Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.Starting what many call a side hustle can be time-consuming and require you to work even more hours than your day job. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. ![]() I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. “This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.” After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner-aren’t those all then “work environments”? At that time, in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight-hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. I learned this during the few years that I worked in the marketing department of a large clothing brand. “Though it finds its baldest expression in things like the Fiverr ads, this phenomenon-of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life-isn’t constrained to the gig economy. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation-or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in video.”17 When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.” In a New Yorker article aptly titled “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino concludes after reading a Fiverr press release: “This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. You might be a doer.” Here, the idea that you would even withhold some of that time to sustain yourself with food is essentially ridiculed. ![]() Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You follow through on your follow-through. In this one, a gaunt twenty-something stares dead-eyed into the camera, accompanied by the following text: “You eat a coffee for lunch. “In 2017, Fiverr ran a similar ad to NEC’s “Power Lunch,” but missing the lunch. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy ![]() Their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy, recalling a question that one of my favorite authors, David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”20” These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in. I noticed that some ravens live half in and half out of the Rose Garden, until I realized that there is no “rose garden” to them. ![]() And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are. They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress-they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week. I assume they just see a human who for some reason pays attention to them. “Inevitably, I began to wonder what these birds see when they look at me.
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