Despite the shelving decisions of many bookstores, author Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book, a genre that promises readers nuggets of influencer insight to nourish their optimization quests. Instead, the book critiques the notion that even leisure should be curated in the service of economic efficiency.
“I have a whole section where I insist that the point of reading my book is not to make you feel refreshed enough to be more productive at work on Monday,” Odell said. “Rather, it’s to question our notions of productivity overall. What is considered productive labor and what is not, and why? It’s an important distinction to make, I write, when the phrase self-care is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming cliche.”
Odell was one of four featured speakers at the Downes Ballroom on campus April 10 for the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Common Good Symposium. The event focused on attention (pun intended), the annual research theme for the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.
Panelists were asked, “How should we hold attention?”
That has become an especially pressing question as we reckon with the costs of how we pay attention today. Nobody needs to be reminded that distractions are omnipresent. As we speak, white noise courses through my headphones to keep my mind on writing this rather than whatever my face-down phone has to entice me. (Nothing. I checked.)
My little sneak-a-peek brought to mind a phenomenon that another speaker, Hidden Brain podcast host, Shankar Vedantam, described at the symposium: nested interruptions.
Say you’re working on a project, Vedantam said, but you’re also expecting a text about daycare pickup. Glance at your phone, no daycare text, but you find a new message from someone you had forgotten to respond to a month ago. Replying becomes urgent, but requires a conversation with a colleague first. In the meantime, the daycare text comes in. Whatever you were working on in the first place has languished the whole time.
“That’s already three interruptions ago,” Vedantam said. “And the research finds that people sometimes take as much as 20 or 25 minutes once they become interrupted, because the first interruption leads to the second, which leads to the third . . .”
It might take a long time to wend our way back to where we started, but the amount of attention we give to any interstitial distraction on our screens has plummeted. Research into screen time has shown how far.
Once upon a time in the internet era, we spent an average of two and a half minutes focused on a single item on a screen before moving on to something else. Subsequent studies have shown that fell first to 75 seconds and now just 47 seconds of focus before flitting away.
Technology has become a kind of modern predator, but the lions on the savanna never intentionally usurped our attention. Companies and content creators now prey upon the receptive antennae that evolved to protect us from those actual, existential threats.
“This thing that has been a huge value to our ancestors, to our survival, now turns out to be something that’s hijacked by the attention economy,” Vedantam said, “because filmmakers and social media have discovered that if you change things quickly, people will pay attention to them.”
There are moments — like when I mindlessly reach for my phone, which has happened probably a dozen more times since my earlier yielding to distraction — when resistance feels futile. It’s as if attention is more than metaphorically a muscle, but a real one atrophied to the point of incapacity.
Another speaker, journalist and author Vauhini Vara, insisted we still have the strength to focus, we just don’t exercise it enough. “It’s not actually that we can’t pay close attention anymore, it’s just that we don’t,” she said. “And the question I want to raise with all of you today is why that’s the case.”
Her answer began with a slide projected on the ballroom screens featuring a 2004 Harvard Crimson photo of a college-age Mark Zuckerberg accompanying an article about the nascent campus phenomenon then known as thefacebook.com.
Zuckerberg soon introduced the website at Stanford, where Vara was a student at the time. The student paper documented its hold over users: “Classes are being skipped. Work is being ignored. Thefacebook.com craze has swept through campus.”
Why? “Nothing validates your social existence like the knowledge that someone has approved you, or is asking for your permission to list them as a friend,” Vara said, recounting one student’s explanation from the story.
Friend requests and, in time, the “like” button generated the dopamine hits our brains crave. Novelty built into the site’s design — post after post in an endless scroll — kept distracted and distractable users on the platform, attracting advertises who would pay handsomely to peddle their wares. Users paid nothing — except attention, which Facebook and its proliferating competitors have sold.
“This is naturally what the function has to be: stealing our attention,” Vara said. “Or in a more neutral way, you could say, holding or grabbing our attention.”
Panelists at the Franco symposium offered ideas to release the grip.
For Odell, a municipal rose garden near her Oakland, California, home became a place of escape into nature during COVID. There she found “a more-than-human world” of flora and fauna, including her beloved night herons, as well as the mental space for contemplation, and community among the people who volunteer there. She’s still a weekly regular.
Vedantam called for an embrace of boredom, intentional sitting with unchanging surroundings, as well as a cultivation of space and time for undisturbed deep work — solitary pursuits that he described as the seedbeds of insight, sometimes slow, but necessary for mental flowering.
“If you think about germination really as a botanical phenomenon, germination cannot be rushed. It actually takes the time that it takes. You actually have to let it mature. You have to let the idea simmer. You have to let the idea grow within you,” he said. “So I think the evidence simply suggests that solitude can be good for us.”
Vara invited the audience into a meditative frame of mind, encouraging attention to the breath and passing thoughts, as well as the surrounding sights, sounds and scents of the moment. Many wrote them on cards, a selection of which Vara shared. “What a gift to be guided to slow down and focus,” one read, illuminating how concentrated attention has come to feel like a luxury.
The last panelist to take the stage, actor Rainn Wilson, best-known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office and now host of the SoulBoom podcast, also wrestled with the stubborn question of how we resist the temptations that tamper with our attention. Start inward, he said, with a few minutes of prayer and meditation for compassion, extending into acts of service.
Attention to screen time statistics on our phones, Wilson suggested, could be an impetus to turn our focus toward a world in need. The time we have to spare is illuminated in that stark tally. Dedicate small increments to care for others — allocate time, like money, toward meaningful uses — and our compassionate interest in others would compound.
“Little by little, day by day, five minutes one day, the next month 10 minutes a day, here and there,” Wilson said, “and gradually, when you start down that path, all of a sudden it’s like a snowball and you will find more and more hours of your week devoted in service to others.”
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.