Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 319: How to Do Nothing | Jenny Odell

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

For an audience of meditators (or aspiring meditators), the idea of doing nothing shouldn’t be foreign. But, speaking from personal experience, it is very possible, especially for Type A people, to approach meditation with an agenda. In which case, sitting on the cushion can be very far from truly doing nothing. Enter Jenny Odell, who makes a very compelling case for truly… doing… nothing. In her work, she is challenging what for many of us, myself included, is a deep-seated and sometimes subconscious reflex: to constantly optimize and constantly be “productive.” She is a Lecturer in the Stanford Department of Art and Art History and author of the bestseller How to Do Nothing, which just came out in paperback. She comes to the subject of time from a very different perspective than our guest on Monday, Ashley Whillans. (If you haven’t listened to that episode, go do it; these two make a fascinating pairing.) In this conversation, Jenny and I talk about: letting go of our constant demand for productivity and learning to simply look around; the thrilling phenomenon of observing something so deeply that you actually cease to understand it; why moments of disgust, or even existential despair, can actually be quite instructive; and how to divest from what she calls “the attention economy”–and where to reinvest instead. Take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast! The team here is always looking for ways to improve, and we’d love to hear from all of you, but we’d particularly like to hear from those of you who listen to the podcast and do not use our companion app. Please visit http://www.tenpercent.com/survey to take the survey. Thank you. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jenny-odell-319 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, for an audience of meditators or aspiring meditators, I assume everybody on this show fits into one of those categories, but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, for this kind of audience, the idea of doing nothing should not be entirely foreign,

but speaking from personal experience here, it is very possible, especially for type A people, to approach meditation with some sort of an agenda, in which case sitting on the cushion can be very far from truly doing nothing. Enter Jenny O'Dell, who makes a very compelling case for truly doing nothing. In her work, she's really challenging what for many of us, myself included here, is a deep seated and sometimes subconscious reflex to constantly optimize, to constantly be productive. Jenny is a lecturer in the Stanford Department of Art and Art History, and she's the author of the bestselling book How to Do Nothing, which just came out in paperback. She comes to the subject of time from a very different perspective than our guest on Monday,

Ashley Willins. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and do it. These two make a fascinating pairing. In this conversation with Jenny, we talk about letting go of our constant demand for productivity and learning to simply look around. The thrilling phenomenon of observing something so deeply that you actually cease to understand it, why moments of disgust or even existential despair can actually be quite instructive and how to divest from what she calls the attention economy. Here we go, Janie O'Dell. Jenny, thanks so much for doing this. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too, and thanks for having me. So you have this great line. I think it may be the opening line or one of the opening lines of your book, nothing is harder to do than nothing. Can you unpack that? I totally agree. I just want to hear your point of view on that. Yeah, I think that doing nothing or maybe more properly like feeling like you're doing nothing is hard for several reasons. And one is just habit. I think like there's a habitual way of thinking in which you always need to be working towards something or having something to show for your time. Otherwise, it was somehow worthless. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I'm writing this new book about time. There's kind of this like orientation toward time in general. I think that thinking about this a lot lately because I'm writing this new book about time. There's kind of this orientation toward time in general, I think, that's almost like a

leaning forward. There's some desired outcome that's different from the present. And you're sort of leaning forward in the space between those two. And to do nothing in relationship to that would be to simply just sit back. And just sit in that moment as it is, which is very difficult to do because of that, I think you get into that posture and it's something you get used to. The posture leading forward. The great writer and former Buddhist monk, Stephen Bachelor, I believe, I hope him, Stephen, if you're listening, we're friends, so he might be listening.

I apologize if I'm going to mangle this line, but I believe in his book, Buddhism without beliefs, he says something about how our default state is wanting to be elsewhere or otherwise. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's such a good way of putting it. It's this kind of underlying dissatisfaction or feeling that something, or you are an adequate, and therefore you need to be sort of working, working against that. I think that actually that line makes me think of Pauline Oliveros, who I talk about in the book, who is a sound artist and composer, and she similarly says that the reason for needing to cultivate deep listening, which is her name

for, you know, sitting in an environment and listening actively, is that our culture privileges snap judgment basically, and like needing to grasp and react to things, and that the opposite of that, which would just be kind of empty listening, is something that I think you would already need to train yourself to do, but you especially have to train yourself to do now because everything is kind of arrayed against that. How have we gotten ourselves into this situation? Because I fully agree.

I feel haunted by what we're both of us quoting a lot of other people here, but I'll quote again, there's a great podcast or Jocelyn Kay Gly, who has a podcast called, Hari Slowly, she's been on the show, and she talks about something called Productivity Shame, which really describes my mindset. Maybe 22 and a half hours per day of just feeling haunted always behind every moment needs to be maximized, optimized, utilized.

Where does this mindset come from? Well, I mean, first of all, I'll just say I've been on her podcast and she's great. I love that podcast. But in terms of where this mindset comes from, just speaking from my own experience, I think that it probably starts pretty early on. I mean, I have journals going back to when I was just old enough to write and have really detailed journals through high school and college.

I went back through them about a year and a half ago, and I was horrified to find myself saying the same exact things that I say now. Like, I never have any time. You can just see this kind of like always running after something, like always trying to catch up. And there's like some passages where I'm like staring towards the Santa Cruz mountains and sort of wishing like I can just go over there and drop all of this. And it's a kind of very familiar refrain. And so I was reflecting when I was reading those about how even then, and that was pre-social media kind of over-scheduled, I was.

