8 ms·

How to Do Nothing (2017)

215 points by panic 7y ago

hnnnnnnnggggggg 7y ago
I just came here to say: I would like to make babies with the author of this article, and I don't care who knows it. I am unashamed.
winningcontinue 7y ago
>suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality wonderful sentiment. Too many occassions pass where we miss out on these moments because we're worried too much about productivity.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
> Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: "…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. " Well said. I really liked this article, and as a side note, the "satellite landscapes" are a thing of beauty.
- lorddagoba 7y ago
  It's interesting how much this relates to competitive strategy games like chess, kungfu, dota etc. 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.
- kmtrowbr 7y ago
  I found the article to be really meaningful. Me too, after the 2016 election I found I had to withdraw, because it became more obvious to me that there's something deeply sick about the relationship between the news media, "scaring people," and modern smartphones. 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.
mikekchar 7y ago
For an article about nothing, I wasn't expecting so much of it. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to read the whole thing. My biggest criticism is that I think there are too many connections drawn at various points. It's one of those things where X led me to Y which led me to Z, but X doesn't really have any bearing on Z at all. Because a path led there, it gives credence to the idea that they are connected, but the only connection is the author. In that way, I found it difficult to read as I felt I was searching for a needle in a haystack. I don't need the author's stream of consciousness in order to do nothing. I have my own. I kept wondering why I am looking at her rose garden and her birds rather than looking at my own.
- parksy 7y ago
  Personally I think these types of writings offer valuable opportunity for reflection, I found the stream of thought approach appealing and overall enjoyed the experience of reading this. 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 ::)
  - GrumpyNl 7y ago
    Friend om mine wrote this book about it. https://andiepeveen.wordpress.com/artofpositivelaziness/ https://andiepeveen.wordpress.com/artofpositivelaziness/
    - verelo 7y ago
quickthrower2 7y ago
I might look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm extremely busy at a cellular level.
- marktani 7y ago
  time to ask for a promotion!
- basetop 7y ago
  Only 10% of you at the cellular level is you. The 90% of you at the cellular level is bacteria. https://bigthink.com/amped/humans-10-human-and-90-bacterial https://bigthink.com/amped/humans-10-human-and-90-bacterial
  - Filligree 7y ago
    In terms of cell count, yes. Not in terms of weight, or computation. :)
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    You took the biological meaning. I was wondering if anyone would take 'cellular' to mean, well, people on their phones!
  - eigenloss 7y ago
    the ratio is more like 3:3.8 cell-count-wise and 400:1 mass-wise [-0.2333] [-0.23333] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/
binnary 7y ago
Hard pass. Going to read the book instead.
code_scrapping 7y ago
Downvotes be damned, but after listening to the actual Eyeo talk, I'm surprised how much fluff (Jenny's work) can be added to a good statement (Gilles Deleuze's statement). Art is supposed to be a consideration on human sentiment/action/whatever, but this is just next level of not actually producing anything and calling it "art" - not because of its value, but because it won't fit into any other meaningful category... and then you do a keynote with it.
waveymaus 7y ago
I'm currently halfway through Jenny's book of the same title, and the situated and the personal, with a strong philosophical grounding makes this such a refreshing read compared to the rest of the literature on attention. Attending is such a subjective experience, and the personal account of developing a different kind of attention (especially one that is situated in places relatable to myself) makes this so much more meaningful than other, still excellent, but more View From Nowhere texts such as Stand Out of Our Light, or The Attention Merchants. Reading this post earlier this year stopped me in my tracks and would highly recommend the book if you enjoyed this!
- trevyn 7y ago
  While I am glad to see and encourage the production of more material on the topic of intentional attention, I found this particular book amateurish and much more of an angry clichéd rant about active resistance against certain qualities of our current political and cultural climate than useful and fundamental advice on personal attentional freedom, and would actively dis-recommend this book.
  - vollmond 7y ago
    Do you have others which you would recommend in this vein?
    - waveymaus 7y ago
      there are a few on the topic of the attention economy: - 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.
  - waveymaus 7y ago
    well i’m sorry to hear that. i understand your point about cliché. there is a good deal of tired arguments to be made about how to be more human, but i’ve still never read one that is as personal as this one. 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.
loblollyboy 7y ago
3 paragraphs in and I'm not following, but I do like the pretty pictures. I guess she got through to me, if only for a bit.
marmaduke 7y ago
Jonathan Crary's 24/7 is a somewhat parallel if less navel gazing take on similar topics.
bubble-07 7y ago
I find many of the comments on this article hilarious -- Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of complaining that your attention span is too short to read an article about the joys of paying attention to the world around you?
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  This article is self important wankery. A few decent thoughts were able to sneak in, and you've somehow turned that into snarking at everyone who's brain is rightly trying to pull the emergency eject lever.
  - bubble-07 7y ago
    I didn't interpret the article that way at all -- I can understand how somebody saying "hey, look at these neat things I found and learned outside!" could be misinterpreted as "self-important wankery" due to the natural "great for you!" or "who gives a shit?" reactions that kind of thing tends to garner. I at least found it neat _because of_ (not in spite of) the feeling that it was almost as if I was reading from the author's personal diary. Why such a negative reaction? I legitimately don't get your hostility. Imagine if a kindergartener wrote a book about their day spent playing outside on a Saturday -- would you call that "self-important wankery", too?
    - forgottenpass 7y ago
      >Why such a negative reaction? I was just matching the tone of >>Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of [personal failing leading to not valuing the article as I did]
      - bubble-07 7y ago
        Okayyy, if you say sooo... You don't need to take everything you see on the internet as unnecessarily hostile. Heck, I was just trying to make light of what I saw as an absurd situation.
jaden 7y ago
I half-expected this to be a link to http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ It's harder than you think.
good-idea 7y ago
It should be noted that she published a book of the same name earlier this year: https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp/1612197493 https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp...
kyleblarson 7y ago
I agree with the overall sentiment of putting aside time for 'doing nothing'. However I read the first few chapters of her book and found it to insufferably epitomize the ramblings of an entitled millennial.
rdiddly 7y ago
I needed this right now.

