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How to do nothing resisting5/8/2023 ![]() ![]() This is just what she discusses in the next chapter, with examples from Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to Henry David Thoreau to the labor movement of the 1930s. ![]() ![]() Odell maintains that we ought to remain in society even if we reject parts of it and seek to make our own space. The trouble with this search for a kind of utopia is that it results in a lack of agency, with someone else too often making the rules for others. There have always been people who sought to do this, from ancient Greece to the commune movement of the 1960s. In Chapter 2, Odell examines the impulse to reject society entirely and isolate oneself. The author found respite in a local garden, where her interest in bird-watching deepened and her ability to notice her surroundings was heightened. For environmentalist John Muir, such an experience led him to quit a life of factory work for environmental activism. It’s humanizing to not feel like you have to be “productive” every hour of the day, and it’s personally enriching to create space for ourselves to think and discover hidden talents, true desires, etc. Chapter 1 focuses on the value of disengaging from the hamster wheel that is the attention economy. She is not advocating merely dropping out and isolating ourselves. ![]() Odell writes that the latter is a dual process of both rejecting the attention economy and redirecting our attention to our local communities. The Introduction presents the issue at hand: the damage the attention economy does to us and how we can disengage from it. ![]()
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