Do Nothing?

When How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell was first released, I was drawn to it by the intriguing title. I didn't read the book, but from reviews, it seems it is based on the idea that everything we do benefits someone else - someone bad. If we work hard at our job, it benefits the "owner". If we try to relax by visiting a social media or other web site, we are lured into looking at promos and clicking on links, all for the site owner's benefit and our detriment. And so on. Odell seems to have explained how to defeat the bad dudes by doing nothing. Though I do love to read how evil the social media companies are, I got discouraged by one of the reviews that mentioned how Odell cried for days after Trump won the election. Disliking Trump is fine, but if you are crying for days that he won, then I think you are too unhinged to be giving life advice to other people! (BTW, that review is no longer on amazon - it looks like the dumb libs at amazon make a practice of banning 'undesirable' accounts from posting reviews!)

Apparently, the book won a few accolades. Barack Obama liked it enough to include it in a list, and a few other books got spawned from it. Oliver Burkeman speaks well of this book in his Four Thousand Weeks. Burkeman himself seems to share Odell's belief that people are out to get us to do things. Many liberals seem to think personal productivity and efficiency are attributes that a capitalist system encourages in "workers" with a view to benefit the "owners". (BLM goons equate these to "white supremacy" - everybody knows white folks started this whole capitalism thingy!)

It may be true that these are considered virtues in a capitalist society, but the "owner" is not the only one that benefits. You get paid for your troubles. If you work harder in capitalism, generally speaking, you get paid more. It may seem like the "owner" benefits more than you do, but the "owner" takes on bigger risks. In any case, envy is not the whole story. Young people now a days seem to think they should be given money and things for doing exactly nothing. Canceling student debt is a popular idea, and so is universal basic income. There are videos on Twitter and tiktok, of young people complaining about having to work 9 to 5 their entire lives just to be able to afford basic necessities. Dem leaders do their best to sustain the illusion that the possibility of a free lunch exists (and all you have to do is keep voting for Dems long enough for it to become a reality). If you don't produce things or provide services that someone else needs, why would someone else work to produce things and provide services that you need? I find it depressing that this is not immediately obvious to grown people.

Recently, I was listening to an old webcast of Cal Newport on productivity, and he mentioned this book. Newport attributes the book's popularity to the notion that the book appeals to a lot of people that are burned out these days by trying to do too much. His take, which I happen to agree with, is that we are using antiquated measures for productivity - we are using the same measures for knowledge workers that we use for factory workers. We measure activity and busyness rather than results. His contention is that doing fewer things and doing them more slowly produces quality work without causing burn out. These ideas may not be entirely new, but they seem to be becoming more popular again.

What about doing nothing for leisure? Are we unwittingly clicking links and lending our attention against our own best interests? Do social media companies really have a hold over their users? Are they using sneaky tricks to control our behavior and make us spend more time on their sites? I know they spend a lot of money to devise ways to keep people hooked, but do those methods work? Or, do social media sites just give us what we like, and we do the rest? I don't know. I guess we will find out eventually.

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