“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”23

As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize.

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

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing.

Bartleby does not refuse to do anything. If Bartleby had said, “I will not,” his act of resistance would have merely negated the law.

Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear. What he proposed in their absence was simple: relaxed contemplation in a community that was turned away from the city at

the “nothing” that I propose is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity

Arriving at Camp Grounded, visitors passed through a “cultish tech-check tent run by the International Institute of Digital Detoxification,”4 where they recited a pledge, watched a five-minute video involving sock puppets, and handed their phones over to camp guides wearing hazmat suits, who sealed them in plastic bags labeled “biohazard.” They agr