I RECENTLY read a book that painted a bleak world. Everything was curated, calculated, commodified—even humans. Valued in terms of utility, the people of this world hustle fueled by a myth. The book—and the world it painted—was not fictional.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy critiques the fast-paced, consumerist world which increasingly makes it difficult to lead meaningful lives. How many times have we felt guilty for not having done anything “productive” with our day? How many times have we burnt out because we take on too much to keep up with our peers? We have been socialized into believing that efficiency is key and productivity equals value.
For systems and technology, this may be the case. However, we are not robots who merely perform tasks day in and day out at a consistently fast pace. We are humans, frail and fallible, who no matter how hard we try cannot sustain such a performance.
Several times before, I’ve tried this. But at one point or another, I found myself crashing and burning. At the end of every attempt, I was listless and unmotivated. I wanted to run away from everything.
The pandemic created an environment that made it almost effortless to disengage from the world. It is so easy to chalk up missed classes, meetings, and even deadlines to a shoddy internet connection. Limited communication channels made disappearances unnoticeable until a long period has passed. But it is exactly at times like this when it is so tempting and so easy to run away that we should stay.
Let us put aside the question of whether it is even possible to completely shut out the world. Isn’t running away a selfish act? Doing so may separate us from the stressful world we live in but it does not change anything. The structures that we left—those that undoubtedly affect many others like us—will remain the same when we inevitably come back because there was no resistance.
In the same book, Jenny Odell introduces the concept of resisting in place; manifesting our rejection of the world’s ways in our everyday lives. Instead of giving in to the inclination to running away, I tried out this new concept. It was nothing grand.
If anything, I did it through smaller things like reading class materials slowly instead of rushing through it. I wrote down my notes by hand even when digitizing them would save me much more time. On weekdays, I cooked dishes that required more time instead of quick meals.
When the world dictated that I move quickly, I slowed down.
However, because I remained in this world, I could not remain slow all the time. Beholden to an educational system that prioritizes quantity over quality, I am guilty of hustling through some tasks in order to comply with deadlines. At the end of the day, I remain fearful of the consequences that resistance entails. So now I find myself in a constant flux of speeding up and slowing down.
I have come to understand that it is alright. The thing about resisting in place is that it is a daily battle. It is a constant struggle against an entire reality; that in itself is tiring. Being the humans that we are, we can give in to it and slip up.
It is okay to fail to resist at times for so long as we have the will to get back up and carry on to eventually realize change. No matter how many times we fail, running away can never be the answer to the world we find ourselves in.
