How to Stretch Time with Jenny Odell
November 28, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Okay, if you have ever felt like you have lost your humanity a bit in the midst of a culture that is obsessed with productivity, if you’ve ever just felt the desire to just breathe a little more, to just find more joy, to find more delight and pleasure, and just be a human being instead of a human producing, then you need to listen to this episode with Jenny Odell. Jenny Odell is just an incredible thinker about just that, about how we can stop losing our humanity in pursuit of productivity. She wrote a book called How to Do Nothing, which is just, it’s actually the book I read right before starting this podcast, and she’s out with a new book now called Saving Time, and both are just about different ways to be, to resist losing all of our humanity and joy.
Glennon Doyle:
She talks today about finding peace and humanity in nature, how to be creative instead of productive, and how we can actually trick the system by becoming less useful, not more useful, less useful, so the world will leave us alone. She’ll change her life, this Jenny Odell, this is a mind-bending conversation. I hope you enjoy.
Glennon Doyle:
Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond The Clock. I’d have to stop and say I was reading Saving Time before it came out long, long ago at this convention where there was a lot of people whizzing around trying to be more productive. And so, somebody came up to me and saw the title, it’s called Saving Time and in big letters. And so she came up to me and she said, “Is it good? Is it helping you?” And I could just tell, and I was like, “Yeah, but it’s not about managing time, it’s about turning times sideways.” And she goes, “Okay, nevermind.” And just, anyway-
Amanda Doyle:
“Not the book I need.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so Jenny’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and other publications, and she lives in Oakland, California. Jenny, thanks for being here.
Jenny Odell:
Thank you so much for having me.
Glennon Doyle:
Absolutely. It’s already a treat. So I’ve been thinking about this podcast with you for two and a half years, so what I’m just hoping for is to just offer the pod squad just a glimpse, a little sliver of what your work has offered me, which is just kind of some questions and ideas about how to think about, really the two things we have, which are time and attention, and how some of the ideas, the cultural ideas we’ve been giving about these things might not be the most life-giving, planet saving ways to think about them. A lot of your work, it’s so cerebral, but it’s not to me at all; I’ve been able to feel it in my body and in the spaces I’m in very much so if you could just do that in the next 50 minutes, that would be great.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, no, that honestly makes me so happy to hear because that is exactly what I’m trying to do. I mean, there are so many little references and things in my work. I’m a very detail oriented person. I think a lot of people who read either of the books are sort of like, “How did you fit all of this into this kind of matrix of a book?” But ultimately that is the goal. It’s for something real and felt for the reader to have a moment of recognition, because I feel like for me as a reader, I really value those moments. The books that changed my life are ones where I wasn’t the same afterward. I’ve read books where I’ve literally feel like I need to sit on a park bench and just think about my whole life again from the beginning. And oftentimes it wasn’t a book that had advice, and it was just a book that it clarified something or, it gave me a lens to see something like right in front of me. And so that’s kind of what I have been chasing as a writer. And even in my visual art before writing books, it was just sort of like, what can I do to make you see the thing that you’re living in every day from a different angle, in a way that allows you to do something else?
Amanda Doyle:
That’s one of my favorite definitions of doing nothing that’s in your work is, “To do nothing is to hold yourself still, so that you can perceive what is actually there.” So it’s not like it’s changed what’s there, it’s just allowing you to receive it and see it, honestly.
Glennon Doyle:
So for someone who doesn’t know what we’re talking about right now, Jenny, can you explain to us or to the pod squad for somebody who hasn’t read your work yet, what was going on in your life and in the world that made you feel like the world needed the book, How To Do Nothing? What were we all swimming in that you felt like maybe you could help us see better?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, the most important thing I think that was influencing me was the 2016 election, and specifically how social media felt right after that. I don’t know, I just felt crazy all the time. I felt like I couldn’t have a thought, and that everyone was upset for very obvious reasons, but I felt like I couldn’t even articulate what I wanted, how I felt, or what I wanted to mourn or whatever. And this was also around the time of the Ghost Ship fire, which was a fire that happened in Oakland where I live, it was like an artist space. And so a lot of people I knew were dealing with that around the same time. And there was a lot of really cruel rhetoric that I remember seeing online of people being like, “Oh, it was just this illegal artist space” and being very dismissive about what had happened, and also about the arts in general. As someone who was working in the arts and I was teaching art at the time, I felt like sort of the spaces for reflection, and subtlety, and art, and joy, and all these other things were really under threat. We were always being shut down and everything felt very immediate. That’s sort of what I remember. It was very hot, and it was very in your face and it was very immediate.
