The thing that I feel like I've learned in the last year, especially, is that there's

kind of an opposite loop where somewhere in there, you break the cycle, that could be anywhere,

really. Put the phone down, just cut it off. Yeah. Compared to even a year ago, it's like,

I really, I have zero desire to look at the feed of any social media. I just, I actually don't

want to. I want to get to that point. That's my north star right there.

I'm John Favreau. Welcome to Offland.

Hey everyone. My guess this week is Jenny O'Dell, an artist and writer whose first book became a

New York Times bestseller, and something of an aspirational manifesto for this show. It's called

How to Do Nothing, resisting the attention economy. It should be fairly obvious by now that I

have absolutely no idea how to do nothing. I have never been able to sit still. I've had a fear of

missing out on just about anything since I was a kid. I've been a workaholic and a political

news junkie since graduating college, and I rarely relax for more than a couple hours. Emily

might say a couple minutes. But I picked up Jenny's book this summer when I was feeling particularly

anxious, exhausted, and just burnt out by how much time I was spending staring at screens,

scrolling through bad takes, going from one awful new cycle to the next, and it completely changed

the way I think about how I spend my time. As Jenny explains in our conversation, the title is

more tongue-in-cheek than literal. Nothing isn't really nothing. It's just not the hyper-connected,

hyper-productive existence that so many of us have become accustomed to. In O'Dell's view,

stepping out of that world isn't about quitting social media or disconnecting from the internet

completely. It's about learning to redirect more of our attention toward the people and places

around us. I found Jenny's perspective especially valuable because she's got a different background

than most of our guests so far. She's an artist and a nature lover who's found offline fulfillment

...