261. How to Stretch Time with Jenny Odell

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Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

Okay.

If you have ever felt like you have lost your your humanity a bit in the midst of a culture that is obsessed with productivity,

if you've ever just felt the desire to just breathe a little more, to just

find more joy, to find more delight and pleasure and just be a human being instead of a human producing, then you need to listen to this episode with Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell is just an incredible thinker about just that, about how we can stop losing our humanity in pursuit of productivity.

She wrote a book called How to Do Nothing, which is just...

It's actually the book I read right before starting this podcast.

And she's out with a new book now called Saving Time.

And both are just about different ways to be,

to resist losing all of our humanity and joy.

She talks today about finding peace and humanity and nature, how to be creative instead of productive, and how we can actually

trick the system by becoming less useful.

Not more useful, less useful.

So the world will leave us alone.

She'll change your life, this Jenny Odell.

This is a mind-bending conversation.

I hope you enjoy.

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and the New York Times best-selling author of How to Do Nothing,

Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time, Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

I have to stop and say I was reading Saving Time before it came out long, long ago at this convention where there was a lot of people whizzing around trying to be more productive.

And so somebody came up to me and saw the title.

It's called Saving Time and in big letters.

And so she came up to me and she said, is it good?

Is it helping you?

And I could just tell.

And I was like, yeah, but it's not about like managing time.

It's about

like

turning time sideways.

And she goes, okay, never mind.

And just

anyway.

Okay, so Jenny's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and other publications.

And she lives in Oakland, California.

Jenny, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely.

It's already a treat.

So I've been thinking about this podcast for

with you for two and a half years.

So what I'm just hoping for is to just offer the pod squad just a glimpse or a little sliver of what your work has offered me, which is just kind of some questions and ideas about how to think about really the two

things we have, which are time and attention,

and how some of the ideas that we, the cultural ideas we've been giving about these things

might not be the most life-giving, planet-saving ways to think about them.

A lot of your work, it's so cerebral, but it's not to me at all.

I've been able to like feel it in my body and in the spaces I'm in very much so.

So if you could just do that in the next 50 minutes, that would be great.

Yeah.

No, that honestly makes me so happy to hear because that is exactly what I'm trying to do.

I mean, there are so many little references and things in my work.

I'm a very detail-oriented person.

Like, I think a lot of people who read either of the books are sort of like, how did you fit all of this into this kind of like matrix of a book?

But ultimately, like, that is the goal.

It's for something like real and felt and for the reader to have a moment of recognition because I feel like for me, me as a reader, I really value those moments.

Like the books that changed my life are ones where I wasn't the same afterward.

I've read books where I've literally feel like I need to sit on a park bench and just like think about my whole life again from the beginning, you know?

And oftentimes it wasn't a book that had advice in it.

It was just a book that it clarified something or it gave me a lens to see something like right in front of me.

And so that's kind of like what I have been chasing as a writer.

And even in my visual art before writing books, it was just sort of like, what can I do to make you see the thing that you're living in every day from a different angle

that in a way that allows you to do something else?

Yeah.

That's one of my favorite definitions of doing nothing that's in your work is.

to do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.

So it's not like it's changed what's there.

It's just allowing allowing you to receive it

and see it honestly.

So for someone who doesn't know what we're talking about right now, Jenny, can you explain to us or to the pod squad, for somebody who hasn't read your work yet, what was going on in your life and in the world that made you feel like the world needed the book, How to Do Nothing?

What were we all swimming in?

that you felt like maybe you could help us see

better.

Yeah, the most important thing I think that was influencing me was the 2016 election

and specifically how social media felt right after that.

I felt like,

I don't know, I just felt crazy all the time.

I just like, I felt like I couldn't have a thought and that I was like everyone was upset.

for very obvious reasons, but I felt like I couldn't even articulate what I wanted, like how I felt or what I wanted to mourn or whatever.

And

this was also around the time of the ghost ship fire, which was a fire that happened in Oakland where I live.

It was like an artist space.

And so a lot of people I knew were dealing with that around the same time.