Jenny Odell:
And so I just started going to this city rose garden near my apartment. It’s in the middle of the city, but it feels like a little kind of sanctuary and people are usually surprised when they discover it for the first time that it’s even there, and was just kind of sitting there day after day or whenever I could get away with it, basically. And then inevitably over time, starting to think about how different I felt when I was sitting there, versus when I was on social media, or even just working. And how if you go there, you just see other people moving around the space in a way that also feels very different. I feel like I talk to strangers there all the time. People are just in a different state of mind. It’s purely a space of enjoyment, and there’s nothing that you’re supposed to be doing there and there’s nothing that you’re supposed to be reacting to. And so, I think How To Do Nothing was kind of an exploration of that contrast. This feels bad, this feels good. How can I move towards the thing that feels good?
Glennon Doyle:
And also that there are these spaces where, because in some way art in general is just the exact same thing as a park. It’s like a place that capitalism might deem worthless or like-
Jenny Odell:
A place like an end in itself. It’s not a means to another end. I think that’s something I’ve thought about for a long time, because I was teaching art at Stanford at the time, and it was often to non humanities majors, so I was having to make this argument for art and try not to sort of stoop to a utilitarian’s explanation, like, “This will help you get a job,” which I don’t know, it could, but that wasn’t the reason to be doing it. And so similarly, I think it would be sort of absurd if you asked someone in the rose garden, “Okay, but what is this place for?” They’d be like, “Well, for this, I’m here. I’m enjoying myself. It’s beautiful.” I just love going there and seeing people. Everyone smells the roses, they just make their way down and they’re smelling all the roses, and it’s like, yeah, because it smells good. And I feel like that’s something that I continually have to push against because I think you could read a book How To Do Nothing, hoping that it will make you more productive. Like, oh, maybe if I take more breaks, I will work better. And that’s probably true, but that’s not why I wrote it, and I don’t think that’s the reason to do it.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. So the idea is that there are places in spaces or reasons just to be fully human, whether that’s art or a park. And the fear is, or the idea could be, the more we become part of a culture that is obsessed with productivity, or that is just using us as a factory, that we lose these spaces, and places, and disciplines and then we lose our humanity.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, absolutely. And just kind of remembering the fact that you have one life to live, that’s a pretty bracing reminder, especially if you’re in a rush to do something. Apologies to my former students, but I was often late to class because there are a lot of birds on the Stanford campus, and including migratory birds, like right now, for example, I’m in this artist’s residency that’s not actually that far from Stanford, and the warblers have just shown up, which means that there are birds that I’m seeing right now that I haven’t seen since spring. I haven’t seen for a long time. They’ve been somewhere else. And so, that will stop me in my tracks because it’s like if you ran into a friend that you hadn’t seen for years or something, you kind of have to pay attention to that. And so, that would happen to me on my way. I’d be carrying all these bags, and I’d be in a really big hurry and super stressed out, and then I would see this bird in a tree and kind of forget about calendar time for a little bit. And then it would all come back, and then I would go to class, but I would just keep having these little sort of openings, where time felt very different. And for most people, I think looking back, it’s like obviously those are the important moments or those are the ones you remember.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And this is so interesting because the idea of attention and time are so smushed together for me that I almost have a hard time. But when you talk about those moments, so the first essay that I ever wrote that went viral, that started my entire career 12 years ago, was about time and young motherhood, being a mom of young children, and how that changed my entire concept of time because I would be in a Target checkout line just dripping with children, and there would be one that was licking the ground, and one that was pulling all the bras off the things, and one that was screaming because they were tired or whatever. And I would just be dying. And then, inevitably an older woman would stop in where I was and she would look at me and she would say, “Oh God, honey, enjoy every moment. This just goes by so fast.”
Glennon Doyle:
And Jenny, it happened so many times, and she would say it wistfully full of wist, looking at me on the ground, and I would think, “Something’s happening here because I don’t feel like time’s going fast. I feel like I’ve been in the line since 1938,” and it really started to make me think there’s a weird thing going on with time here. And so that whole essay was trying to figure out in young motherhood that the difference between the chronos time and kairos time are different. That I would wake up with young kids and look at the clock, I look at a baby on the ground who can’t talk to me or entertain me at all. And I would look at the clock and it would be like 7:00 AM and I would think, “Oh, okay, well, I guess we have to do this until 7:00 PM. How am I going to make it?” But then we’d have these moments during the day where I would look at this baby, or smell the baby or something and it would be like a wormhole of time, no clock, no nothing. I was sucked into this moment that I can still remember these moments right now.
