I'm haunted by this idea of life is passing you by and you're not paying attention,

or that there are these things around you that you could be changed by, or it could be meaningful,

or connections you could be making that simply are not rendered to you in your reality

because of this very stable and hyper-optimized pattern of attention that you've learned.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is and hyper-optimized pattern of attention that you've learned.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can find more creativity and meaning in your daily work through the simple act of slowing down.

My guest today is Jenny O'Dell, a writer and artist whose work I discovered for the first

time back in 2017 when she published an 11,000-word essay on medium called How to Do Nothing.

It was a strange, slow, deeply thoughtful piece about the power of activities that cannot be optimized,

listening to another person, taking care of ourselves, contemplating a new idea,

and one of her personal favorites, bird watching, or bird noticing, as Jenny prefers to call it.

After the piece went viral, Jenny ended up elaborating on the concepts in her essay to create

the new book, How to Do Nothing. In this conversation, we explored the idea of withdrawing

your attention as an act of resistance.

What if we decided that making likable content wasn't the best use of our time and energy

and directed our attention elsewhere?

What if we let go of the idea that we should always be using our time in ways that are productive and opened

ourselves up to the meandering present and all of the serendipity available to us there.

What if we spent less time skimming through digital space and more time on the messy

realness of engaging in face-to-face conversations.

When all of our attention is absorbed in the urgencies of the moment,

...