And there was a lot of really cruel rhetoric that I remember seeing online.

of people being like, oh, it was just, you know, this illegal artist space and being very dismissive about what had happened and also about the arts in general.

As someone who was working in the arts and I was teaching art at the time, I felt like

sort of the spaces for reflection and subtlety and art and joy and all these other things were like really under threat.

We were always being shut down

and everything felt very immediate.

That's sort of what I remember.

It was like very hot and it was very in your face and it was very immediate.

And so I just started going to this city rose garden near my apartment.

It's like in the middle of the city, but it feels like a little kind of sanctuary.

And people are usually surprised when they discover it for the first time that it's even there.

And was just kind of sitting there day after day or when, you know, whenever I could get away with it, basically.

And

then, you know, inevitably over time, starting to think about how different I felt when I was sitting there versus when I was on social media or even just working.

And how if you go there, you just see other people like moving around the space in a way that also feels very different.

I feel like I talk to strangers there all the the time.

People are just like in a different state of mind.

It's purely a space of enjoyment.

And there's nothing that you're supposed to be doing there, and there's nothing that you're supposed to be reacting to.

And so I think how to do nothing

was kind of like an exploration of that contrast.

Like,

this feels bad, this feels good.

How can I move towards the thing that feels good?

You know?

And also, that there are these spaces where, because in some way, art in general is just the exact same thing as a park.

It's like a place that

capitalism might deem worthless, right?

Or like

a place.

It's like an end in itself.

It's not a means to another end.

I think that's something I've thought about for a long time because I was teaching art at Stanford at the time and it was off into non-humanities majors.

So I was having to make this like argument for art and

try not to like sort of stoop to a utilitarian

explanation like this will help you get a job, you you know, which I don't know, it could, but that wasn't like the reason to be doing it.

And so similarly, you know, I think it would be sort of absurd if you asked someone in the rose garden, okay, but like, what is this place for?

They'd be like, well, it's for this,

like I'm here, you know, I'm enjoying myself.

It's beautiful.

I just love going there and seeing people like.

Everyone smells the roses.

They just make their way down and they're smelling all the roses.

And it's like, yeah, because it smells good.

And I feel like that's something that I continually have to kind of push against.

Because I think, you know, you could read a book like How to Do Nothing, hoping that it will make you more productive.

Like, oh, maybe if I take more breaks, I will work better.

And that's probably true, but that's not why I wrote it.

And I don't think that's the reason to do it.

Right.

So the idea is that there are places and spaces or reasons just to be fully human, whether that's art or a park.

And the fear is, or the idea idea could be the more we

become part of a culture that is obsessed with productivity or that is just using us as a factory, that we lose these spaces and places and disciplines, and then we lose our humanity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And just kind of remembering the fact that you have one life to live, like that's a pretty bracing reminder, especially like if you're in a rush to do something, you you know, apologies to my former students, but I was often late to class because there are a lot of birds on the Stanford campus and

including migratory birds.

Like right now, for example, I'm, you know, I'm in this artist residency that's not actually that far from Stanford and the warblers have just shown up, which means that there are birds that I'm seeing right now that I haven't seen since spring.

I haven't seen for a long time.

They've been somewhere else, you know, and so that will like stop me in my tracks because it's like if you ran into a friend that you hadn't seen for years or something, you kind of have to pay attention to that um and so that would happen to me on my way i'd like be carrying all these bags and i'd be like in a really big hurry and super stressed out and then i would see this bird in a tree and kind of like forget about calendar time for a little bit and then it would all come back and then i would go to class but like i would just keep having these little sort of like openings um where time felt very different and i think like

For most people, I think looking back, it's like, obviously, those are the important moments.

Yeah.

Or those are the ones you remember.

Yeah.

And this is so interesting because

the idea of attention and time are so smushed together for me that I almost have a hard time.

But like when you talk about those moments, so the first essay that I ever wrote that went viral that started my entire career 12 years ago was about time and young motherhood.

Okay, like being a mom of young children and how that changed my entire concept of time because I would be in like a target target checkout line, just dripping with children.

And there would be one that was like licking the ground, and one that was like pulling all the bras off of things, and one that was screaming because they were tired or whatever.

