clear view down the end of the barrel
This Week in Reading:
How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
I haven’t been writing, and Jenny Odell told me that it was okay. That it is okay to do nothing, to not transform every lived moment into some kind of tangible product. There can be input, without output.
I read How To Do Nothing back in June, right around my birthday, and I reread it this past week, after I burst into tears that I hadn’t gotten a single thing done during the only evening I had reserved for going to my studio. The thesis of the book is that in our modern world that values busy-ness, efficiency, and connectivity above all else, doing nothing is both a restorative, and radical act. Odell describes how the attention economy has weoponized apps to keep us scrolling just a few minutes longer, keep us swiping through just a few more ads. Big tech’s currency is attention and we are all going broke staring at screens. Though critical, she is refreshingly gentle. She does not chastise us for our ever growing addiction to social media, as she puts it, blaming people for being unable to resist the attention economy would be like criticizing someone for letting an algorithm beat them at chess.
Instead, she offers alternatives for where to put our attention. By asking us to do nothing she is actually asking us to engage more deeply on a micro level. To stop frantically doing, and instead sit still, absorb, observe. She talks about how in her own life, recentering her attention has led to increasing fascination with birdcalls and local foliage, and in doing so, she has become more grounded in place, which has grown increasingly specific the longer she looks at it.
At its core, the book is challenging us to unhook ourselves from the cogs of capitalism, just for a moment. To be honest, I’ve been able to detach myself from my job very successfully. I build wooden crates for a living, which is the kind of bizarre, repetitive, job that is impossible to confuse with meaningful service. It quite literally, does not matter. That was the main appeal when I took the position three years ago. It is a job that I leave behind at 5 pm. It is the way I participate in capitalism, and provides me with the means to feed and house myself, but it doesn’t provide me with meaning, or purpose, or a sense of identity. It has allowed me to define myself in ways that exist outside of the realm of capitalism: friendship, love, place. It also has the added benefit of preventing work problems from crushing my self-confidence. But while I have successfully extricated myself from my 9 to 5, I have definitely not been able to fully disentangle capitalism from my psyche.
I haven’t been writing but I also haven’t mastered doing nothing. These past many months I turned a year older and moved in with Sophie and went camping many, many, which was wonderful for the smells and the stars, but also for the extended period of time outside of cell range. I climbed the tallest mountain in Southern California in a grueling backpacking trip (which certainly wasn’t doing nothing, but also was an inherently purposeless activity, so in its own way, it was doing nothing). I’ve been going to concerts and weddings and birthday parties.
I haven’t been writing and Jenny Odell told me it was okay, but it doesn’t feel okay. I am grateful, in many ways, that writing is not my profession, that it can just be something I do, when I want to because I want to. It is good to have one thing that I do exist outside the framework of capitalism and hustling and monetization. But of course I have felt bad about it, because I feel badly when I haven’t been productive, even when I’ve been so dizzyingly busy it is unthinkable to imagine doing more. Even the many parts of my life that aren’t literally monetized are influenced by a capitalistic morality that is ingrained into my bones. I feel good when I have been productive because some hard wired part of myself believes that I must optimize all aspects of my existence, because the most optimized use of time is the most profitable use of time, and I will be therefore be compensated accordingly, and an increase in compensation corresponds with an increase of my value as a person. The flaws of this logic are obvious when written out like this, but knowing that my self-esteem is a reflection of 26 years of capitalistic immersion therapy, is different than actually disentangling the two of them.
This compulsion to optimize time is driven by capitalism’s inextricable pull, but that in itself is driven by humans’ deep rooted fear of mortality. We are scared of mortality, and thus, we feverishly try to optimize the finite amount of time we have on earth. Capitalism just gives us an easy framework to judge how successfully we are doing this. The terrifying, abstract, concept of “time” is transformed into the more concrete idea of “labor” which can then be easily transformed into a quantifiable system of “value.” Existential dread has been neatly divided and subtracted into a ledger of numbers rounded to the second decimal place. To obsess over capitalism is to escape obsessing over mortality. You can’t be a Wall Street broker and be comfortable with the fact that you are going to die one day-- try to convince me otherwise.
That’s why it is so hard to do nothing. That is why it is so hard to step back from capitalism, and so easy to get so wrapped up in our jobs. To admit that our role in the labor force doesn’t define our existence is to drain the projected purpose out of 40+ hours of our week. Without that to distract us it is a clear view down the end of the barrel.
I have not succeeded in doing nothing, but I have staunched my compulsion to turn everything into something else. I am writing less, documenting less, sharing less, posting less. I’ve been reading a lot of books but I’ve stopped keeping track of the number. Life is passing by and it is so delicious and cozy and good. I am letting it pass, letting myself enjoy it and then enjoy the next day and the next week and the next month after that. I am, yes, paying attention. To the sky and the chill against my arm and the warmth radiating off the California concrete. I’ve been basking in the temporality of the day to day. In the knowledge that these things are for me alone, and not for some broader, nebulous public. But I also feel like for me, personally, writing is the greatest form of attention I can grant to something. It is the way I finish a sentence. For months my brain has only produced fragments that break off into an emdash. It feels good to end a thought with a period again.
"Winner Winner", oil on canvas, 2019
Studio-ing
In 2017 I did a project called Winner Winner, in which I made an oil painting of a blue ribbon and submitted it to the LA County Fair. Two years out of college I was frustrated with how impenetrable the art world felt, how arbitrary it all was. It didn’t matter how good the work was, success hinged on connections and wealth and perceived coolness. I was tired of the openings where no one looked at the art, and the networking and the opaqueness. So I paid $3 to display my painting in the LA County Fair, an alternative art space just outside of the high brow elitist Los Angeles art scene. (The LA County Fair organizes the art display by artist first name.) I was hoping to get a blue ribbon for my blue ribbon. I just wanted to win, for once. And then I lost. Or rather, I got third place—beaten by a pencil drawing of Prince.
This year I made an oil painting of the white ribbon I had won two years earlier, and resubmitted it to the LA County Fair. It won a blue ribbon. Together, they make a perfect diptych: a white ribbon for my blue ribbon, and a blue ribbon for my white ribbon.
Further Reading:
A couple other motivational, pivotal books I read during my long hiatus: How To Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. I also loved this Manrepeller piece about the pressure to turn your hobbies into sidehustles.
See you next week, hopefully.