215 points by panic 7y ago

I just came here to say: I would like to make babies with the author of this article, and I don't care who knows it. I am unashamed.

winningcontinue 7y ago

>suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality wonderful sentiment. Too many occassions pass where we miss out on these moments because we're worried too much about productivity.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

> Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: "…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. " Well said. I really liked this article, and as a side note, the "satellite landscapes" are a thing of beauty.

lorddagoba 7y ago
It's interesting how much this relates to competitive strategy games like chess, kungfu, dota etc. 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.
kmtrowbr 7y ago
I found the article to be really meaningful. Me too, after the 2016 election I found I had to withdraw, because it became more obvious to me that there's something deeply sick about the relationship between the news media, "scaring people," and modern smartphones. 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.

mikekchar 7y ago

For an article about nothing, I wasn't expecting so much of it. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to read the whole thing. My biggest criticism is that I think there are too many connections drawn at various points. It's one of those things where X led me to Y which led me to Z, but X doesn't really have any bearing on Z at all. Because a path led there, it gives credence to the idea that they are connected, but the only connection is the author. In that way, I found it difficult to read as I felt I was searching for a needle in a haystack. I don't need the author's stream of consciousness in order to do nothing. I have my own. I kept wondering why I am looking at her rose garden and her birds rather than looking at my own.

parksy 7y ago
Personally I think these types of writings offer valuable opportunity for reflection, I found the stream of thought approach appealing and overall enjoyed the experience of reading this. 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 ::)
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  Friend om mine wrote this book about it. https://andiepeveen.wordpress.com/artofpositivelaziness/ https://andiepeveen.wordpress.com/artofpositivelaziness/
  - verelo 7y ago

quickthrower2 7y ago

I might look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm extremely busy at a cellular level.

