How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.

This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long.

“doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something.

One very early example of this approach was the garden school of Epicurus in the fourth century BC. Epicurus, the son of a schoolteacher, was a philosopher who held happiness and leisurely contemplation to be the loftiest goals in life. He also hated the city, seeing in it only opportunism, corruption, political machinations, and military bravado—t

What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time?

It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight.

digital distraction was a bane not because it made people less productive but because it took them away from the one life they had to live.

When Meyrowitz observes of this “one large combined social situation” that certain types of behavior will become impossible, I’m struck by two of these behaviors in particular.