And I think that that's kind of a combination of school, you know, could be your parents. It could just be kind of like the easer of expectation. Like that's something that I think about a lot with my students who are at Stanford. It could be that no one in particular is telling them that they need to do that many things. It's just an expectation that exists around them. So it's really like a culture of busyness

or a culture of productivity, where yes, like technically you are free to not participate in that, but you will feel the pressure if not falling in line with that culture. I believe your book, you've described the book as a, I'm now referring to how to do nothing not your forthcoming book about time, which I also be curious to talk a little bit about,

but I believe you described it as a critique of capitalism. Would you pin some of the blame for this, this kind of productivity shame mindset? We have the struggle we have with doing nothing on capitalism. Yeah, I certainly think that it lines up with capitalist ways of valuing time, or a certain like picture of productivity, which is pretty specific. It's like the production of visible, tangible, commodified value over X amount of time, versus the quote-unquote productivity that I kind of try to put forth in the book, which is much more connected to a less linear, more cyclical kind of way of thinking about things like maintenance, care,

where you may have nothing to show for your time within one frame of reference, but actually it was hugely productive of meaning or care or something like that in this other frame of reference. So I kind of ask early on when we say productivity, it's like productive of what, for whom and why, and these are kind of like questions that exist outside of that one version of productivity. Like, you know, I've been sort of critically reading a lot of

commercial time management books lately, and it, you know, there are good tips in there for me personally, and I've been thinking a lot about how there's a difference between getting more management books lately. And there are good tips in there for me personally. And I've been thinking a lot about how there's a difference between getting more comfortable in the situation that you're in. So getting more streamlined so that you can be more comfortable in a capitalist situation versus questioning some of the premises that are underlying

that, which is not something that's going to happen inside that time-management advice, that advice is really addressed to kind of like treading water, in my opinion. What does it look like to question the underlying premises of capitalism? And, you know, if you follow it to its endpoint, are you living off the grid? how do we change our relationship to this structure that is like so seeped into our, like the marrow of our culture? I think the first step is just that acknowledgement, right? Like how hard that is, I think like simply taking stock of how completely that may have

colonized your ways of thinking is a really great place to start. So, you know, that gets into really deep questions of like self-worth. What is your life for? What does value mean to you? What does meaning mean to you? Those are really difficult questions that you like kind of spend your entire life answering. So just simply having respect for the difficulty of those questions,

I think, is really important, or at least it's been important for me. And then I think with awareness of that difficulty, then there's a kind of accompanying recognition that it's going to be a difficult ongoing process. So like I'm really suspicious of this kind of quick fix process. So like I'm really suspicious of this kind of quick fix approaches to things like the attention economy because I don't I don't think there is a quick fix. And I think the reality is that you live in a world with other people where things are happening. You are beholden to those people. Those people are beholden to you, and this kind of fantasy of dropping out entirely, and yeah, like throwing your phone in the ocean and moving to the woods, completely understandable impulse that has, you know, also come up many other times in history, and it's a helpful pointer

in a direction, I think. But ultimately, I think what I'm interested in in the book is how can you live in this kind of difficult and complicated space in between where you are able to direct your attention with some agency and make these kind of more intentional decisions about, for example, the way they use social media, but also just how you value your time and the extent to which you're aware of your surroundings and human and non-human community, you have the agency to do those things, but you also are not this kind of like isolated unit in a dead world where everything is just sort of there for to be controlled by you.

So it's a version of that like old complicated question between individual agency and living in a community. So where have you come down for yourself on how to navigate your relationship to the capitalist society in which we find ourselves? I'm almost a bad example because I have a really unusual life situation. I mean, on top of teaching art, which because, you know, that's the university job. I have pretty like self-directed schedules. Now I'm teaching online. so it's even more so and then I'm a writer so my work is writing.

So in a way I'm obviously fortunate but it also is a little bit complicated because you could argue if I'm walking in the park and I'm like contemplating and thinking like that's work according to my job. So it actually gets complicated and fuzzy and interesting ways. But for me, it's this kind of like ongoing effort to strike a balance between obviously I need to make a living and I need some amount of stability and I'm incredibly, incredibly fortunate and privileged to have those things. And then over and above that are sort sort of beyond the realm of that,

there's this other space, which I could be putting through the sort of machine of productivity and trying to ring value out of it. And I have chosen not to, or I'm trying to choose not to, day after day. And I think thinking about it in terms of protection can be really helpful. Like, I'm protecting this time, or I'm protecting this part of myself from these outside forces in a way it sort of reminds me of the Rose Garden, which I talk about a lot in the book. In Oakland, this Rose Garden is sort of like utopian little park that is really close to you know, the main drag in this neighborhood. You can hear the

traffic actually going on around this kind of bowl of a park that's sitting down into the hill. You know that you're going to leave the park at some point, but the park itself sort of represents this little bubble that's existing in the middle of all of that. I know that notwithstanding the title, which has a how-to in it, how to do nothing, it's not a how-to book. But I would be curious to hear more about how you do nothing. And maybe let's start with the Rose Garden, but I would be, I think it would be instructive for people to hear about your process of doing nothing as a radical act.