And I would just be dying.

And then inevitably, an older woman would stop in like right where I was.

And she would look at me and she would say,

oh, God, honey.

enjoy every moment.

This just goes goes by so fast.

And Jenny, it happened so many times.

And I would look at, like, she would say it wistfully, like full of wist,

looking at me on the ground, you know, and I would think something's happening here because I don't feel like time's going fast.

I feel like I've been in this line since 1938.

And it really started to make me think there's a weird thing going on with time here.

And so that whole essay was like trying to figure out in young motherhood that the difference between like the Kronos time and Kairos time are different.

That like I would wake up with young kids and look at the clock.

I'd look at a baby on the ground who can't talk to me or entertain me at all.

And I would look at the clock and it would be like 7 a.m.

And I would think, okay, well, I guess we have to do this until 7 p.m.

How am I going to make it?

Right.

Yeah.

But then we'd have these moments during the day where I would look at this baby or like smell the baby or something and it would be like a wormhole of time.

Like no clock, no nothing.

Like I was sucked into this moment that I can still remember these moments right now.

Yeah.

And so are these the bird moments you're talking about?

Is this the malleableness of time?

Like

that there's the calendar, the clock time, and then there are these moments

that so define your day in your life that you realize you're off the clock.

Yeah, I think so.

And

I also find that that kind of the clock time, the like, I need to do something, or like you're looking at time as a material that you, that you need to organize and cut up so that you can get these things done.

I find that time often feels

this, not the same, but it feels like it's a uniform material, right?

Like an hour is an hour.

Like an hour is a time in which like you can get these things done versus like those moments are often ones where I realize how different all of the moments are.

Like I only have, I have an outsider's perspective.

Like a lot of my friends had babies during the pandemic.

So I know a lot of three-year-olds right now.

And so I like, I know from talking to them about what you're describing and also like what it did to their attention and sort of like attention span.

And like when I'm with them, I can feel that.

But then at the same time, I, it's like, that's also a time when they're growing really fast.

And so I would have these kind kind of like surreal moments of, I'll just be like looking at my friend's kid and then thinking about like even just six months ago.

It's incredible.

And you're like, oh, right, time is like moving forward.

Like things are growing.

Like everything is moving all the time, which feels very different than that kind of like

the hour, kind of the hour as material, right?

Yeah, the hour as widget that gets allocated.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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You talk about horizontal and vertical time.

So I understand that we cannot add time to our timeline, right?

That like if you're looking at it like a flat line,

we can't add any time to the end.

But it feels to me like we can

add

quality of the time.

You can't add to the end or the beginning horizontally, but there are things that you can add or ways of paying attention that improve the quality of the time so much that it feels like it's stretching like a marshmallow.

Like

music.

If I'm walking around my kitchen, that's like one minute of time.

But if I put on music,

it feels like a different minute.

Yep.

Do you know what I'm saying?

It's like space.

You have space.

Space is a dimension like time.

You can change the quality of space.

You can walk through air or you can walk through water.

It's still just one block of space, but you're changing the quality of it.

And I feel like you can do that with time, right?

Am I, am I?

Yeah.

Okay.

That makes sense.

That's, yeah, I totally agree.

And I think that the space comparison is a really great one because I'm actually friends with an architect and so he and I think about this a lot the ways that architectural space right like shapes our interactions so the fact that there's a public park right it allows me to go to this place and have these interactions and inhabit a certain type of attention

um i feel like there's been a lot of really interesting writing lately about communal architecture right like co-living like how could we design our spaces to um make

things like care care work easier for everyone who lives there because it's just because it's arranged differently, right?

And I think that it's very useful to apply that to time because time also is structured and it's also something that involves our interactions with other people.

And I'm like haunted by this comment that my friend who actually had a kid before the pandemic, who had read How to Do Nothing.

made where she was like, my relationship to the attention economy was totally different after.

And she's basically a single mom.

She has a lot of support, but at the end of the day, she's a single mom.

And it's like, yeah, I mean, I've hung out with her.

