Hi there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

When I think of my childhood home in Bethesda, Maryland, depending on what kind of mood I'm in,

I think either of the mall or of the woods. Although there were some fun moments looking at

the inappropriate novelty items at Spencer Gifts

like edible underwear, the mall in my memory is a symbol of suburban enemy and alienation,

a place, as my guest today might put it, without context.

The woods, on the other hand, were endless and full of surprises.

We'd follow the twisting creek, overturn rocks to find crawfish, and eat sassafras leaves.

Once we made Molotov cocktails out of my mom's nail polish and threw them into the creek

with pure anarchic joy.

In the woods, I was always utterly present, connected to every sound and attuned to the slightest

movement. In the mall, I was mostly conscious of whether or not my jacket looked cool.

My guest today is Jenny Odell.

She's an artist, an educator who grew up in Silicon Valley and teaches at Stanford,

the heart of the attention economy that's colonizing more and more of the cultural woods.

She's also an avid bird watcher, or bird noticeer, as she might put it.

Her wonderful new book, How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy, is something like a primer for growing the woods inside them all.

It's about carving out space for ourselves in a world that wants to put our time and our lives to other more utilitarian uses.

Welcome to think again, Jenny. Thanks for having me. So it's not really about doing nothing, is it? No, it's definitely

not. You could almost call it like how to do everything, not do everything, maybe see everything.

Okay. I think that the phrase doing nothing is really just meant to be heard in opposition to how we normally think of how one would projectively spend time.

So, like this idea that you should have something to show for the time that you spent, all of the activities

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