Yeah, I would say that my acts of doing nothing are pretty uncomplicated. They're just, it's really any time plan or unplanned where I am not trying to do anything. And that's not to say, you know, I'm totally getting away from the guilt of like feeling like I should be doing something. But the fact of the matter in that time is that I'm not trying to do anything. So the Rose Garden is a really lovely example because it's just so beautiful there. And so kind of the fact that it's maintained by volunteers and some of whom I know now.

And it's full of bird species that are now familiar to me. When I go there it feels like going to meet up with some friends even if they're not like human friends, right? Just a place of like familiarity and enjoyment and so it doesn't really make sense for me to go there to do something. Going there is the point. If I'm there, I have achieved my goal. And really the only thing that I'm doing there is observing, observing, appreciating, being surprised, letting my mind get unbound from these very small cycles of anxiety, despair, whatever else is going on, doom scrolling on my phone. And so that's really just like sitting and observing in any place.

But for me, particularly green spaces, like I'm a big fan of Parklets. Oakland has a lot of nice little. Sometimes it's just unnamed Parklets where there's like one bench and it's near Creek where it happens to be above ground. And so that pretty much any version of that for me is doing nothing. I mean, just yesterday I was sitting in a different park and watching a bee for a long time. I didn't plan to, I didn't know

there was gonna be a bee there, but it was a really huge, one of those really, really big bumblebees. That's like fuzzy. And the bench was right next to a plant that's like right up in your face when you're sitting there. And it was just like, bee time. Double on Tondra intended, I assume. Yeah. Yeah.

The Leslie Knopes of the world must be saluted. Parks are amazing. What else do you do? I mean, I, I, I saw this great slogan in a peronie beer ad, which I know is perverse to bring up ads in this context, but it's not actually a slogan per se. It's apparently an Italian expression, which I will now mangle with apologies to my wife

who speaks Italian. Dolce part nutty, I believe. The sweetness of doing nothing. So sometimes for me, that's like, you know, lying and putting my face into one of my cat's bellies or just my son is playing in a room and I just lie in the ground and heckle him gently or whatever.

So those are some examples from my own life. I don't know if that fits with what else you do when you're sort of intentionally quote unquote, doing nothing. Yeah, I love those examples. I mean, right now sort of an odd time because there isn't really much to do other than to go for a walk.

For me anyway, like that's just, I've just been here or grocery store or on one of a handful of the same walks that I've been going on since March. I mean, I guess in terms of like intentionally setting out to do something really it's just going for a walk, like a slow walk, and just kind of observing, particularly right now, I really love seeing the changes in bird populations throughout the year. So seeing like the birds that have arrived for the winter and kind of watching them arrive. But I think maybe more generally or more abstractly, I think, which I think you're sort of getting at in the examples that you just listed is, I think you can take a view of it. You can become self-aware. I mean, people would describe this as mindfulness, right? But it's almost like you could imagine if you were suddenly dropped into your body

and now you're like here in your life on earth, the way you would feel kind of just like looking around at stuff. There's so many Like you think you know your home. You think you know your apartment I think you don't there's so many things that you haven't noticed and I keep having that experience like in here in my apartment but also Walking around it's like I think I'm getting tired of these walks. And then one day, something will just kind of get knocked loose somehow in my mind. And then I realized that there's something very obvious that I just have not noticed on my hundreds of times going on this walk.

So for me, it's almost like the do nothing, say to mine, it can just be a very subtle shift and perspective on the same thing that you might have been looking at or not noticing a moment before because you were in this more kind of a purposeful forward leaning stance. I love this thinking about doing nothing as like a slothful act of rebellion. My off base there, that's where I'm going in my mind. It reminds me of like if someone had been grasping onto like a bar or something like trying to hold on to something for their entire life. And then you're asking that person to just uncurl their fingers. And that person has been told that if they let go of this

thing, like they will cease to exist, then you know, on the one hand, that is you are relaxing. On the other hand, it's incredibly challenging. And I think that the fact that something can look like relaxing, but also be challenging, I guess that's part of what I meant by that sentence. Nothing is harder than doing nothing. Yes, and that's what I was probably melodroidly trying to point to with Slothful Rebellion. It's consequential, it's difficult, and also sort of like beautifully, sloppily indulgent. Yeah, I like that about it, and I think there's also some humor in that as well. I mean, one of the reasons I love Daoist stories so much, there's often a sense of humor in that as well. Like, I mean, one of the reasons I love

Dao's stories so much, there's often a sense of humor in them of like, almost like you realize that you've been like running around in these tiny circles and then suddenly you zoomed out in the punch line is that like there was all the space around you. That's funny. It's funny that something could be hard and easy at the same time.

