Learning how to ignore

I am currently reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Published in 2019, it was written in the aftermath of the first Trump election, when many of us were feeling exhausted and confused and constantly being tazed by the chaos of each day.

I’m only through the first chapter, but Odell explains early on that the book is less a guide and more of an anticapitalist treatise. She rightly argues that social media (or, the companies behind the brands) is robbing us of our humanity and the skills we used to have to build community. Of course, nothing has improved since this was published. In fact, it’s much worse in the age of AI. We have given even MORE of our broken brains to machines to think and create for us. To be more productive.

(Well, not me, but I understand that I am in the minority.)

Productive to what end? Are you blooming like a flower or are you growing like a cancer? What are you building and is it for you? Or is it for the multinational corporation that likes to refer to you, the worker, as part of a “family” until you’re laid off?

As the job market shrinks for those of us who have enjoyed our “email jobs” for years, I am being forced to reflect on what I now must do with my time. I have really struggled with this in my leaner times as a freelancer. When I had a regular daily office job, I daydreamed about what it would be like to be a freelancer. The freedom to do whatever you want when you don’t have a task to do! I was hyper-efficient in my office job, so a lot of time was spent staring at my cubicle walls or taking walks around the building. I thought if I could just get out of the office my life would be much richer.

Sadly, my life has become much less rich this year. And in all of the time I have spent working from home, I haven’t devoted much time at all to reading, hobbies, art even though I have the time. I am realizing that reading this book, my brain and soul have been eroded by working in social media and being Very Online, and that I must work on rebuilding my curiosity, listening deeply, and resisting the urge to be constantly angry at a world I cannot control.

I am getting to a point here, I promise.

Here comes Hamilton Nolan at just the right time to remind me that I don’t have to read everything that people are mad about that day or hour:

You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits

Most wisdom comes from tangible experience in our wide world. It comes from human relationships, from travel, from living and loving and fighting and falling in the dirt. There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasti…

How Things Work

Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.

When I find myself between the few work tasks I have right now, I just sit and scroll Bluesky hoping something is going to pop up that might be fun or funny. But most of it is outrage at things I don’t feel like I need to care about. Today, it’s Lake America. I don’t know, guys, does this matter? He’s going to keep doing it and no one is stopping him, so is your outrage useful for anything? We are stuck with this idiot king and his flattering MBA-havers, we really should focus on what we can change and what we can build, rather than what we can post.