How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
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Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#2I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes time, and after a couple weeks it’s easy to see that life is so, so easy without the obsession of always consuming something. And what a better way to come up with interesting ideas, too. I’d take an hour of staring at a wall over an hour of Hacker News any day, if I was trying specifically to drum up ideas for something to hack on.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#3I spend most of my "doing nothing" time to imagine/predict things.
Or analyzing & answering random questions from my own (asked at that moment or before)
It seems to be one of the good habits I have.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#4I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…
> we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored
Yup.. personally I somehow feel it's "wrong" that I sit there and do nothing on the rare occasion I get the opportunity.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#5For me, it’s work that caused a constant sense of anxiety for the last decade. When I’m not doing anything, I start thinking about work or doing work. There is just so much to do, as an entrepreneur.
I have this feeling like sure, I can be idle for an hour or so. But it would be incredibly boring and also why?
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#6It's an interesting dichotomy — the author paints doing nothing as "detaching from life online" and instead "engaging in an activity without considering whether it’s productive".
Personally, a lot of my "doing nothing" happens online as well. Whether that's good or bad I can't say, but my goal is definitely not to be productive when I'm randomly browsing the internet.
As the review points out, it works for the author and her artistic lifestyle, but probably wouldn't for me.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#7There's a reason we get so many of our great ideas in the shower - our 'diffuse brain' is going to work, forging new paths and making connections.
I think the biggest danger of these products is that they are optimized to co-opt our attention, reducing the time available for this genuinely deep thinking.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#8I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…
I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook.
Which reminds me the first time I did a longer silent meditation retreat. Even though this was before the smartphone age, I missed listening to music, talking to people, reading the news, etc. Basically any strong sensory perception. Once you are over the hump and accept these cravings, it becomes easier and you find a certain 'lightness' in not having to react to every emotion immediately.
Since last year or so I have become more conscientious about my smartphone use. And I have tried to curtail use a fair bit. Since smartphones are often genuinely useful (navigation, occasional messaging, music) I didn't want to stop cold turkey. Also, to me it is more interesting to learn to break the addiction while still being able to use a phone responsibly. I removed all games from my phone and most social media apps. All those moments where you'd normally take out your phone have become so much nicer: there are more opportunities to rest your mind, pick up small conversations with people, etc.
Besides the addictiveness of phones, the other problem of social media is that everything has become a reputation game. The other day, I saw a video of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder just wandering around a park in Seattle in 1992. People recognized him, would come up to him and they'd just chat. Some people would ask an autograph, but that's it. As someone pointed out in the comments, this would not be possible anymore today. If a somewhat famous person would be recognized, people would focus more on getting the perfect pic for Instagram likes than actually connecting with a real person.
Similarly, when I was a teenager, we would just go to concerts, fool around, kiss, play guitar miserably, all the things that teenagers do, without the need to continuously document our perfect party life or being aware of the risk that someone might film you when you do something stupid. We were much freer than kids are now.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#9I'm tree weeks into:
git clone https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts.git && cd hosts && pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt && python3 updateHostsFile.py --auto --replace --extensions social porn gambling
and going strong.
What I figured so far is that the trick is to stay away from the browser. So I've removed Safari on my iPhone (well, more like hidden), I've changed my rss client to newsboat - command line one, I moved all of my youtube subscriptions into rss, I've written a script that keeps track of videos I would like to watch from those rss subscriptions, downloads them in bulk in background (all hail systemd timers) and then gives me dmenu to pick a video to play in mpv.
I had Google app installed on my iPhone but I noticed that I use this thing to surf mindlessly again, so I deleted it. Basically I can't google stuff anymore on my phone =/. But so be it, it turned into communicator/navigator/music player/food orderer.
I did start reading books again because... Well, taking phone into toilet is pointless now, gotta do something, so I started reading books again. I'm actually reading multiple at the time, there is a paper book in the toilet, there is a book on my iphone and there is a book on my laptop, three completely unrelated topics so whenever I feel like procrastinating I read one of them. Well, except the one in toilet, I'm not procrastinating, I'm working hard there ;-).
Stay away from the browser guys.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#10Should I get this book on my Kindle? It’s available there.