There's a really groovy meditation teacher who's a great friend of mine and just an awesome member of Homo sapiens, Jeff Warren. And he talks about meditation and or practice. He uses the word practice and it really broad sense. So it doesn't have to be, and in some cases really shouldn't be, fold yourself up into a pretzel

and do the traditional meditation. Everything we do trains the mind. So you can train the mind in lots of ways. And Jeff tries to be very democratic, a small D democratic in his approach. He's Canadian, so he's definitely not a member of either a US party. And he did this thing where he collected from his various followers online. He's got a quite a robust following online. And he collected people's practices. And one of them is coming to mind. I just want to, I wish I could

quote this woman's practice verbatim, but I'm going to try to reproduce it to the best my ability, but just to see if it fits with you. She says, I deliberately try to waste time. I will sit at my desk when the work day's over with nothing to do. I will actively watch old Taylor Swift music videos instead of something good for me on Netflix or whatever. And that idea of deliberately wasting time it feels, quote unquote, wasting time, it feels quote unquote wasting time,

feels like it fits into what you and I are discussing here of this interesting rebellion, this interesting letting go. Does it land for you? Yeah, it looks like the idea of sitting at my desk any longer than I have to, it's just painful to me. Right, I did have that response. Yeah, I mean, and I guess that that is an example of the fact that for me, simply not working or sort of not optimizing the time that's left over from that in and of itself, there's something more specific than that that I'm usually looking for, and that is some sense of like getting outside of myself. So like dissolving the ego a little bit. Like one of the reasons I keep mentioning going outside,

it's like if I don't have to be here at my desk, I want usually to be outside because it sounds cheesy, but like if I leave, for example, and I go on vacation, I come back, I feel like I need to walk around to see all of the, like, bird species that live in my neighborhood as if you just got home to your neighborhood and you're saying hi to everyone.

I'm like, I'm back. There's some sense of, yeah, just sort of connection and embeddedness I guess with something larger than myself. I think that that is often what I am seeking in those kinds of moments. And so it's because everything else like working or participating in social media feels like the opposite of that to me. It feels very isolating. It feels very concentrated on me as a sort of bounded identity. And that for me goes really hand in hand with that kind of forward leaning quality

of needing to accumulate things to that bounded identity, like add value. And so I'm always trying to find ways to get out of that. Sort of like counterbalance that because you could spend your whole life in that mode. And that to me would be a real tragedy because it would be almost like you tunneled through your life and you never looked around. I think many people do that. I spent a huge chunk of my life doing that, I believe. You made a really important distinction there

because I was off on my whole like, slothful rebellion thing. And the tweak that you added, at least what I heard was that for you at least, it's not just hurling yourself on the ground and just lying there, maybe sometimes, but what I heard as an ad on there is that there is an intention there. It's not an intention that would fit or slot nicely into Capitalism, but it is to kind of dissolve the small self

Connect with the world around you whether it's birds or humans or whatever there is something more there than just sloth. Am I in the neighborhood there? Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's funny because it's basically two very different forms of desire. There's the grasping desire of getting more bang for your buck with your time and having results to show for it versus the desire that I feel, for example, I'm looking at that B. You know, it's like strange to call it desire, but it's like when you're

really fascinated with something, it's almost like you're falling into it. It feels almost like this vertigo and somehow like the more and more you look, the more and more that happens. I wrote this piece for the Atlantic earlier this year that was a review of two bird behavior books. They're both, you know, I mean, they're recent. And there's kind of interesting phenomenon in both of them where the more we learn about bird behavior, it's like the more we know that we don't know. Like, there are things that we've learned that birds know how to do and no one knows why. There's a species of bird that can predict hurricanes, like two months in advance, and change their flight path and no one knows why.

But we know they do. And to me, that's kind of like an analog to this feeling of like, you can look more and more at something, and not only not grasp it, it's opposite. It's like the person that would be grasping it is gone. It's just your awareness of this bird or plant or bee or whatever. And that's like an incredibly intoxicating feeling. So, and I think part of what I was trying to do in the book

is like, that is, it has its own addictiveness to me and it really stands up to these other more nefarious forms of addictiveness on social media or just a social media-informed way of being. Yeah. Let me see if I can restate it to you just so I make sure that I understand it because it sounds very interesting. There are phenomena that one can observe

where the more you observe it in some ways, the less you get it. Yeah, yeah, and you don't want to get it. Either it's not that same feeling of dissatisfaction. I mean, I talk in the book about these crows that I've befriended on my street, crows are supposedly, they're very common birds. I think a lot of people wouldn't look twice at a crow. And my starting to pay attention to them was in part because I had learned, you know, in 2016 that they recognize human faces. And all of these other interesting things about their intelligence, of course, that's the human model of intelligence. But that was 2016. I still, these crows still come by every morning. It's the same family of crows. And they land right on the balcony so I can see them pretty close up. And it's the opposite of the feeling of really

like having a hold on something. Like I was a point, instead it sort of like expands. And so I just feel more and more sort of curious about them. And they see more and more mysterious to me. And that'll probably just go on forever. But that's a very pleasurable feeling. I would never want to feel like one day you can close the book on these grows. This phenomenon can show up in my experience in romantic love and friendship. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think that in both cases, it's a matter of how generous you are in your looking and how open-minded, especially in long-term relationships, right? You might replace someone's actual living being

with your image of them, and that image might have been frozen a long time ago. And so there's like an active effort that you have to make. It's like the Pauline Olive Eros steep listening type of thing, but you do it with a person. I think the same thing can happen with a place as I was saying earlier,

when you go on these walks that you think you're familiar with and you get bored with. There's nothing actually boring about that walk. It's like, that's something that's happened to the way that you're thinking about it. And so I think that knowing that and being aware of that, you can sort of try to cultivate this practice of asking different questions of that place or that person or taking a slightly different angle or just even more generally just kind of like relaxing backward and letting whatever is there just be there. I know it's not a how-to book but you have suggestions on how we can engage in this act of looking again and looking again and looking again at things and people and animals, we thought we knew to get this

