How to Do Nothing

“Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.”

The world is moving so fast in the same vehicle that those left behind seem to have lost their way. But in reality, looking from behind is an opportunity to question where this speed is heading.

What I feel in every environment created by the attention economy is this: That vehicle thinks it can keep spinning forever on a Nascar track. The faster it goes, the more it believes in its existence. But this speed will eventually drive it to self-destruction. Because this race has no turns, no brakes.

Space

I live near the coast in İzmir. Since moving there, I’ve found a small, quiet café to retreat from the noise of conversations and work: The Leaf.

There was a period last year when I was there almost every day. Some days I went both in the morning and evening, as if it had become the two breaths of my day. It wasn’t entirely a conscious decision. I wasn’t choosing to be there, I just was. My friend Can was usually there too. Sometimes we’d talk, other times we’d retreat into our own worlds in silence.

The Leaf was my place for “doing nothing.” A space that helped me quiet down to find something meaningful to say. Away from the endless cycle of words and images, it had everything I needed: wonderful barista friends, three charming cats, Shrek, Untitled, and “Literally” No Name, and the much-needed presence of “nothing.”

That space reminded me of the same feeling I had when reading Jenny Odell’s book.

This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.

Time

Inefficacy is always under the watchful eye of the attention economy. Time, for it, is an economic resource. Time has been transformed into a tool we must constantly use, measure, and optimize.

Walking the entire city along the coastline is both a spatial and temporal experience. It involves listening to the waves “until you’re tired,” without any specific purpose or goal. But the interruption of seaside paths and the transformation of public spaces have detached them from their temporal context. Places where people could go just to be, to pause and breathe, and to “spend time” without needing to do anything, have turned into spaces where you have to buy something or at least act like you want to.

With this transformation, new “public spaces” emerged: social platforms. However, these are places devoid of spatial and temporal context. They are shaped as commercial spaces under the control of the attention economy. Flooded with information, nothing is truly heard. Guided by algorithms, these spaces turn every action into a commodity.

“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via social platforms, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.”

Commons

Today, the culture of “progress” is closely tied to the idea of constantly creating something new. Yet this view often ignores the responsibility to preserve, respect, and meaningfully share what already exists.

Many projects justified by the need for more energy are, in fact, designed to expand our capacity for consumption. Building dams is presented as a symbol of “progress,” yet the destruction they inflict on nature is one of the clearest examples of the “tragedy of the commons.”

Speed and consumption come to dominate life itself. Space, breath, and time are claimed as resources, and the promise of “more” leaves behind only loss for people and for the natural world.

“If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that’s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress.” The Round River: A Parable ⏤ Aldo Leopold