Glennon Doyle:
And so, are the bird moments you’re talking about, is this the malleableness of time that there’s the calendar, the clock time, and then there are these moments that so define your day in your life that you realize you’re off the clock?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, I think so. And I also find that the clock time that, “I need to do something,” or you’re looking at time as a material that you need to organize and cut up so that you can get these things done. I find that time often feels not the same, but it feels like it’s a uniform material; an hour is an hour. An hour is the time in which you can get these things done, versus those moments are often ones where I realize how different all of the moments are. I have an outsider’s perspective; a lot of my friends had babies during the pandemic, so I know a lot of three-year-olds right now. And so I know from talking to them about what you’re describing, and also what it did to their attention and sort of attention span. And when I’m with them, I can feel that. But then at the same time, that’s also a time when they’re growing really fast. And so I would have these kind of surreal moments of I’ll just be looking at my friend’s kid and then thinking about even just six months ago, it’s incredible. And you’re like, “Oh, right, time is moving forward, things are growing, everything is moving all the time,” which feels very different than that kind of the hour. The hour as material, right?
Amanda Doyle:
The hour as widget that gets allocated.
Jenny Odell:
Right, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You talk about horizontal and vertical time. So I understand that we cannot add time to our timeline, that if you’re looking at it like a flat line, we can’t add any time to the end. But it feels to me we can add quality of the time. You can’t add to the end or the beginning horizontally, but there are things that you can add, or ways of paying attention that improve the quality of the time so much that it feels like it’s stretching a marshmallow. Like music, if I’m walking around my kitchen, that’s like one minute of time, but if I put on music, it feels like a different minute. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s like space, you have space. Space is a dimension like time. You can change the quality of space; you can walk through air or you can walk through water. It’s still just one block of space, but you’re changing the quality of it, and I feel like you can do that with time, right? Am I-
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Makes sense.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that the space comparison is a really great one, because I’m actually friends with an architect, and so, and I think about this a lot, the ways that architectural space shapes our interactions. So the fact that there’s a public park, it allows me to go to this place, and have these interactions, and inhabit a certain type of attention. I feel like there’s been a lot of really interesting writing lately about communal architecture, like co-living. How could we design our spaces to make things like care work easier for everyone who lives there? Just because it’s arranged differently, right? And I think that it’s very useful to apply that to time because time also is structured, and it’s also something that involves our interactions with other people. And I’m haunted by this comment that my friend who actually had a kid before the pandemic who had read How To Do Nothing made where she was, my relationship to the attention economy was totally different after. And she’s basically a single mom. She has a lot of support, but at the end of the day, she’s a single mom. And it’s like, yeah, I mean, I’ve hung out with her. It’s like there’s just constant demands on your attention, especially if it’s just you and your kid. And so I think about what is the temporal structure that would allow her more breathing room, and what does that look like?
Jenny Odell:
And I think it’s similar, honestly, if you think about communal architecture, and you think about communal time structures, it’s kind of the same and it would change everyone’s experience of time who’s involved in that, not just hers.
Amanda Doyle:
And in that case that you bring up, it’s kind of akin to the technologies, I mean, where the systems, and the structures, and the policies are built without reference to our need to be humans.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Of course there’s going to be an out of balance with the ability to access that. And so when you’re talking about music being on, it’s not like, okay, for the person at the conference, the tip is to add music, then you’ll have that.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Amanda Doyle:
But the thing under the thing is that, Jenny, when you talk about what your intentions are, you’re saying, “I am suggesting we take protective stance and of defense of ourselves, each other, and whatever is left that makes us human.” It’s like the reason to me why the music being on stretches the time is that the quality of that time connects with your humanity, connects with what you call the non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought that allows us to access what was intended for us as humans.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s probably those moments all the time. The stretchy time thing, like the vertical time, the kairos time, those moments I’m talking about music smelling my people’s hair, my dog, anytime with my dog, nature. They’re all things that make me completely useless to a system other than my humanity, is exactly what you’re saying. So okay, to that end, can you tell us the story, Jenny, about Old Survivor?
Jenny Odell:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Old Survivor is the name of a tree, an old growth redwood tree in the East Bay hills. And a lot of people from the Bay Area even don’t know that. So the hills next to Oakland used to have redwoods, a lot of old growth redwoods, and they were all logged in the 19th century, except for Old Survivor because this tree, for various reasons, it was actually not considered big compared to other old growth redwoods, which now it’s huge and sort of an odd gnarled shape, and it’s on an outcrop that’s hard to get to. So for all these reasons that make it useless as timber, it survived. And when I learned about that, I thought to myself that it sounded like a real life version of the Story of the Useless Tree by the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who talks about a similar sort of large gnarled tree that is seen by a carpenter, and the carpenter sort of laughs to himself and he is like, “Oh, that tree is not useful for anything. It doesn’t have fruit, it’s not good for timber.” And then the tree appears to him in a dream and basically is like, “Who are you to call me useless? My uselessness has been very useful for me. Obviously, I am still alive and you are a mortal man. You will die soon.” Sort of just like, “Okay, I’m going to flip the tables on you.”