for a tigenous feeling that you've described as addictive. Yeah. There's kind of a rather arbitrary way of doing this is just to pick different things to focus on. Rob Walker wrote a book called The Art of Noticing, A While Back, and I think this is one of the things he suggests and the example that he gives is security cameras. So he says like spend a whole day looking at security. I actually did that. It's fascinating. There are way more security cameras than you

realize, but also because of where security cameras are placed, they'll make you notice architectural details that you would not have noticed or even the building, maybe you didn't even notice that. Also the different kinds of security cameras. Then you can go and think about all the infrastructure on those security cameras and go on and on. It's really just there is a practice of selecting something out of this chaos to pay attention to. Then something I've noticed also, although this is a bit more difficult right now, but going to a familiar place with someone else

who has a different perspective, I am always surprised by things that my boyfriend notices that I don't when we're walking. So he'll say, like, oh, look at that weird thing on that roof. And I was never going to notice that thing on the roof. I could have gone on that walk a hundred more times than I would not have seen it. And you know, different people have different reasons for noticing the things that they do. But I think combining them together can be really interesting. And I know like some of my friends have started noticing birds more because

of just being around me. And I won't stop talking about birds. So... about birds, so. Ask me for a friend here. Actually not, I love birds, so I actually want to... How does one and I like crows a lot? How does one befriend a family of crows? Do you feed them? Yeah, so they really like peanuts. I'm a little hesitant to recommend it because I'm worried that everyone, everyone, will

start putting peanuts everywhere. And then it'll be like ecological chaos. But yeah, I think once in a while you leave a peanut out for a crow. I mean, the thing is, I think that they notice, you know, if you're the same person in the same place at the same time, and they are too, I think they notice that. So if you, if there's like always crows in some area that you pass and then maybe you like leave them like one peanut, I'm sure, you know, after a while they would notice that.

But yeah, we have a bird feeder now on our balcony. So we've also begun to eat some chickadees and tit mice. And that's been really lovely just to like know that our little balcony is like a part of their universe. Much more of my conversation with Jenny O'Dell right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud.

From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. There's so much overlap and I've waited to ask this question, but there's so much overlap in what you're pointing to or what you're pointing at. And in the language you use, or what you're pointing at. And in the language you use, write down to the letting go. Like you said, you're grasping onto a pole,

your whole life or a bar, your whole life, and then you let go. There's so much overlap with Buddhism and meditation. How familiar are you with those worlds? Are you informed by those practices and world views, or is your world view completely independent of that? I definitely am aware I've read and listened to things in the realm of Buddhism. I also really love Christiana Merti. So much, I was just rereading freedom from the known a couple weeks ago.

So yeah, I'm aware of this kind of, there's this of this long tradition of that act of letting go. I came to it almost from a bleak angle where you realize that you're saying the same things as something this incredibly rich tradition, but you came to it from an odd path. And I don't have a traditional meditation practice, but I think that the things that I do that fall into the meditative category are informed by those same ideas. There are a few phrases that come up in your work

that I would love to get you to talk about, bio-regionalism. Yeah, bio-regionalism would definitely depend on who you ask and just over what that means. There's all kinds of different versions of it. But for me, that's just an awareness of one's sort of ecological neighborhood. So for example, being aware of the name of the watershed that you live

in. And maybe like some familiarity with that mountain and those waterways and where they're going, the native plants that grow there, the natural geological history. I would also include indigenous history of that place. And then that's the detached version, but I would also add the kind of a sense of responsibility. So these things are not the cold, detached objects of inquiry, but their agents who live in a community, the water way is and the animals and the plants that are living in the water way are also actors.

And so you are all together in this community and you have some responsibility and you have effects on that community simply by being there. So it's like a different way of thinking about your address. You have your street address, but then you also have your bio-regionalism address. And Peter Berg, who was a big proponent of bio-regionalism, I quoted him in the book, his address that he would give people was basically a long string of, you know, so-and-so watershed and so-and-so, you know, mountain range on planet Earth. You know, so it's like, it's just kind of a way of like locating yourself in physical ecological space. Manifest dismantling. Okay, that one's mine. I made that one up. Manifestus Manaling is a term that I oppose to manifest destiny, and specifically to the

painting that is often associated with manifest destiny, which is a painting by John Gast of White Robed Woman who's kind of like floating over the US, and she's got like trains and she's actually stringing up power lines and then all of the sort of indigenous people and animals and everything is running away from her and it's kind of shrouded in darkness. And so if Manifest Destiny is this kind of like techno determinist, triumphalist, very specific, culturally specific notion of progress that involves a lot of destruction of the existing communities and knowledge. Then manifest dismantling

would be the opposite of that. It would be cleaning up all of the damage that manifest destiny brought. It starts first with acknowledging the systems and the knowledge that was and is here already. And then working to repair those

connections and to repair that was and is here already and then working to repair those connections and to repair waterways and to just think about repair as a form of productivity basically. And the example that I give is the amount of effort that went into rerouting of river around a dam in Carmel Valley here in California, that that took a significant amount of science, engineering, political innovation, you know, multiple groups working together

