How to Do Nothing (2017)
medium.com
medium.com
Well said. I really liked this article, and as a side note, the "satellite landscapes" are a thing of beauty.
If you watch a beginner he has not much to do, but he enjoys what happens seemingly randomly.
Then if you watch a mediocre strategist you will see them hustle and hustle and hustle away, always feeling one step behind optimum.
And then when you watch the experts, they simply refuse to do the 80% of the hustling where they know it has no value for their goals. Then they sit around calculating how an actual opportunity would look like, observing what their opponents are doing and when one of these opportunities comes around they are already prepared and therefore can take it in a relaxed manner.
The thing is step 1 is easy, everybody can do it. But the value in the competitive environments like your working environment are almost zero. Good and bad things happen at random to you. And while you might have less stress in general, the bad things will hurt you badly.
What we actually want is getting to step 3. But few people take the time after reaching step 2 to actually continue learning and optimizing. But that's the way to get to step 3.
The reason people feel that way is because they "just" need to get to that one thing that is in front of them, "just" barely out of reach, not realizing that they don't get it because they are so exhausted.
And the solution is really letting go. Accepting that you won't achieve the opportunities that you see directly in front of you, but rather work on improving yourself to become more capable to achieve anything. And then one needs to continue for quite some time in that state, slowly improving ones health, ones ability to observe oneself and others, recognizing big opportunities that are further away, and realizing which steps to take to reach them.
Since the news and social media apps are purposefully built to be addictive, you have to "save yourself from yourself." I now know a lot about filtering technologies for both my desktop and my mobile phone. I have always loved camping and being outdoors, but these days I feel it more as a need: just sitting in the sun and listening to the wind in the trees. That, and reading really good books.
I see her work here as similar to art movements like Dada: I don't know if the world has really "gone mad" but, as the collective behavior of humanity makes less sense, playful silliness might be the best way to express that you have free will, you love folks and want them to be happy, and that in certain ways, you refuse to engage & put more energy, into events and processes that are harmful.
I think if you have reached a point where you've found your rose garden, that's a beautiful thing and maybe this article and others like it seem less appealing. And I get it can seem contradictory, narcissistic or sacrosanct to want to write (or read) an entire article about something so personal or subjective (and in doing so, add noise to the very noisy environment the author was describing). All valid points of view, which shift in relation to the observer.
Read as an essay on culture, I don't think it has a clear thesis beyond a general sensation of defending our time and space. Explored as a meandering journey through a garden of ideas we're given the opportunity to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings - in a way the article shows us some disjoint pieces of the haystack as experienced by the author (in a very blind-men-describing-the-elephant way), and the needle is ourselves.
Each to their own ::)
Long read yes, meandering but touching too.
Reading this post earlier this year stopped me in my tracks and would highly recommend the book if you enjoyed this!
- stand out of our light by james williams
- the attention merchants by tim wu
- the shallows by nicholas carr
and not on the attention economy, but nervous states by william davies is very much in the similar thread.
as for being “useful”, it is not so cut and dry, which i think her philosophy wouldn’t allow. it isn’t a “do this” so much as it is an “i did this”. and for me, the subjectivity of attention is much better lent to that than some objective diagnosis of attention.
wonderful sentiment. Too many occassions pass where we miss out on these moments because we're worried too much about productivity.
[-0.23333] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/
It's harder than you think.
Maybe one sentence like "Think for a minute..."
Actually this article read kind of like a literary labyrinth, in the sense of it changing directions repeatedly and at the end you realize you haven't gone anywhere. Some people I know greatly enjoy labyrinths, but they are not for me (nor is this article).
As a final point, I am a very fast reader. Were I a slower reader, I likely would have stopped reading the article much sooner. This isn't an article with a surprise ending, so if you didn't like it 1/3 of the way through, I recommend not finishing it.
Literary labyrinths can be fun to explore, though it takes a certain mindset going in. I'd say that pieces like this are not "ingest with morning coffee" pieces, but more like lazy Sunday afternoon tea with (your preferred equivalent to) "Lofi hip hop mix - Beats to Relax/Study to" playing in the background.
The article _does_ go somewhere, though, even if you wind up in nearly the same place you started. I for one didn't know much, if anything about the artists, places, and pieces the writer referenced, nor that BYTE magazine had such weird pictures, nor about the Chapel of the Chimes, nor what a scrub-jay sounds like, nor that Fiverr had such aggressive advertising campaigns, ... etc.
As a collection of a bunch of little things (which suits the point of the article well), I at least found it interesting.