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.

You know, that could be anywhere really.

Put the phone down, just cut it off first.

Yeah.

Compared to like even a year ago, it's like, I really, I have zero desire to look at the

the feed of any social media. I just I actually don't want to.

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

I'm John Fabro. Welcome to offline.

Hey everyone. My guest 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

...