Jenny Odell:
And I feel like the humor of that story and sort of the irony of Old Survivor I find very compelling because it’s this perfect illustration of how being or appearing useless in one frame. It could actually be the thing that rescues you from it. And it’s not only not a deficiency, it’s a source of strength and it’s what will help you come out intact on the other side.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, it begs the question, to whom and for what? If you are, “Successful,” to whom and for what are you successful? Is that working for you? You are useful, you are helpful, you are important, to whom and for what? And unless it is for your humanity also, then you might be a really useful, successful logged redwood.
Jenny Odell:
Yes, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. What the people who are most useful, the people who are most efficient, who are the smartest, who are the most people pleasing, who are the most useful to the systems they’re in, get eaten alive by the systems.
Abby Wambach:
I think that that’s something that I’ve just been sitting here thinking, especially I come from the athlete background where it’s like hyper vigilant on your time, everything is cataloged, data driven. It’s almost like productivity is our religion in some ways. How do you suppose you bring somebody, maybe over towards the way that you feel life could be lived and why, what kind of benefits is this giving them?
Jenny Odell:
It’s a hard question because you can’t know what’s true for someone, right? I think the most you can say is I’m concerned that people might be unknowingly cut off from what is actually true to them. So, I mean even that’s how it would play out in my class when I taught art, it was like, I’m just going to give you a space to be reflective about things, because I suspect that you’re not being given the space otherwise. And maybe you’ll see something when you’re there and come back and feel differently. But I’m certainly not going to tell them what that is. And a lot of times that is what happened. Through the art projects that they would make, they would sort of realize, some of them knew from the outset, “I don’t want to be grinding all the time.” They would tell me that the beginning of class, but others would sort of come around. I would see them start to reflect on that through the work.
Jenny Odell:
One image that I always come back to is worrying that I have blinders on, and so I’m going in a direction, and I’m going forward, and that looks great, but I’m not super aware of the people around me who might also have blinders on or the sort of other paths that I could be taking. And I just feel like I have to be on this track, and there’s only forwards or backwards, and it’s sort of like what I want is to take them off, so that I can look around. And maybe it is true that after you do that, you’re like, “No, I am on the right path.” Or you could decide, “I do get a lot of satisfaction, genuine meaning and satisfaction out of being really productive all the time.” I don’t know, who am I to say? But I suspect that a lot of people would, as I think we saw during the pandemic, look around and be like, “I actually don’t want to be on this track. I want to be over there.” Or, “I want to live in a way where I can just see the other people around me and where they’re going and why.”
Glennon Doyle:
And maybe that the idea of success and the idea of productivity that I’m being very successful about has actually gotten me cut down like the tree. I think about your story about Old Survivor once a week. I don’t know why, it just stuck in my head. So just this tree that was passed over completely because it was a loser tree, basically. The loggers were like, “Ugh, this freaking tree is of no use to us,” and passed it over, and so it got to live. I think about have you read Matrix by Lauren Groff? So it’s this book about this woman and she doesn’t get married off because she’s not attractive. So she starts this wild convent, with these renegade women, they end up saving their selves and actually living full lives. And there’s this scene where the woman who started it talks about how, had she been pretty, she never would have been powerful or free. So she was like the Old Survivor, she was not useful to the men who were picking wives, so she got to live this whole thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Or I think about my friend who was having this family drama recently because her parents were constantly calling her and her siblings. She was the one that everybody relied on, and she said to me, “I just need to figure out how to become less dependable to my family.” And I was like, “That is a fucking brilliant goal.” But she’s Old Survivor or she’s the opposite; she’s so useful that she gets cut down constantly. It’s almost as if instead of asking ourselves how we can be more useful, we should ask ourselves how we can become less useful.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, yeah. I mean I think, even just the notion of use that implies becoming an instrument for something, rather than just yourself. I think one of the reasons the rose garden was so important for me was that it’s not that far from my apartment, but it is a space of removal. And so I think it had this function for me that’s similar to, I’ve written in a journal for my entire life since I was eight, and it has a similar function to that where it’s like, I am going to just stop thinking about these outside standards or pressures just long enough for me to find out what will grow in this space that feels more like me, but it needs to be protected.
Glennon Doyle:
Jenny, I get that. So if we’re in these worlds that we have been convinced our economies, even the words we use, we’re, “Paying attention,” we’re, “Saving time,” we’re, “Spending time.” We even use economic words for these things. “Time is money.” I mean, it’s all so clearly for you, time is not money, right? I think that’s safe to say.
Jenny Odell:
Not all the time.