It's like, there's just constant demands on your attention, especially if it's just you and your kid, right?

And so I think about like, what is the temporal structure that would allow her

more breathing room?

And what does that look like?

And I think it's similar, honestly.

Like, if you think about communal architecture and you think about communal

time structures, it's kind of the same, right?

And it would change everyone's experience of time who's involved in that, not just hers.

And in that case, that you bring up, it's kind of akin to the technologies.

I mean, where the systems and this, the structures and the policies are built without reference to our need to be humans.

Yes.

Of course, there's going to be an out of balance with the ability to access that.

And so when you're kind of when you're talking about music being on, it's not like,

Okay, for the person at the conference, like the tip is to add music, then you'll have that.

But the thing under thing

is that like jenny when you talk about

what your intentions are you're saying i am suggesting we take protective stance in defense of ourselves each other and whatever is left that makes us human it's like the reason to me why the music being on

stretches the time is that it the quality of that time connects with your humanity.

Yes.

It connects with what you call the, you know, the non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought

that allows us to access

what was intended for us as humans.

It's probably those moments all the time.

The stretchy time thing, like the vertical time, the Kairos time, those moments I'm talking about, music, smelling my people's hair, my dog.

anytime with my dog,

nature,

they're all things that make me completely useless to a system other than my humanity is exactly what you're saying.

So, okay, to that end, can you tell us the story, Jenny, about Old Survivor?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So old survivor is the name of a tree, an old growth redwood tree in the East Bay Hills.

And a lot of people from the Bay Area even don't know that.

So the hills next to Oakland used to have redwoods, like a lot of old-growth redwoods.

And they were all logged in the 19th century,

except for Old Survivor, because this tree, you know, for various reasons, it was actually not considered big compared to other old growth redwoods, which now it's like huge, right?

And sort of an odd, gnarled shape, and it's on an outcrop that's hard to get to.

So, for all these reasons that make it useless as timber, it survived.

And when I learned about that,

I thought to myself that it sounded like a real life version of the story of the useless tree by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who talks about a similar sort of large gnarled tree that is seen by a carpenter.

And the carpenter sort of laughs to himself.

And he's like, oh, that tree.

It's like not useful for anything.

It doesn't have fruit.

It's not good for timber.

And then the tree appears to him in a dream and basically is like,

who are you to call me useless?

Like, my uselessness has been very useful for me obviously i'm still alive and you are a mortal man you will die soon sort of just like okay like i'm gonna flip the tables on you and i feel like the the humor of that story and and sort of the irony of of old survivor i find very compelling because it's this perfect illustration of how

being or appearing useless in one frame it could actually be the thing that rescues you from it.

And it's not only not a deficiency, it's like a source of strength.

And it is what will help you

come out intact on the other side.

Yes.

It begs the question: like,

to whom and for what?

Like,

if you are successful, quote unquote,

you know, to whom and for what are you successful?

Is that working for you?

You are useful, you are helpful, you are important.

To whom and for what?

Like, yeah, and unless it is for your humanity

also,

then you might be a really useful, successful,

logged redwood.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like what the people who are most useful, the people who are most like efficient, who are like the smartest, who are the most like people pleasing, who are the most useful to the systems they're in get eaten alive

by the systems.

I think that that's something that I've just been sitting here thinking, especially I come from the athlete background where it's like hyper vigilant on your time.

Everything is cataloged, data-driven.

It's almost like productivity is our religion in some ways.

How do you suppose you bring somebody maybe over towards the way that you feel life could be lived?

And why?

What kind of benefits is this giving them?

It's a hard question because you can't know what's true for someone.

Right.

Like, I think the most you can say is, is,

you know, I'm concerned that people might be unknowingly cut off from what is actually true to them.

Right.

So, I mean, even that's how it would play out in my class when I taught art.

It was like, I'm just going to give you a space to sort of like be reflective about things.

because I suspect that you're not being given the space otherwise.

And maybe you'll see something when you're there and come back and feel differently, right?

But I'm certainly not going to tell them what that is.

And a lot of times that is what happened.

