The other day Ada wandered over to the bookshelf and remarked out loud, “How to do Nothing? Who would read a book called THAT. It sounds SO boring.” This was followed by the audible scoff of a seven-year-old going on tween, who thinks she knows a lot about a lot and complains often about not knowing what to do.
She was referring, of course, to Jenny Odell’s 2019 book, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a reflection and flag-raising around the dangers of constant distraction, a meditation on our complicated relationship to technology, and a manifesto on how we can harness it, rather than being harnessed by it. It was published in a moment when the overwhelm of social media, Trump tweets, and productivity culture felt maximally cacophonous, though this was still pre-pandemic, so arguably we were also more innocent back then.
Odell’s antidote was largely a recommendation in two parts: 1) engaging in active listening and 2) training herself to engage with her surroundings—particularly with the natural world. Engagement is the key word here—that is, directing our attention for long enough that it becomes meaningful. Engagement is unsurprisingly a word also co-opted heavily by technology, i.e. “user engagement” is the currency of YouTube and Twitter and The New York Times alike, and something that’s been part of many of my job descriptions. Many, many people and companies have invested in professionals to strategize on how to engage yours or your kid’s brain, a complicated notion at the very least.
This past week I’ve alternated between temptation, guilt, and a general feeling of ugggh as email after email rolled in with one Black Friday / Cyber Monday discount after another. Everyone has something to sell, and it feels like they will say or offer anything until I pay attention. Even though I knew this time of year was coming, it feels like i’m being told to throw money at all my problems, and everyone is simultaneously fighting for my attention and my money. Between this, and other forms of distraction known as sick children, Thanksgiving, catching up on White Lotus Season 2, and a lack of childcare, I found my focus diminished and my brain fairly scattered.
That said, I am a grown adult and have learned certain tools for combatting all this noise. For me, that is stopping and baking something. It’s going for a run or to a yoga class. It’s reading a book without stopping to check my phone for at least an hour. It’s playing with my kids, preferably outdoors. These are all very mundane but consciously chosen activities to partake in that took me a long time to realize were actually good for me. They’re also only really rewarding when participating in them fully, necessarily have minimal to no exchange of capital, and require activating my body, whether my hands (baking, reading), or more athletic physical exertion. Making ceramics and going on long, meandering walks also serve this purpose—that is, providing time to de-stimulate, contemplate, and synthesize all the inputting my brain otherwise has to do. I know when to I need to do one of these things when I just feel bad or guilty or sedentary or have too many tabs open or get the deep sinking feeling of time evaporating as I scroll.
The concern is that children don’t know when to do this; they can’t combat the noise because they only know the noise. Adults have a recollection for a world before screen-based hyper-stimulation, which is tied to our nostalgia for Goonies-style adventuring, romanticization of the dog days of summer, and why we are willing to pay too much to send our children to nature-based educations. We remember being bored, and we remember it—though perhaps abstractly—being good for us (which science has also validated). It taught us a sense of direction (when we got lost in the neighborhood), survival skills (when we were out in the woods), social skills (playing made up games with the neighbor kids), to be good readers (biding many hours at grandma’s house all summer), and many other soft skills like problem-solving, organization, strategizing, etc.
We worry that perhaps this memory of what it felt like to be bored, and the ways we equipped ourselves to combat our boredom, is a sense our kids will never intuitively develop, unless we deliberately teach it to them. We worry that staring into the ether of technology will only feel good, or that in the absence of parental-regulation there’s no foundation for self-regulation.
So how’s a parent to teach a kid how to “resist the attention economy?” The answers and capacity of an individual parent honestly feel up against an intimidating infrastructure of attention-seeking, but perhaps that’s overly pessimistic and we can try and build their own toolkits, slowly and over time. For surely, the ways I engage are not the same as the ways another adult finds their focus, nor will it be the same as the way my kids find their contentedness in being, as they get older and have more autonomy.
In an interview with Romper in 2019, Odell said,
One of the effects of the attention economy is that it figures time so squarely as money, and it also gives the impression that all time is the same: You can have anything or do anything at any time. By contrast, I think of how I feel when I see certain favorite wildflowers that I know only bloom during one month of the year — or when I see a rare bird on its migration north. These experiences are beautiful and meaningful because they exist within limits that I don’t control; this time is not, in fact, the same as all other time. In a similar way, stages of life take on meaning because we know they will end.
Parenting your kids to resist the attention economy often feels like preserving the curiosity they’re born with. It’s letting them ask the questions. It’s encouraging them to take chances, leaving more to serendipity, encouraging adventure, chaos, novelty. In a way, it’s resisting routine; it’s being specific. It’s creating more that’s ephemeral. It’s making. It’s finding the wildflower or the rare bird, or the poisonous mushroom, or at least going out into the woods to try and find it, so they’re in the habit of always looking.
Recommendations:
To read: Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s newsletter for The Cut on kids’ literature—on hating Dog Man and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but loving that it made her kids readers along with an excellent wishlist of recommended middle-grade books.
To make: This Smitten Kitchen roasted cabbage with walnuts and parm. Delicious and easy and savoy cabbage is beautiful.
For your LEGO fanatic: This 22 page PDF on the names of every LEGO piece. Julian’s in the process of memorizing this and loves to correct me when I get the names wrong. LOL.
To read: This great profile on filmmaker and writer Sarah Polley in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, and the inspiring way she ran the set of her new film, “Women Talking.”
Best jams: Rare Bird jams are so delicious and make a great gift. Feel free to send me a pack!
To see: I had no idea there was an Italian Modern Art museum in NYC until last week, but there is! And they have a great-looking exhibit, Bruno Munari: The Child Within, (open Fri / Sat) up through Jan 14th. Excited to check this out.
To listen: Ezra Klein’s interview with Maryanne Wolf on “deep reading.” It’s less about what we read and it’s more about how we read. Also related to this entire essay, cultivating the skill of focus, deep analysis, etc.
I was going to post a gift guide for grown-ups, but decided you’re probably all bombarded with gift guides already. If in case you’d like a gift rec for someone in your life, drop a note in the comments :)
Ah this speaks to me so much. And yes to suggestions for a Lego loving 5 year old (that isn’t yet another set of legos), a toddler and an ski/outdoorsy person if you have them. And something else you have on your wish list. Why not?
I clicked through to read your link on the Cut's take on kids' literature. It only partially factors into your essay about freedom from the attention economy, but I 100% agree with the plug for librarians. I'm a huge personal fan of libraries, and the human factor that libraries provide in that 1 environment and function feels important in the resistance against the results of an otherwise somewhat self-sustaining industry algorithm to perpetuate the same reading preferences.