2022-09-10
18 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Our Think Again series continues today.
The Art of Doing Nothing.
I've spent more time in Washington Square park than any other green space in New York City.
It's my go to just Killing Time park and I'm convinced that it's one of the best people watching spots on the planet.
There's the one shady area where the jazz musicians usually play.
The person who's always feeding pigeons, the guy who's been suntanning in the 60s, same exact spot for years now.
It's hard to look at a place that you know really well and try to see it with fresh eyes.
But that's what I did one day recently after having a conversation with Jenny Odell.
Jenny is an artist and the author of the book how to Do Resisting the Attention Economy.
It's doing nothing with like air quotes.
I'll tell you more about how I did nothing in the park a little later in the show.
But to be clear, Jenny's idea of doing nothing is not about being bored.
It's not about sitting around watching paint dry.
The point is to pull away from the things that we call productive in a capitalistic or work oriented way and instead engage in things that aren't measured in dollars or clicks.
You can actually perceive more, sometimes by doing less.
And I think I quote the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hampton, who basically is saying that like if you're silent, then you can actually hear what is around you.
Jenny says in a way it's an act of refusal, refusing to be tied to the so called attention economy.
She thinks of it quite literally as corporate platforms buying and selling human attention.