to get rid of something, to get rid of something that should not have been there, and to allow the steelhead trout population to again flourish. So that's just one example. You've, I believe, said that one of the things that kind of looking back at your book that you might have wanted to have included more on with stuff around privilege. Am I right about that? Yeah, yeah. I think it's pretty significant that the book came from a talk that I gave in 2017, that I wrote in part in in reaction to the 2016 election. And that conference was for people who are sort of working in art and technology, which is the background that I come from. And so in a way, from the

beginning, it was written by someone in a very specific life situation with lots of privileges and stability and address to other people in similar situation. I think the back definitely comes out in the book. And I think that as much as I tried not to make itself help, it risks having the same problem as other self-help, which is that it only is helpful to certain people, right? Like it's only helpful to someone who has enough time, I think it's the really big one in my case. Someone who has time or temporal autonomy to make those choices about how they value their time, whereas like it's not useful to someone who does not have time or does not have control over their time.

And it's simply just trying to make it. So I think that that's I sort of tried to make that clear in the book, but I I feel like I So I think that that's, I sort of tried to make that clear in the book, but I feel like I probably should have emphasized it more and actually is sort of the impetus for this book that I'm writing now. It's kind of a useful thorn in my side in terms of thinking about that question of time. How would you plan to address that in the new book? What can you say to folks about thinking creatively about anti-productivity and not trying to optimize every moment if they feel like you will look, I have to in order to pay the bills? Yeah, I mean, I think what I would say to that person is that nothing about that is their fault. So there's a really big difference between someone

who just has no time and is completely stuck in that situation versus like, I look back at especially the last four or five years and I was always too busy, but that's a lot more my fault than it is for someone in the first situation. So a big part of this research that I've been doing for this book is like, you know, there's been a lot of really interesting writing about the difference between those two situations

and the role of choice and agency in someone's experience of time scarcity. And I think with that is the acknowledgement that the realm of individual agency and choice and directing ones attention can only go so far. Like ultimately, if you want to talk about making more time for more people, then you're going to have to talk about things like organizing, workplace organizing, unions, structural things like universal childcare, you can only go so far without having to then talk about those things. And so part of my motivation in this upcoming book is not just addressing that kind of missing part of the last book, but also I feel sort of compelled to point out that like that time management

and a certain kind of bootstrap or mentality, which I feel is very American, more it's like just manage your time better. But that's like, and it's incredibly cool to sort of say that to someone who isn't in the situation that they're in because they didn't know how to manage their time. But that's often how it's framed, right? It's like just buy this book and it'll solve all your problems. But then it turns out that all of the suggestions are like, well, just outsource all of your work. Just pay someone else to do it. It's like, well, just outsource all of your work. Just pace the one else to do it. It's like, well, okay, that's going to work for a certain subset of people, but not a lot. Do you have a sense that change is a foot that among the privilege to can, quote unquote, quote-unquote manage their time and maybe shift out of a constant preoccupation with productivity

that there's a shift happening at that level and or a shift happening at the policy level so that we don't have so many people who through no choice of their own need to have their hair on fire every waking hour? I don't know. My sense is that within maybe very specific and privileged realms, maybe yes, especially with the pandemic, right? It's like, oh, it turns out you could work from home. Oh, it turns out you can have an entire company to pivot so that people can work from home.

I feel like I've heard about more places trying out different experiments with time, like giving certain days off or giving people more flexibility. I think there's also had to be more of, kind of reckoning with childcare and work and the flexibility that that requires. And maybe like more people are just sort of thinking about work time versus non-work time

because the distinction feels so arbitrary now, if it's just all at your computer. But at the same time, I just think about Amazon. What is going to stop Amazon from completely exploiting every single second of their workers time? I don't know, I don't see a shift in that. I only see that accelerating. And so, again, I think that kind of divide between the two, where there is latitude to think about those kinds of things.

Yes, there's probably some movement in that direction, but there's just this whole other swath, right? Like this whole other supporting layer where people, I think, are actually probably being squeezed more. I mean, I feel like I've read about, like like skeleton crews doing the same work that like many more people were doing before and getting paid the same were even less. So that does not seem promising to me. This next question I think maybe goes to the layer of the privileged, but I believe in the book you talk about another book called the Burnout Society in which the author says existential tiredness can be a positive thing that, you know, maybe we're heading toward a tipping point that we're just so fed up with this always on always connected always comparing ourselves to other people, doom scrolling,

disconnected from what matters, like other people in nature, that we may reach a point of sort of creative desperation. Do you believe that? Yeah, it's not one moment though. It's not like you have an aha moment and you just totally walk away and and that's it for me. There's multiple moments where I get like super embroiled and stuff. I had that happen to me this year. There was just so much going on in the news,

so much to be worried about. Yeah, I did find at one point in the year that I just kind of reached like a mini breaking point. And I think I spent like two weeks off of social media or something like that. And just like changed some of my habits and things were very different after that. But I'm sure that in the future,

like this will have to happen again. Right. This thing, it'll just be once in a while. You, yeah, right, you reach this point of disgust. That is actually quite instructive. I mean, I think that's kind of like where that's what happened in late 2016. I think that's where how to do nothing came from was like a moment of being just totally flattened. And then in that state of kind of like forced receptivity, the world kind of comes back into view. And if I'm hearing you correctly,

