bad one is the one that is sort of being exploited right now, which is there's a lot to be upset about and scared, just like deeply frightened, right? Like there's

so many sources of dread. And we're also, you know, a lot of people are still pretty isolated, you know, they're more isolated than they would be. So you go to social media because you want to feel some connection and you want to feel, maybe you want to feel validated. You want to feel seen and recognized. You go there, you don't get that. You get something else. you want to feel seen and recognized you go there you don't get that you get something else there's something else that you get makes you feel more lonely and disconnected and have more anxiety so you go back and i mean i've literally read papers in like travel journals where like tourism people like know about this loop and they name it and they're like we need to figure out a way to use use that to drive ticket sales for like when people see other people's vacations like they're gonna have low self-esteem so like how

do we get in there and have there be a button where you can like buy your ticket right like this is very known um so that's that's the bad that's the bad feedback loop and it's sort of self-reinforcing the thing that i feel like i've learned in the last year, especially, is that there's like kind of an opposite loop where somewhere in there you break the cycle. You know, that could be anywhere, really. Put the phone down, just cut it off. Yeah. Facebook News, Feudal Advocate or whatever. Whatever you have. Yeah. Or you get a loop, get the jeweler's loop and go outside and look at a bush. Somewhere you break the cycle and then you get the opposite which is like you find other sources of meaning and belonging and being seen and that makes you feel more stable and then because you feel more stable you don't feel the need to go to social media anymore because you're not going to

social media anymore you feel more stable right like this is what's kind of been happening to me. Like I have a joke that my social media is, you know, on iMessage, you can pin like people to the top of your iMessage. Yeah. So I have like nine people and they all have different animal photos. And so I was calling it like animal net. And when something goes viral on animal net,

it's just me sending it to every single person, like one at a time. And like, I get news from animal net it's just me sending it to every single person like one at a time and like i get news from animal net like people tell me about stuff you know like in whether it's like something happening to them or the news or something that they saw that was funny like you know it is a little mini kind of like some of them are group chats so um and i find that like i actually get what i wanted i originally wanted from that and from, you know, interactions with just individual people. It could be like friends or it could be other writers. It could be whoever, you know, either like one-on-one or kind of like small groups.

And, you know, a lot of that's been on my phone because it's the pandemic, right? But it's very different than sort of broadcasting or being on on a feed and it's really like it's it's amazing like I I compared to like even a year ago it's like I really I have zero desire to look at the the feed of any social media I I just I actually don't want to that's uh I want to get to that point that's my that's my north star right there offline is brought to you by keeps a lot of things should not follow you into the new year i can think of a few myself all the bad vibes from 2021 how about that yeah how about that you know what should follow you into 2022? Your hair. Yeah, it should follow you.

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I get energy from other people. I hadn't thought about redirecting my attention toward the place that I live, which you write about a lot. You know, so much of your book is about your connection with nature. What is it about nature that you find important and fulfilling? I think, I mean, maybe the most basic part of it is kind of illustrated by the part where I talk about the crows. Although I realize that crows are getting out of hand in a lot of places. I was just reading or someone, I think three different people on Animal Net sent me an article about like using like lasers to control crows. Anyway, because the crows are getting out of hand in San Jose. But, you know, I have that description in the book of like, crows can

recognize human faces. So, I befriended these crows. The crows are looking at me. I'm looking at the crows. Crows are not human, but they're like regarding me in some way, right? And it's this reminder that I am also an earthbound animal who, from their point of view, I sort of emerged from this little box every day and then I go back inside. And so it's a very, um, kind of, it's like almost like moves the center of gravity out away from you. And I was finding that very therapeutic at the time because the other thing that I think social media does is it kind of like hyper stimulates your ego. Like you really get into like the center of your head and it's like very dense in there. And for me, just being reminded

that there are these like kind of other societies that are just outside, like I've lived in the same neighborhood for long enough. I know like the bird neighborhoods, like I know that like the chickadees are always in that one tree or like, I just, I just noticed two weeks ago, there's a, a sap sucker, which is like a type of woodpecker that makes these little holes in a very dense pattern. It's always in this one tree between 10 AM and noon. And I'm like, there he is at work, you know, I passed this bird and it's very inspiring to me because then I go home and I like do my work. But I think it's just something about being reminded of a different context for yourself. Right. And it's pretty insistently like physical context. I can see

why it might be useful because I have been trying to go on walks where I like, like, don't look at my phone the entire walk. And I don't listen to anything either. Right. I don't even listen to a podcast. I just want to walk and look around. But sometimes, at least at the beginning, I noticed that as I'm walking, I'm still thinking about all the things I would think about if I was scrolling through Twitter. Right.