Glennon Doyle:
Or maybe not the best highest use of time. What is it, if somebody says to you, “Fine, time is not money, then Jenny Odell, time is what?” What is your fullest understanding of what time is for
Jenny Odell:
What it’s for or what it is?
Glennon Doyle:
Either one.
Jenny Odell:
I mean…
Abby Wambach:
Both, yeah.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Because for me, time is just change. I have a pretty basic definition of it, and that’s one of the reasons that I spend so much time in Saving Time, dwelling on botanical examples or examples from nature of using the Buckeye tree in my neighborhood as a clock in a very serious way. It’s not a metaphor. It is very true that right now the Buckeye tree is dormant and you can already see the buds that are going to open in the spring, and that is an expression of time. There’s no other way to explain that.
Jenny Odell:
So I mean, in terms of what time is for, I feel like that is similar to trying to figure out the meaning of life, this time is life, time is change. And I kind of related to that definition of time. For me, I feel that the purpose of my time and experience is actually to be as in touch as possible with that change. To have as much of my life feel like I am sensitive to the tree that is changing.
Jenny Odell:
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience of learning about something, for example, I don’t know, type of plant or birds or something, and then you think about how you used to see it in the past. So for example, these warblers that are visiting. I lived in San Francisco starting in 2008. I’m sure I saw them. I know they were there. I don’t really know what I thought they were. Maybe I didn’t notice them at all. But if you had asked me in 2008, “Describe the birds in San Francisco, I’d say, well, there’s crows and then there’s the really little guys and they’re just kind of always around and they’re all kind of brown and then there’s seagulls.” That’s probably what I would tell you. And it’s like, no, it turns out that there are all these different speeches of warblers coming from really far away, these amazing journeys, and they only go into certain types of trees. You know what I mean? There’s so much specificity and change and aliveness in that I just wasn’t aware of yet. And I do feel that my life is richer the more I’m aware of that. The best days are the ones where I go outside and everything feels like that. Whatever’s the opposite of the world is a frozen place, and I’m just kind of a productive person who’s just kind of there, right? That’s what I don’t want.
Glennon Doyle:
It feels so important if you pod squatters listening to this, imagine, so if we were people who paid attention and time in such a way that our attention and time led us closer, and closer to understanding, and knowing, and observing, and loving the intricacies of our environments, how much more likely we would be to save our planet? This is why How To Do Nothing is everything. It’s not a dropping out, it’s a dropping so deep in that we save the very thing that is everything.
Jenny Odell:
I think it ideally can be the beginning of something. That’s kind of how I see it. I mean, I think I used the word way station at some point and how to do nothing. And it’s similar in Saving Time. It’s sort of like, I don’t think that just learning to see things differently is the answer or the end of that sort of journey, but it is I think a really important preliminary step of sort of like, “Okay, everything looks different.” And now you look around. I mean, I get the most excited by, for example, thinking about if people were to see time as less of a zero-sum game, that’s sometimes the best way for me to get time, more time is to give it to you. This notion of time that isn’t money. If more people were to adopt that, that then allows, maybe those people to look around at each other and start to ask questions like, “Okay, well what are the temporal structures? What are the structures of mutual support that we want to build?” But to get there, you have to get out of the, “I have my box of 24 hours that gets refilled every day. I have mine, you have yours, and I just need to use mine better.” There’s only so far you can get with that. So I guess I get really excited by the things that are enabled by different forms of attention.
Jenny Odell:
And to your point, I think seeing the non-human world as more alive than maybe we normally treat it, I feel like that makes the climate crisis feel different. Obviously, it doesn’t really make you feel any better about it, but I do think that it points the way towards a feeling more of collaboration, for example, with the non-human world, I’m deeply, deeply inspired by people who work in habitat restoration locally here in the Bay Area. And that is how they think about it. They don’t see themselves as going in, “I’m going to fix this, I’m going to fix this area.” No, it’s like, “I’m going to observe this ecology and learn enough about it and fall in love with it enough to know which interventions will bring it back to a state of flourishing.” But when they talk about it, it’s very clear that they’re also restoring themselves. This isn’t a sort of one way thing.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
As a representative of the remedial How To Do Nothing, students, I love the way that you’re talking about the warblers and the connecting to all of the movement and intricacies of the non-human world. And I’m starting way back in the line, and what I see in your work is if I’m an accurate representation of a chunk of folks, I’m not sure we are even paying attention to the human world, to our own intricacies, and movements, and humanness of the humans we are. And so for me, I’m thinking like, “Yes, this is, I am a human. I am here to be a human,” and I am operating in a world when I can see it in moments of clarity, that is, as you say, ruled by these things that actively ignore and disdain my humanity. And those are the structures of, “Don’t think about things, don’t feel things, don’t do anything that is not productive.” And you get so used to that it becomes your fluency that anything outside of that feels so odd.
