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‘How to do nothing’ to avoid falling into forced productivity
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When you reach adulthood, there are few pleasures greater than doing nothing. Being free from obligations, no matter how mundane, and throwing yourself on the couch to enjoy inactivity is the end of many people throughout their days. The problem that is sometimes encountered is that even these free moments fall within a planning: we live under a ‘system’ that makes all our time is divided into moments that have a function; no room for free will.
Jenny Odell, writer and professor at Stanford University, defends in the essay ‘How to do nothing’ (Ariel) that lack of activity is the greatest form of protest that
we have on hand. And it is that, even the ways in which we occupy our free time, with social networks or streaming platforms, make companies and algorithms take advantage of our moments of relaxation. “Technologies capture, optimize and appropriate each and every one of our minutes, understood as financial resources,” argues the writer in the book. This, of course, does not have an impact only on free time, but also on personal relationships.
We live under a connectivity without limits that, apart from making us constantly interact, not only monitors these interactions, but also transforms them from the root. “They have removed the nuances of face-to-face conversation, taking along, along the way, a lot of information and context, ”explains Odell. Thus, he argues that this ‘doing nothing’ is something more than dedicating our free time to technologies; it is somehow to stand up to ‘modern life’. “The first half of doing nothing has to do with distancing yourself from the attention economy; the other half deals with reconnecting with something else. And that other thing is nothing less than time and space, “he says. For this reason, he defends to partially put aside the life that passes online to cultivate the roots to a place that is focused on the here and now.
The paradox of disconnection
But, although the idea of leaving the online plane behind to focus on ourselves in essence, the author also warns that many times these ‘disconnections’, increasingly widespread, have the objective of incorporating us into productive life again with more force, for which, in a way, is to continue making the same mistakes. “The withdrawals are sold as a kind of trick to increase our productivity when we return to work“, Explain. In addition, he adds that this impulse to leave everything behind has two major problems: on the one hand, it would somehow be turning our back on the world in which we live and ignoring our responsibility to it. On the other, that “it is largely unfeasible.” He explains his own experience, in which although he claims to greatly enjoy moments of separation from his reality, these are unsustainable in time. “As much as I would like to live in the forest, where the telephone does not work for me, or avoid the newspapers (…), a total resignation would be a mistake,” he says.
“What I suggest is that we adopt a protective attitude towards ourselves (…), towards what is left of what makes us human,” says Odell. Therefore encourages protect own spacesas well as the time that we can dedicate to activities and non-instrumental thoughts. Like what Virginia Woolf defended in her “own room”, that women could have a space just for themselves, without outside influences, to be able to develop, understand each other and explore everything that the corseted society of that moment allowed us to do , Odell wants us to be capable, not to have free time to fill with activities, but to live with that period of inactivity to dedicate it to what, in the end, makes us human.