Like through the art projects that they would make, they would sort of realize like, some of them knew from the outset, I don't want to be grinding all the time.

They would tell me that the beginning of class.

But others would sort of come around.

Like

I would see them start to kind of reflect on that through the work.

One image that I always come back to is like worrying that I have blinders on.

And so I'm going in a direction and I'm going forward and like, that looks great.

But I'm not super aware of the people around me who might also have blinders on or the sort of other paths that I could be taking, taking.

And I just feel like I have to be on this track.

And there's only forwards or backwards.

And it's sort of like, what I want is like to take them off so that I can look around.

And maybe it is.

true that after you do that, you're like, no, I am on the right path.

Or you could decide like, I do get a lot of satisfaction, like genuine meaning and satisfaction out of being really productive all the time.

Like, I don't know, who am I to say, right?

But I suspect that a lot of people would,

uh, as I think we saw during the pandemic, um, kind of look around and be like, I actually don't want to be on this track, right?

Um, I want to be over there, um, or like, I want to live in a way where I can just see the other people around me and where they're going and why.

And maybe that the idea of success and the idea of productivity

that I'm being very successful about has actually gotten me cut down.

Yeah.

Like the tree.

I think about your story about old survivor once a week.

I don't know why.

It just stuck, stick, stuck in my head so like just this tree that was passed over completely because it was a loser tree, basically.

Right.

Like the loggers were like,

this freaking tree is of no use to us.

and passed it over.

And so it got to live.

Like I think about, have you read Matrix by Lauren Groff so it's this book about this woman and and she

doesn't get married off because she's not attractive okay

so she starts this like wild convent with this but these like renegade women they end up saving their selves and actually living full lives.

And there's this scene where the woman who started it talks about how had she been pretty,

she never would have been powerful or free.

So she was like the old survivor.

She was not useful to the men of her, who were picking wives.

So she got to live this whole thing, right?

Or I think about my friend who was having this like family drama recently and she, because her parents were constantly calling her and

her sibling, she was the one that everybody relied on.

And she said to me, I just need to figure out how to become less dependable to my family.

And I was like, that is a fucking brilliant goal, right?

Like she's old survivor or she's the opposite, right?

She's so useful that she gets cut down constantly.

It's almost as if

instead of asking ourselves how we can be more useful, we should ask ourselves how we can become less useful.

Yeah.

yeah

yeah i mean i think the sort of um even just the notion of use right like that implies becoming an instrument for something right rather than just um

yourself yeah i think one of the reasons the rose garden was so important for me was that it's not that far from my apartment but it's it is a space of removal

and so i think it had this function for me that's similar to, you know, right, I've written in a journal for like my entire life life since I was like eight.

Um, and it has a similar function to that, where it's like, I'm, I'm gonna just like stop thinking about these sort of like outside standards or pressures, like just long enough for me to find out what will grow in the space that feels more like me.

But it, but it, it needs to be like, it needs to be protected,

you know.

Jenny, I get that.

So if we're in these

worlds that we have been convinced are economies, like even the words we use, we're paying attention, we're saving time, we're spending time.

We even use economic words for these things.

We're told time is money, right?

I mean, it's all like,

so clearly for you,

time is not money.

Right?

I think that saves us all the time.

Right.

Or like maybe not the best, highest use of what.

Yeah.

What is it?

If somebody says to you, fine, time is not money, then Jenny Odell, time is what?

What is your fullest understanding of what time is for?

What it's for or what it is?

Either of you.

I mean, those are both.

Both, yeah.

Yeah.

Because for me, time is just change.

I have like a.

pretty basic definition of it.

And that's one of the reasons that I spend so much time in saving time dwelling on botanical examples or like examples from nature of like using the buckeye tree in my neighborhood as a clock

in a very serious way.

Like, right, it's not a metaphor.

It is very true that right now the buckeye tree is dormant and you can already see the buds that are going to open in the spring.

And that is an expression of time.

There's like no other way to explain that.

And

so, I mean, in terms of what time is for, I feel like that is

similar to trying to figure out the meaning of life, right?

Like this time, time is life, time is change.