Amanda Doyle:
And so I think there’s just such beauty in being like, “Wait, I am a body among other bodies and there are things here that are for us and things here that are against us. And I can only truly see that when I take the time to actually get a taste of my own humanity.” Because I feel like we don’t even have a taste of it and that’s why we’re not rushing towards it and feasting on it.
Glennon Doyle:
So, when do you get a taste of it, Sister? When do you feel a taste of the humanity that Jenny’s talking about? When do you feel like, “Oh God, wait. There’s something that has nothing to do with productivity that feels like magic.”
Amanda Doyle:
I think it’s when I visit and spend time with my friend who’s dying. When I am playing with, and not pretend laughing with my kid to get through this 30 minutes, but actually enjoying it and being ridiculous. When I find something absolutely ridiculously awesome at a thrift store that I’m like, “I’m going to paint that. It’s going to be so perfect. I love that thing.” When it is these moments where, as you say Jenny, it’s like the things that only exist because our practice of care and maintenance, those relationships, those exchanges, all of that are not the result of something that has value because it has been assigned. It is precisely because of the care that we put into them that makes it of value.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah. Totally. And I think something that a lot of those experiences have in common, and that I think is true of care in general, is it’s very kind of ego disassembling. It makes your boundaries a bit fuzzier. And I think one of the reasons maybe we don’t habitually go there is because there’s a lot in our culture that wants us to be very bounded. I need to be a sort of identifiable individual who’s in competition with other identifiable individuals. Yeah, and that’s really easy to get swept up in. I mean, because all around you, and it becomes very unintuitive that actually, like, what your heart wants is to move in the opposite directions. I actually don’t want to have such hard boundaries. When you’re caring for someone or something, I feel like there are moments where you’re not really sure where that boundary is. There is you and there is them, but there’s something that’s sort of overflowing.
Jenny Odell:
And I think also even just the example of listening to music, these are also sensory experiences. People going to the rose garden, smelling the roses, which smell like that to you as a human animal with a nose. Those are also, kind of, I feel like overflowing moments when something is so beautiful that you don’t even know who you are anymore, for a minute, that also tends to overcome that boundary.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s disillusion. It’s like the ego disappearing, and it is so true about one of the reasons, I mean, I think the first sentence of your book is, “The hardest thing in the world is doing nothing, something like that.” It’s because when we stop, the truth is there, but it’s also because all of our doing affords us identity makes us feel important.
Jenny Odell:
And it’s sort of the language that’s spoken, the main language of value that’s spoken. I always felt with my students, for example, I felt like I needed to cut them a out of slack, because it is in the air everywhere. These ways of talking about things and valuing things. Outright advice that’s given, but also not even, sometimes things are just implied. It’s just implied that you should have a personal brand, for example, or it’s just implied that if you’re not externalizing your life events on Instagram that they’re not important, right? No one’s actually saying that to you, but it’s just kind of in the ether. I think it’s important to likewise cut ourselves some slack. The reason it’s hard is because no one’s used to it.
Amanda Doyle:
And the systems are specifically built in to ignore and disdain it. So I mean, when you’re talking about the mom and we’re talking about it isn’t just hard to stop doing things because of your ego or your identity, it’s also hard to stop because most people in this nation have to work one and two jobs to be able to care for their people. But I am putting all of those systems that are there in the same bucket of the technologies that you’re identifying, which are acting to the detriment of your body and your humanity. And so, even just noting that it isn’t like this inevitable thing that, it is there, and it is a force, and just even seeing it as such I think is helpful because when you’re talking about the warblers, and being late to class, we’re chuckling that you have to stay out and watch them. But who decided what is urgent? The systems decided that what was urgent and important is that you’re ass be in class at the start of class, right? And the idea that it be urgent and important to stop and watch some birds gives us all a chuckle. But that is a value decision.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, it’s like the lady who got mad at me on the path when I went for a walk. We have these freaking roses that are so gorgeous, you can’t believe it in the South Bay. And so, I’m on the path, and I stop, and I’m staring at these roses and she runs into me, which fair enough, I’m on the wrong side, and I stopped. But then she goes, “Pay attention.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m paying such close attention. I’m just not paying attention to what you want me to pay attention to.” Right?
Jenny Odell:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
But we’re both paying attention to what you want me to pay attention to. And to be fair, what the rest of the world has decided is-
Glennon Doyle:
What we should be paying attention to.
Amanda Doyle:
And to me, what your work is, is let us be clear, we are definitely paying attention, but we are paying attention to a very small sliver of what is available to us as humans, to pay attention to the detriment of our own humanity.
