> Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: "…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. "
Well said. I really liked this article, and as a side note, the "satellite landscapes" are a thing of beauty.
It's interesting how much this relates to competitive strategy games like chess, kungfu, dota etc.
If you watch a beginner he has not much to do, but he enjoys what happens seemingly randomly.
Then if you watch a mediocre strategist you will see them hustle and hustle and hustle away, always feeling one step behind optimum.
And then when you watch the experts, they simply refuse to do the 80% of the hustling where they know it has no value for their goals. Then they sit around calculating how an actual opportunity would look like, observing what their opponents are doing and when one of these opportunities comes around they are already prepared and therefore can take it in a relaxed manner.
The thing is step 1 is easy, everybody can do it. But the value in the competitive environments like your working environment are almost zero. Good and bad things happen at random to you. And while you might have less stress in general, the bad things will hurt you badly.
What we actually want is getting to step 3. But few people take the time after reaching step 2 to actually continue learning and optimizing. But that's the way to get to step 3.
The reason people feel that way is because they "just" need to get to that one thing that is in front of them, "just" barely out of reach, not realizing that they don't get it because they are so exhausted.
And the solution is really letting go. Accepting that you won't achieve the opportunities that you see directly in front of you, but rather work on improving yourself to become more capable to achieve anything. And then one needs to continue for quite some time in that state, slowly improving ones health, ones ability to observe oneself and others, recognizing big opportunities that are further away, and realizing which steps to take to reach them.
I found the article to be really meaningful. Me too, after the 2016 election I found I had to withdraw, because it became more obvious to me that there's something deeply sick about the relationship between the news media, "scaring people," and modern smartphones.
Since the news and social media apps are purposefully built to be addictive, you have to "save yourself from yourself." I now know a lot about filtering technologies for both my desktop and my mobile phone. I have always loved camping and being outdoors, but these days I feel it more as a need: just sitting in the sun and listening to the wind in the trees. That, and reading really good books.
I see her work here as similar to art movements like Dada: I don't know if the world has really "gone mad" but, as the collective behavior of humanity makes less sense, playful silliness might be the best way to express that you have free will, you love folks and want them to be happy, and that in certain ways, you refuse to engage & put more energy, into events and processes that are harmful.
For an article about nothing, I wasn't expecting so much of it. I'm afraid that I wasn't able to read the whole thing. My biggest criticism is that I think there are too many connections drawn at various points. It's one of those things where X led me to Y which led me to Z, but X doesn't really have any bearing on Z at all. Because a path led there, it gives credence to the idea that they are connected, but the only connection is the author. In that way, I found it difficult to read as I felt I was searching for a needle in a haystack. I don't need the author's stream of consciousness in order to do nothing. I have my own. I kept wondering why I am looking at her rose garden and her birds rather than looking at my own.
Personally I think these types of writings offer valuable opportunity for reflection, I found the stream of thought approach appealing and overall enjoyed the experience of reading this.
I think if you have reached a point where you've found your rose garden, that's a beautiful thing and maybe this article and others like it seem less appealing. And I get it can seem contradictory, narcissistic or sacrosanct to want to write (or read) an entire article about something so personal or subjective (and in doing so, add noise to the very noisy environment the author was describing). All valid points of view, which shift in relation to the observer.
Read as an essay on culture, I don't think it has a clear thesis beyond a general sensation of defending our time and space. Explored as a meandering journey through a garden of ideas we're given the opportunity to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings - in a way the article shows us some disjoint pieces of the haystack as experienced by the author (in a very blind-men-describing-the-elephant way), and the needle is ourselves.
Ha yeah i thought it meant “friend of mine”. And now i read it again i see “mine” is written, so maybe I’m just in wake up brain and not reading right. That was a fun waste of everyone’s time, sorry ha!
This was a fun read. Took me about 1/3 to realise I was reading a woman's work then it became really personal and I could draw from personal experience. It was well expressed.
I also couldn't read the entire article. Just as soon as I thought it was about to end, I eyed over to the scroll bar and saw I was only 1/4 the way through... that was disappointing. Maybe that says something about me but perhaps it says more about the author. Sometimes you just need to get to the point, life is short.