old kind of comes back into view. And if I'm hearing you correctly, it's happened even after having written a book called How to Do Nothing and you expect it to continue to happen that it's, that this is a natural cycle of dysregulation and then re-regulation. Yeah, I think so. And even if it's not, I think that it's thinking about it that way kind of puts less pressure on you, right? Like I know this is talked about in Buddhism, right? Like you can make being sort of goalless into its own goal, right? Like you could you could try to optimize your doing nothing. And so I think like being realistic and just saying like this is just a lifelong

commitment to re-examine over and over again. And it's never going to be total perfect control. It can't be. That I'm just like committing to asking myself these questions over and over again. I have personally fallen into the trap of making my meditation into a box to be checked. And it's like someone's like semi-athletic, it's like showing off to myself and others, and not actually taking much of what I'm training on the cushion out into the rest of my life. So yeah, and then having to recalibrate. I feel like I get much more out of less meditation now because I'm less sweaty about it. I'm not trying to fit in as X amount per day per say.

And as a consequence, I'm showing up with the right mindset for the practice and for many other things. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how we can turn anything into a really goal-directed practice. I mean, for a while, I was getting that way about my number of miles walked a day. And then I was like, this is so silly. Like, you know, when did this start? But something I have been thinking about a lot

during the pandemic is that in some ways, it's very understandable this impulse to want to control something about your life or about yourself, right? It's like you're surrounded by a situation in which everything's out of control, especially right now. And I think it's very natural to react to that by wanting to sort of keep things in almost like neurotic order as your kind of space where you control things. And I think that that can very quickly spill over

into kind of like obsession with order and control, especially controlling oneself. It's like, well, I can't control anything around me, so I'm gonna control myself. And so I think the things that most successfully knock me out of that are these like reminders, like the kind of good version of the reminders of how little control you have, right? It's like for me, it's like thinking about

geological time. I like I've been getting really into rocks lately, so I'm learning all about the Bay Area Geology, and it's like, if I go to this park that I go to all the time, but now I'm looking at the rocks, and I'm like, I don't know what I thought before. Like the rocks are just there. I just like didn't think about like, what does it mean that a rock is here and like where did it come from and how did it form? And like, that's not a replica of a rock. That's a real rock that like came out of the ground, you know?

And you think about that and then you just realize that you're this tiny speck. And it's very humbling and it makes it a little bit. It's again that sort of zooming out punchline where it's like, okay, I was controlling my little thing, but it's like from any other perspective, it's completely absurd. Is there a way in which all of the physical and intellectual, paragraph nations, you know, your walks and your various interests from birds to rocks to whatever. Well, for sure, are really healing in the sense that they can kind of jar you out of one out of a, um, sort of obsessive optimization.

But in some ways, didn't you kind of do a meta optimizing by turning it all into a book? Maybe, but that was not my intention. And I actually never intended to read a book. I gave that talk. And the reason I gave that talk, I should add, is because the conference organizers asked me to give a talk in late 2016, and they said it could be about anything I wanted. And they asked me that at the time that I was going and sitting in this Rose Garden doing nothing.

So I just submitted the title, how to do nothing, and it actually didn't have a talk yet. And so that was its own accident. And then I gave the talk and an author that I really love, Adam Greenfield, just emailed me out of the blue and said, oh, I think you should consider making this into a book, which that would not have occurred to me. And honestly, I just really love reading and I love writing.

And I was kind of like blissfully naive of the whole world of like what it means to publish a book. And I just, for me at the time, it's almost like another art project because I was making a lot more visual art at the time. Although my, my visual work has always had a lot of writing in it. So I just enjoyed it. And it's very different this time around. But it's when I was writing it, it was really just an act of like, it's like that feeling when you're a kid and you collected a bunch of cool rocks and someone comes over and you have to show them all your rocks. And it's almost a little bit obnoxious. Like, you look at all of my rocks. But you're,

it's like, you're not, it's like, you're sort of showing off, but it's more about the rocks. Having someone be as amazed with these rocks as you are. How has the success of the book gone down with you? Because as somebody who's suspicious of capitalism to have a really successful book to kind of, I think I heard you say something the effect of, you know, to be kind of the, to have anti-capitalism and anti-productivity sort of to have anti-capitalism and anti-productivity sort of wrapped up in sold. Has there been some cognitive dissonance there? Oh yeah, definitely. By the way, I say this as with no judgment because I'm like a ridiculously ambitious, constantly push, push pushing and selling, selling, selling. So I this is not, I just want to be clear, this is asked from a friendly, curious place.

Yeah, right. Well, it's like anyone who's put a book into the world has experienced some version of this. I feel like I was definitely surprised. I mean, maybe I shouldn't have been, but I think I was just so wrapped up in the excitement, again, of like sharing the cool rocks that I guess I just, I wasn't even thinking about

the things that I was gonna have to do after the book was I was just thinking about getting it written. And it was definitely painful. You know, I write at the beginning about the story of the useless tree that doesn't get chopped down because it's a weird shape and that being a weird shaped tree is a way of resisting the sawmill. And then it's then I'm writing that and then I'm watching a way of resisting the sawmill.