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, right. It’s like paying attention to what? I used to become morbidly fascinated with how I would look when I was on social media around the time that I wrote How To Do Nothing, and it’s always the same. I’d be very hunched over my browser furrowed, and I still think about this all the time, like, the phone is not very big. It’s actually a really small part of your visual field, and it’s crazy that you could just be in that little rectangle. There’s all this stuff, even if you were somewhere very boring, just thinking about fraction wise, how much space the phone is taking up in your entire visual field, you’re just looking only at that.
Jenny Odell:
And then I often would find that I was not breathing very deeply, which that’s a whole thing, screen apnea, and that I’d sort of forgotten that I had a body, that would happen a lot. I would just become this pure cognitive force of likes and not likes. And then nothing else. And I don’t have a body, I don’t have a history, I don’t have a future. I don’t have an appetite. It’s just, you know?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, I do.
Jenny Odell:
And then I would go to the rose garden and I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, right. I am actually in the world,” this three dimensional world with smells and light and all this, but it’s amazing how quickly you can forget, and it’s designed that way. That’s absolutely what it’s designed for. So it’s just doing its job. I mean, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm. It’s like when we were in Wyoming recently and one of our kids looked at the freaking most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen and said, “Oh my God, it looks just like a screensaver.” I was like, “Holy shit. They think that nature is trying to recreate screensavers.”
Jenny Odell:
Or the screensaver is the primary image.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. Right. This thing is just trying to match that. Productivity versus creativity. Jenny never suggests that we all just drop out of everything forever. This is not the idea, but it does feel to me you have found lots of ways to maybe switch your goal from being productive to being creative. So can you talk to us about how you define the difference between being productive, or actually being creative and how there are different ways to kind of walk around the Earth?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, I mean, I will say that even as an artist and writer, you do usually need some mix of both. I think for me, the main difference is that productivity feels to me very industrial, right? It’s like assembly line work, basically, even in your mind. And creativity to me feels much more related to encounter. So this is ironic, but I have a work log in my Scrivener document for Saving Time, which Scrivener is just the software that I used to write Saving Time, which meant that I had to decide what counted as work to go in the work log. Obviously it was like, “Finished X, Y, Z book.” That’s goes in the work log. “I interviewed someone,” that goes in the work log, but then sometimes things would just happen to me. I would encounter something, or I would have an unexpected conversation with someone, or I would see something and it would kind of start this whole train of thought. And I realized that I had to also put those in there, because they were the most important part of the process, the actually creative part. And so, if I have to distinguish those two, one feels much more solitary than the other, right? Productivity is like I’m alone, and I’m producing something, and according to a plan, and creativity feels more like I went outside and I got surprised by something.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Is productivity also related to a thing that, “I have to make something?” This is so weird, but when I think about my understanding, this version of your work, I think about, okay, we’re on a lifeboat. Okay, we’re on a lifeboat with seven other people and we don’t know if we’re getting rescued. And the productive people are making new shit on the lifeboat. They’re like, “Look what I made. I made a new thing. Look at my thing.”
Abby Wambach:
Like a sail?
Glennon Doyle:
Whatever they’ve made.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what I’m wondering, Abby. I’m like, “What the hell are we making on the lifeboat?”
Glennon Doyle:
Please, just stick with me.
Abby Wambach:
Are we making a fishing rock stick?
Amanda Doyle:
Is it toward our survival?
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Amanda Doyle:
Are we making-
Glennon Doyle:
No, it’s a thing. All right. They’re being excited that they made a thing because they’re being productive and the creative people are like, “Look at this thing over here. Let’s all focus our attention on this beautiful part of the lifeboat.” And then everybody’s looking over there and then we’re spending 20 minutes looking at the threads on the lifeboat and how it actually makes this beautiful pattern, and we’re all passing time in that way, whereas the productive people are just making more shit, and they’re going to sink us, they keep making more, but the creative people are focusing our attention in different spaces so that we can see what’s already there with fresh eyes. I think of in your book, Jenny, the Applause Encouraged the art project where the person set up chairs at sunset and had people come into the red velvet ropes, and sit and watch the sunset and then applaud. It’s like part of creativity is, “Look what’s already here and how beautiful it is,” as opposed to, “Look what I made.”
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, totally. That’s a perfect example also of that encounter. There’s the encounter on the side of being creative, but then also there’s creating a space for others to have an encounter. I’m assuming the people who went to that performance all live in that area and have seen the sunset over the ocean before, but maybe never had it framed in that way, that maybe made the experience a lot more intense. Just the decision to mark off the time, like, “I’m going to start watching the sunset now.” Oh, also, no phones were allowed. I feel like that’s an important, so people are not taking photos of the sunset. They’re just sitting there and watching it. That’s something that I really love. I mean at the end of the book, I talk about do-nothing farming, which is very similar. Traditional or industrial farming in particular. It’s like, I want to grow this amount of corn and I’m going to use all these pesticides, and do whatever I need to do to the land to make that happen, while meanwhile you’re exhausting the soil and making this impossible in the future, versus do-nothing farming, which was this Japanese farmer who came up with this method of farming in a way that used no fertilizer, it had no tilling, none of the inputs that rice farming in that area, that they normally would use.