So I'm thinking about political issues of the day. I'm thinking about things I have to do. Like your mind's still racing. And I think part, you know, you write about this too. I think when you're focusing, when you redirect your attention on something else, like nature, like birds, like the trees, right? Then you sort of get out of your own mind and you don't just leave the scrolling and social media behind. You leave sort of all the stuff that comes with it, which is thinking about all that shit constantly which continues to give you anxiety even if you're not staring at the

screen yeah totally and i think it also has like very concrete lessons at least that that i have learned from observing and learning about ecology in particular um you know one of the things i write about in the book is that in ecology there there are very few hard boundaries. So like there are bioregions and they have identifiable characteristics, but there's not like you're in Oak Savannah and then all of a sudden you cross a line and you're in a redwood forest, right? Like it just doesn't work that way. out that everything is affecting everything else all the time. And for me, that was meaningful because I'm biracial and it really resonated with that idea that you could have something be multiple with identifiable parts, but they're not so easily pinpointed. And I think actually, it's interesting to bounce back and forth between contexts. If you take those lessons and then you come back to something you know like a political situation right maybe you look at it differently like you see for me it becomes easier to see things like oh this is a knot of strands one of which started in like the 1800s or something

right like something that's a little bit more complex than like the Twitter moments of the day. Like it just allows you to like zoom out or sort of like change your focus a little bit and, and like appreciate and like sit with complexity because I think that's everywhere. I mean, one of, one of the first things I did after I finished your book is I started looking up books about the history of Los Angeles, which is where I live. And like, I moved here in 2014. And I always think to myself, oh, I just moved to LA. And I've been here eight years now, seven, eight years now. And because I live such a hyper connected life, and I'm working so much, and I'm online so much, I was like, I finished your book. I'm like,

I don't even know that much about the place that I live, like the history of the place that I live, you know. And I wonder like the more that we're online and you can be sort of online anywhere and the Internet is just this big global space that has like a lot of nothingness around it. You do sort of forget that like you live in a physical place with history and tradition and culture and nature and all that kind of stuff. Like it's, it's wild. Yeah. Although I should point out that, you know, similar to the fact that, you know, I say that social media just as, as the idea of like a network of people who are in communication is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. I think similarly, you know, let's say like, let's say you move to a new place and you want to learn more about it. Like the Internet is actually going to be a huge use to you.

Right. Well, that's where I looked for books. Yeah. And I learned. I mean, I really got off the ground by using iNaturalist, which is the app that, you know, it's basically Shazam for plants. Right. Like you take pictures of plants and it tells you what they are. Yeah. It's so good. It's like what I've been waiting for. That's utopian technology to me.

But yeah, I think it's like, again, it's almost like the loop versus the iPhone again, right? It's like, are you using it to actually become more engaged with the place that you are or are you using it in the opposite direction? And certain platforms or apps or whatever will push you in either direction. On a societal level, are there policies or collective actions you think we should take in order to help resist the attention economy? You mentioned in the book that a lot of people have jobs

that don't give them the privilege of trying to do nothing because they're so busy. Yeah. I mean, that is kind of something that I am taking up thinking about specifically about time because, you know, one really obvious response to how to do nothing as a whole, as a book is like, that's great. I don't have time. And like time is like a sort of very obvious dimension in which like some people have more affordances than others. So anything, you know, that, that opens up more time or not even more time, but like gives more temporal autonomy to people, I think. Because to be able to, you know, be curious about things and, you know, go for your walk and whatever, meet with the local birding group, you know, you have to have the time and the resources to do that. And