I'm currently halfway through Jenny's book of the same title, and the situated and the personal, with a strong philosophical grounding makes this such a refreshing read compared to the rest of the literature on attention. Attending is such a subjective experience, and the personal account of developing a different kind of attention (especially one that is situated in places relatable to myself) makes this so much more meaningful than other, still excellent, but more View From Nowhere texts such as Stand Out of Our Light, or The Attention Merchants.
Reading this post earlier this year stopped me in my tracks and would highly recommend the book if you enjoyed this!
While I am glad to see and encourage the production of more material on the topic of intentional attention, I found this particular book amateurish and much more of an angry clichéd rant about active resistance against certain qualities of our current political and cultural climate than useful and fundamental advice on personal attentional freedom, and would actively dis-recommend this book.
well i’m sorry to hear that. i understand your point about cliché. there is a good deal of tired arguments to be made about how to be more human, but i’ve still never read one that is as personal as this one.
as for being “useful”, it is not so cut and dry, which i think her philosophy wouldn’t allow. it isn’t a “do this” so much as it is an “i did this”. and for me, the subjectivity of attention is much better lent to that than some objective diagnosis of attention.
>suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality
wonderful sentiment. Too many occassions pass where we miss out on these moments because we're worried too much about productivity.
I agree with the overall sentiment of putting aside time for 'doing nothing'. However I read the first few chapters of her book and found it to insufferably epitomize the ramblings of an entitled millennial.
I find many of the comments on this article hilarious -- Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of complaining that your attention span is too short to read an article about the joys of paying attention to the world around you?
Meh, I'm walking distance from a rose garden, and I think I'd have been better off spending my time sitting in that garden than having read this article.
Actually this article read kind of like a literary labyrinth, in the sense of it changing directions repeatedly and at the end you realize you haven't gone anywhere. Some people I know greatly enjoy labyrinths, but they are not for me (nor is this article).
As a final point, I am a very fast reader. Were I a slower reader, I likely would have stopped reading the article much sooner. This isn't an article with a surprise ending, so if you didn't like it 1/3 of the way through, I recommend not finishing it.
Eh, fair enough -- a real experience beats reading about it any day.
Literary labyrinths can be fun to explore, though it takes a certain mindset going in. I'd say that pieces like this are not "ingest with morning coffee" pieces, but more like lazy Sunday afternoon tea with (your preferred equivalent to) "Lofi hip hop mix - Beats to Relax/Study to" playing in the background.
The article _does_ go somewhere, though, even if you wind up in nearly the same place you started. I for one didn't know much, if anything about the artists, places, and pieces the writer referenced, nor that BYTE magazine had such weird pictures, nor about the Chapel of the Chimes, nor what a scrub-jay sounds like, nor that Fiverr had such aggressive advertising campaigns, ... etc.
As a collection of a bunch of little things (which suits the point of the article well), I at least found it interesting.
I didn't interpret the article that way at all -- I can understand how somebody saying "hey, look at these neat things I found and learned outside!" could be misinterpreted as "self-important wankery" due to the natural "great for you!" or "who gives a shit?" reactions that kind of thing tends to garner. I at least found it neat _because of_ (not in spite of) the feeling that it was almost as if I was reading from the author's personal diary.
Why such a negative reaction? I legitimately don't get your hostility. Imagine if a kindergartener wrote a book about their day spent playing outside on a Saturday -- would you call that "self-important wankery", too?
You don't need to take everything you see on the internet as unnecessarily hostile. Heck, I was just trying to make light of what I saw as an absurd situation.
Downvotes be damned, but after listening to the actual Eyeo talk, I'm surprised how much fluff (Jenny's work) can be added to a good statement (Gilles Deleuze's statement). Art is supposed to be a consideration on human sentiment/action/whatever, but this is just next level of not actually producing anything and calling it "art" - not because of its value, but because it won't fit into any other meaningful category... and then you do a keynote with it.
Well said. I really liked this article, and as a side note, the "satellite landscapes" are a thing of beauty.