Jenny Odell:
And the irony being that his farm ended up being very productive. It produced a lot of what he was growing, but his attitude in the book that he wrote about it is very different. It’s much more humble. He’s like, “I’m a participant in this environment and I can make these sort of tweaks to make it sort of do something where you get this food. But I’m only able to do that because I am aware of the existing relationships and that I’m maintaining.” And so I just feel like that is also very creative.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jenny Odell:
And I also, I should say that I think that maintenance is very creative. I think that it’s not often recognized as such, but I live in a neighborhood that has a lot of repair shops, a shoe repair shop. I’ve gone by watch repaired twice at the same place, even pick up your dry cleaning. There’s that sewing area, I’m always looking at all the little threads. That’s such an art. It is just an art. And to say nothing of the fact that I know I have friends who are really into mending, and the very moment in which you decide that you might mend something is also an opportunity to change it to something that suits you better or that’s different.
Jenny Odell:
And so, I think there’s this sort of notion, the more traditional notion of creativity, which is much closer to productivity, which is like, “I made something from nothing. I made this big thing. There wasn’t anything here before and then I made it.” Whereas I think that there’s really amazing, more amazing examples of creativity that are much more like, “I arrived at a situation, I observed the relationships, and then I intervened into that and produce something new.” Even if that’s just a new experience for someone, someone is able to experience the sunset in a new way. And I think if you ask those people, they would undeniably say, “Yeah, I had a new experience. I wouldn’t have had it otherwise.” So it is new.
Amanda Doyle:
There’s such a dignity in that. The maintenance piece of that artist who wanted to showcase caring for her young baby in all of the minutiae of the day-to-day as she was doing that practice of maintenance, and she said, “This is my art, this work that I’m doing every day is art, and it’s the creativity of maintenance that keeps things alive and that builds bonds.” And I love the dignity of that because, because we don’t value it, I think there’s an internal devaluing of it? It’s just beautiful to claim that as creative, and as a part of our life force that we are using in really creative and very smart ways on a daily basis.
Glennon Doyle:
Beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
I think this risks being a ridiculous oversimplification of your work, but this is the remedial student, I took away from all of this, it’s like, yes, if you choose to dip into this humanity piece of this non-commercial, non-productive experience, it is true that you might miss something. You might be late for class. You might not get the promotion you wanted, period. And the true story is that we are not dipping into that, we are also missing something. There is no way of doing the life as set for us in the ideal capitalist productive attention economy world without missing things. We’re missing it.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you have it all? No, decidedly not.
Amanda Doyle:
Right. So it’s kind of like a choose your poison thing for me. It’s like, do you want to miss the humanity part of your humanity or you want to take a little look-see and see what you got going on over there?
Jenny Odell:
Yeah, totally. Although I should say that it makes me think of something, there was a Spanish journalist who said there was a phrase going around there at the time, “Do you need a therapist or do you need a union?” And I do think that one of my hopes for that kind of the doing nothing and the attention as a preliminary step is that one of the things that it opens up is actually the feeling that, “Hey, maybe you can’t have it all, but maybe you can have more than you were told, and maybe it doesn’t need to be such a binary.” I’ve just been so inspired by the writer’s strike and how that’s an example of people taking their blinders off, looking around, sharing stories about, “Oh, I thought I was just grinding really hard and I was a failure. But it turns out everyone else around me was having the same experience.” They start talking and then they just materially changed their experience of time, and how much their time is worth and how much security they have. It turns out they didn’t have to choose.
Jenny Odell:
And I think that’s so important to harbor that, right? Even if you’re at the very beginning of a process like that actually, that we are right to want to have it all. I guess, you shouldn’t have to choose between security and feeling alive. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Abby Wambach:
Yes. That would be wonderful.
Glennon Doyle:
Jenny.
Amanda Doyle:
Woo.
Glennon Doyle:
Woo. Thank you. Thank you for all of your work.
Jenny Odell:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Are you going to write another book? I’m just hoping you can be productive.
Jenny Odell:
I think so.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, great. Great. Good.
Jenny Odell:
I’m thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. If you do, can you send it to me just as soon as humanly possible?
Jenny Odell:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks. Thanks. Okay.
Amanda Doyle:
No pressure to be productive or anything, just…
Glennon Doyle:
Pod Squad, we love you. Be human this week and we’ll see you next time.
Glennon Doyle:
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