marktani 7y ago
time to ask for a promotion!
basetop 7y ago
Only 10% of you at the cellular level is you. The 90% of you at the cellular level is bacteria. https://bigthink.com/amped/humans-10-human-and-90-bacterial https://bigthink.com/amped/humans-10-human-and-90-bacterial
- Filligree 7y ago
  In terms of cell count, yes. Not in terms of weight, or computation. :)
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  You took the biological meaning. I was wondering if anyone would take 'cellular' to mean, well, people on their phones!
- eigenloss 7y ago
  the ratio is more like 3:3.8 cell-count-wise and 400:1 mass-wise [-0.2333] [-0.23333] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/

binnary 7y ago

Hard pass. Going to read the book instead.

code_scrapping 7y ago

Downvotes be damned, but after listening to the actual Eyeo talk, I'm surprised how much fluff (Jenny's work) can be added to a good statement (Gilles Deleuze's statement). Art is supposed to be a consideration on human sentiment/action/whatever, but this is just next level of not actually producing anything and calling it "art" - not because of its value, but because it won't fit into any other meaningful category... and then you do a keynote with it.

waveymaus 7y ago

I'm currently halfway through Jenny's book of the same title, and the situated and the personal, with a strong philosophical grounding makes this such a refreshing read compared to the rest of the literature on attention. Attending is such a subjective experience, and the personal account of developing a different kind of attention (especially one that is situated in places relatable to myself) makes this so much more meaningful than other, still excellent, but more View From Nowhere texts such as Stand Out of Our Light, or The Attention Merchants. Reading this post earlier this year stopped me in my tracks and would highly recommend the book if you enjoyed this!

trevyn 7y ago
While I am glad to see and encourage the production of more material on the topic of intentional attention, I found this particular book amateurish and much more of an angry clichéd rant about active resistance against certain qualities of our current political and cultural climate than useful and fundamental advice on personal attentional freedom, and would actively dis-recommend this book.
- vollmond 7y ago
  Do you have others which you would recommend in this vein?
  - waveymaus 7y ago
    there are a few on the topic of the attention economy: - 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.
- waveymaus 7y ago
  well i’m sorry to hear that. i understand your point about cliché. there is a good deal of tired arguments to be made about how to be more human, but i’ve still never read one that is as personal as this one. 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.

loblollyboy 7y ago

3 paragraphs in and I'm not following, but I do like the pretty pictures. I guess she got through to me, if only for a bit.

marmaduke 7y ago

Jonathan Crary's 24/7 is a somewhat parallel if less navel gazing take on similar topics.

bubble-07 7y ago

I find many of the comments on this article hilarious -- Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of complaining that your attention span is too short to read an article about the joys of paying attention to the world around you?

forgottenpass 7y ago
This article is self important wankery. A few decent thoughts were able to sneak in, and you've somehow turned that into snarking at everyone who's brain is rightly trying to pull the emergency eject lever.
- bubble-07 7y ago
  I didn't interpret the article that way at all -- I can understand how somebody saying "hey, look at these neat things I found and learned outside!" could be misinterpreted as "self-important wankery" due to the natural "great for you!" or "who gives a shit?" reactions that kind of thing tends to garner. I at least found it neat _because of_ (not in spite of) the feeling that it was almost as if I was reading from the author's personal diary. Why such a negative reaction? I legitimately don't get your hostility. Imagine if a kindergartener wrote a book about their day spent playing outside on a Saturday -- would you call that "self-important wankery", too?
  - forgottenpass 7y ago
    >Why such a negative reaction? I was just matching the tone of >>Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of [personal failing leading to not valuing the article as I did]
    - bubble-07 7y ago
      Okayyy, if you say sooo... You don't need to take everything you see on the internet as unnecessarily hostile. Heck, I was just trying to make light of what I saw as an absurd situation.

jaden 7y ago

I half-expected this to be a link to http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ It's harder than you think.

good-idea 7y ago

It should be noted that she published a book of the same name earlier this year: https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp/1612197493 https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp...

kyleblarson 7y ago

I agree with the overall sentiment of putting aside time for 'doing nothing'. However I read the first few chapters of her book and found it to insufferably epitomize the ramblings of an entitled millennial.

rdiddly 7y ago

I needed this right now.