And then I'm writing that and then I'm watching the book go into the sawmill. And it's like, you know, it's definitely a nail fighter for me. But I think I kind of made my piece with it where I recognize that some of it is just necessary. It's like if you want people to read your book, you have to, they have to find out about it somehow. And this is, this is the world that we live in. This is how people find out about things. And then I think if you're lucky, you have some decisions you can make, right?

Like, okay, you have to do a certain amount of publicity, but you don't have to become, like I don't need to become a guru. Like I don't need to become like, like how to do nothing TM. And my Instagram account is very boring. I don't do Instagram stories. I don't do, it's like once in a while,

it's like a picture of a bird. And I could see like a social media manager coming along and being like, oh, this is a really unexploded resource. Like you have all these followers and you could be, and it's like, ah, well, you know, that may be true, but I'm gonna draw the line there. So it's kind of like this acknowledgement of like, I will do the required amount,

and then beyond that, I will exercise my judgment about how much I wanna participate in that. Because for me, it's like really, I'm very again to come back to that idea of protecting. I'm very protective of the part of my identity that can't be commodified or shouldn't be commodified. It seems like a delicate dance because so you do do some Instagram.

You do write books and put your name on them and then do interviews to get the word out, all of which again, I do all of those things in way more. But you also wanna make sure, as you said, that you're protecting the part of you that cannot be commodified. Yeah, it is very delicate, and that's another one of those things where it's like, you know, the needle goes back and forth. It's like, oh, I'm doing too much.

I've sort of lost sight of myself. And then, or like, you know, I need to do more. Or, you know, it's just this kind of like constant adjustment. But something that's been really important for me to do, oh, I started doing this when I was writing the book, and then I've done it ever since, is once in a long while, I will go to, you know, on a very short trip somewhere fairly close by,

I'm very fortunate to live in a Bay Area, surrounded by mountains, by myself for about three days. I mean, speaking of privilege, that's a very privileged thing to do. But I find that those trips are really important for me to just realign in some ways or just an experience. It sounds strange, but like experience fellow feeling with myself.

Because I think that that's part of what gets lost or what I worry about losing in the process of having to be a public persona or something like that. So that you become very one dimensional or I should say two dimensional. And the only relationship you're aware of is between that image and the audience versus a more three-dimensional kind of experience where you can have a conversation with yourself or yourselves. And so those kind of little moments have been really only more and more important for me. I wish I had had this conversation before.

I wrote 10% happy, or it would have been quite useful. It's been a sheer pleasure to sit and talk to you. Are there areas where I should have directed the conversation, but failed to? I would maybe just add one thing, because it's been so helpful to me during the pandemic, which is towards the end of the book, I asked this question. Basically, if you're talking about the attention economy, like what if you divested some attention from the attention economy and you reinvested it elsewhere. And part of what I'm suggesting and reinvesting it is

your ecological surroundings, but it's also just other people. And I have found it very helpful during the pandemic to notice when I am being driven toward social media by feelings of isolation and loneliness and to kind of recognize that and kind of stop there. And then think, what is this really about? Is it that I need to talk to my parents? Do I need to call my friend? The thing that I'm seeking, where is it actually? Because it's not here. It's never there. So I have found it really, really helpful to kind of redirect those efforts or that attention towards specific people,

or specific groups of people. And, you know, I've been getting a lot of really, yesterday I got two letters in the mail from friends. And I sat down. I just think about how different that is on social media. I sat down, I opened them, and I read them, and then I just kind of sat with that. And it was like that is to me worth like a million times more than anything I am going to experience on social media, even from friends. And so I think that those connections have always been really important, but I think as the pandemic wears on, I think that that's a really important strategy. I don't want to call it a strategy. It's just something to try instead of your usual engagement with what appears to be the

social world. I like it because it's, I like it a lot because it's really, for at least the way I hear it. It's kind of building a new habit, a new muscle. You can notice what kind of self-medication am I doing as I reach with a zombie arm toward the phone to update my app replies on Twitter or whatever it is. Emily likes I've gone on Instagram. What need, what itch am I trying to scratch here? It sounds like you create a new neural pathway that's like,

uh, okay, I don't actually need to do that. This is a cue to call mom. This is a cue to write a letter. This is a cue to whatever. Right. I mean, it could be a cue to just cry. Like, you know, I mean, like speaking of habitual ways of thinking, it's like, it's been so long that you can really lose sight at the same time that you're wrapped up in the details of whatever current tragedy is going on. You can also lose sight of the fact that although you may be safe in your apartment, sort of living the same day over and over again, there is this pandemic. I think that there's also this risk of not registering these feelings about that and feelings about loss and mortality that maybe sometimes when you're reaching for

the phone, it's to not deal with that or to not look at that. Excellent point. I'm glad you brought that up and I'm glad I asked whether I missed something. It's really great to connect to you. Thank you for doing this. Thanks for taking the time to do it. Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure.

It was both productive and anti-productive at the same time. That's the best combination. Thanks again to Jenny, really enjoyed that conversation. Also want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns, our fearless leader, our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our producer, Jules Dodson, is our AP, our sound designer is Matt Boynton from Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wertel,

is our production coordinator. We get an enormous amount of really helpful input from TPH colleagues such as Jen Poient, Liz Levin, Ben Rubin, Nate Toby. As always, a big hearty salute to my ABC News colleagues, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

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