And I

kind of related to that definition of time, like for me, like I

feel that the purpose of my time

and experience is actually to be as in touch as possible with that change, to have as much of

my life feel like I'm sensitive to the tree that is changing.

I don't know if if you've ever had this experience of

learning about something, for example, like, I don't know, a type of plant or like birds or something, and then you think about how you used to see it in the past.

So, for example, these warblers that are visiting.

I mean, I lived in San Francisco starting in 2008.

I'm sure I saw them.

I know they were there.

I don't really know what I thought they were.

Maybe I didn't notice them at all.

But like, if you had asked me in 2008, describe the birds in San Francisco, I'd say, well, there's crows

and then there's the really little guys and they're just kind of always around and they're all kind of brown.

And then there's like seagulls.

I don't know.

That's probably what I would tell you, you know, and it's like,

no, it turns out that there are these like.

amaze like all these different species of warblers like coming from like really far away these amazing journeys and they only go into certain types of trees you know what i mean there's like so much specific specificity and change and like aliveness in that that I just like wasn't aware of yet.

And I do feel that my life is richer the more I'm aware of that.

Like the best days are the ones where like I go outside and everything feels like that.

Like whatever is the opposite of the world is a is a frozen place and I'm just kind of like

a productive person who's just kind of there.

Yeah.

Right.

Like that's what I don't know.

It's also so important.

Like if you, if pod squatters listening to this, imagine.

So if we were people who

paid attention in time in such a way that our attention and time led us closer and closer to understanding and knowing and observing and loving the intricacies of our environments,

how much more likely we would be to save our planet?

Like this is why the how to do nothing

is everything.

It's not a dropping out.

It's a dropping so deep in that we save the very thing that is everything,

yeah.

I think it ideally can be the beginning of something, that's kind of how I see it.

I mean, I think I used the word way station at some point in how to do nothing, and it's similar in saving time.

It's sort of like, I don't think that you know, just learning to see things differently is the answer or the end of that sort of journey, right?

But it is, I think, a really important

preliminary step of sort of like, okay, everything looks different, and now you look around.

I mean, I get the most excited by,

for example, like thinking about if people were to see time as less of a zero-sum game, right?

That sometimes the best way for me to get time, more time is to give it to you.

This notion of time that isn't money,

if more people were to adopt that, that then allows maybe those people to sort of look around at each other and start to ask questions like, okay, well, like, what are the temporal structures?

Like, what are the structures of like mutual support that we want to build?

But to get there, you have to get out of the sort of like, I have my box of 24 hours that gets refilled every day.

I have mine, you have yours.

And I just need to use mine better, right?

Like, there's only so far you can get with that.

So I guess, like, I, yeah, I get really excited by the things that are enabled by different forms of attention.

And to your point, I think seeing the non-human world as

more alive than maybe we normally treat it, I feel like like that

makes the climate crisis feel different.

It doesn't, obviously, it doesn't really make you feel any better about it, but I do think that it

points the way towards a feeling more of like collaboration, for example, with

the non-human world.

Like I'm deeply, deeply inspired by people who work in habitat restoration locally here in the Bay Area, and that is how they think about it.

They don't see themselves as going in, I'm going to fix this, I'm going to fix this area.

No, it's like, I'm going to observe this

ecology and learn enough about it and like fall in love with it enough to know like which interventions will bring it back to a state of flourishing.

But when they talk about it, it's very clear that they're also restoring themselves.

Like this isn't a sort of like one-way thing.

Yeah.

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As a representative of the remedial how to do nothing students,

I

love the way that you're talking about the warblers and the connecting to all of the like movement and intricacies of the non-human world.

And I'm

like starting way back in the line.

And what I see in your work is: if I'm an accurate representation of a chunk of folks, I'm not sure we are even

paying attention to the human world, to our own intricacies and movements and humanness of the actual humans we are.

And so for me, I'm thinking like,

yes, this is, I am a human.

Like, I am here

to be a human.

And,

and I am operating in a world when I, when I can see it in moments of clarity, that is, as you say,

ruled by these things that actively ignore and disdain my humanity.