I think that's one of the things that I wish that I had made clear in the book was, was that, you know, distinction between someone who finds it difficult to do nothing because, you know, they're so steeped in like achievement culture or whatnot. And then someone who really actually just does not have control of their time. Right. I mean, do you think that this great resignation we've seen, you know, throughout the course of the pandemic, a lot of people, you know, sort of quitting their jobs, looking for other things to do, has to do with some of the challenges that you wrote about in the book. I mean, one sort of overlap that I definitely see is, you know, I talk about kind of like the pause in the book, like when you take a pause and you shift your perspective. Like I talk about my dad

taking two years off of work when he was in his 30s. And again, you know, that's a very privileged thing to do. But he he kind of had like all these epiphanies during that time about himself and his work and what he wanted to do and and what it actually took for him to, you know, be creative and have like purpose and meaning or whatever. Right. be creative and have like purpose and meaning or whatever right so i mean i have no way of knowing really but i my sense is that maybe that happened for people where it's like it's this forced pause everything suddenly looks weird um right like things that were once familiar look very strange um like even things like buildings getting used for other things. And, and that's such a destabilizing moment.

And I think that that can be really scary, but it can also kind of like shake loose these things that you took for granted or not even necessarily took for granted. You were just so busy going, you had to take it for granted. There wasn't a time to stop and think about it. And now you have to stop and think about it. And maybe your work situation is a little different. Maybe you work from home and you realize how shitty your boss is or something. I don't know. Because something has changed. And something becomes clear to you. And then maybe

also, I don't know, but because we've all been living with this hyper awareness of mortality, like people are dying. There's this like this possibility of dying was just in the air. Then maybe that also people were thinking about like, I have one life. Yeah. You know, and what am I going to do with this one life? Am I really going to spend it doing this and just staring at this all day? So I don't know i that's my kind

of guess look i think that's i've had that experience i think it's a combination of the trends that you've been writing about which is so everyone being hyper connected on social media and that leaves you feeling sort of shitty uh and distracted all the time and then something like the pandemic happens and you stop and think of your own mortality and you're like, is this how I want to be for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years? It's just doing this nonstop. Or do I need like a real change here? And that change can be your job. It can also just be, I think, how you describe really well, just figuring out how to redirect your attention on a daily basis, just in even small ways.

Yeah, totally. Just something that I've observed among people that I know is people sort of leaving jobs or contexts and they don't actually know what's next, but they knew enough that it was wrong that they could leave. And I think that's really interesting because more and more lately I put such a, I really value intuition and like intuition versus like the kind of objective, like just, I don't know, I don't even know how to describe it. But like the gut feeling, right? Like the gut feeling when you're on social media too much is this is bad. And it's like, how do you learn how on social media too much is this is bad and it's like how do you learn how to better hear what that is saying and i think maybe people were following that same

intuition of like i'm not happy where i am this isn't fulfilling um i need to find the things that actually give me some sense of like traction in life yeah uh last question i ask all of our guests which was partly inspired by your book. Um, what's your favorite way to unplug right now, uh, now that you're busy writing another book and, and how often do you get to do it? Um, that's hard. I mean, I would say maybe currently it's the loop. It's the loop. I'm going to, I'm going to look into this loop. Yeah. It's, uh, I don't think it's very expensive.'m gonna i'm gonna look into this loop yeah it's uh i don't think it's very expensive um i think that you can also get magnifying lenses for your phone okay um i

don't know as much about those but um and i'm very lucky i get to do that every day because every day my boyfriend and i go on basically the same it's your pandemic walk like some variation we've had we've had a few of those yeah yeah and uh and it's like the loop it's so small and it's such a high magnification that like i'll never be able to like loop everything on this walk like it's endless so uh i think that's my current favorite way but i honestly like so many. I mean, like birdwatching, obviously. I'm still really into that. Yeah.

Fantastic. Jenny O'Dell, thank you so much for joining Offline. Appreciate the time. Thanks so much for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Andy Gardner Bernstein and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor.

Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.