And those are the structures of

don't think about things, don't feel things, don't do anything that is not productive.

And you get so used to that,

it becomes

your

fluency that anything outside of that feels so odd.

And so

I think there's just such beauty in being like,

wait,

I am a body among other bodies.

And there are things here that are for us

and things here that are against us.

And I can only truly see that

when I take the time to actually get a taste of my own humanity because I feel like we don't even have a taste of it.

And that's why we're not like rushing towards it and feasting on it.

So when do you get a taste of it, sister?

When do you feel a taste of the humanity that Jenny's talking about?

Like,

when do you

feel like, oh, God, wait, there's something that has nothing to do with productivity that feels like magic?

I think it's when I visit my and spend time with my friend who's dying, when I am

playing with and not like pretend laughing with my kid to get through this 30 minutes, but like actually enjoying it and being ridiculous.

When I like find something absolutely ridiculously awesome at a thrift store that I'm like, I'm going to paint that.

It's going to be so perfect.

I love that thing.

Like when, when it is

these moments where, as you say, Jenny, it's like

the things

that only exist because

our practice of care and maintenance.

Like those, those relationships, those exchanges, all of that are not the result of something that has

value because it has been assigned.

It is precisely because of the care that we put into them

that makes it of value.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, and I think, you know, something that a lot of those experiences have in common is, and that I think is true of care in general, is it's very

kind of like ego disassembling.

It makes your boundaries a bit fuzzier.

And I think one of the reasons maybe

we don't habitually go there is because there's a lot in our culture that wants us to be very bounded, right?

Like,

I need to be a, you know, sort of like identifiable individual who's in competition with other identifiable individuals.

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's really easy to get swept up in.

I mean, because it's all around you and it becomes very unintuitive that actually what what you're like, what your heart wants is to move in the opposite directions like i actually don't want to have such hard boundaries like when you when you're caring for someone or something i feel like there are moments where you're like not really sure where that boundary is

there is you and there is them but there's something that's sort of like overflowing um and i think also

like even just like the example of listening to music right like these are also experienced like sensory experiences like people going to the rose garden smelling the the roses which smell like that to you as a human animal with a nose right um those are also kind of i feel like overflowing moments when something is so beautiful that you like don't even know who you are anymore for a minute you know like that also tends to overcome that boundary yeah it's disillusioned it's like

the ego disappearing and it is so true about one of the reasons I mean, I think the first sentence of your book is like, there's the hardest thing in the world is doing nothing, like something like that.

It's because when we stop, the truth is there, but it's also because all of our doing affords us identity, makes us feel important.

Yeah.

And it's sort of the language that's spoken, the main language of value that's spoken.

Like I always felt with my students, for example, like I felt like I needed to cut them a lot of slack because

it is in the air, like everywhere, like these ways of talking about things and valuing things, outright advice that's given, but also not even sometimes things are just implied, right?

Like it's just implied that you should have a personal brand, for example, or it's just implied that if you're not

like externalizing your life events on Instagram, that they're not important, right?

Like no one's actually saying that to you, but it's just kind of like in the ether.

I think it's important to likewise cut ourselves some slack.

The reason it's hard

is because no one's used to it.

And the systems are specifically built in to ignore and disdain it.

So, I mean, when you're talking about the mom,

and we're talking about like, it isn't just hard to stop doing things because of your ego or your identity.

It's also hard to stop because most people in this nation have to work one and two jobs to be able to care for their people.

But, but I am putting all of those systems that are there in the same bucket of the technologies that you're identifying, which are acting

to the detriment of

body and your humanity.

And so, even just noting that, that it isn't like this inevitable thing that you,

it is there and it is a force.

And just even seeing it as such, I think is helpful.

Because when you're talking about the warblers and like being late to class, we're like chuckling that you have to stay out and watch them.

But, but who decided what is urgent?

Like,

the systems decided that what was urgent and important is that your ass be in class at the start of class, right?

And the idea that it'd be urgent and important to stop and watch some birds gives us all a chuckle.

But that is a value decision.

Well, it's like the lady who got mad at me on the path when I went for a walk.

We have these freaking roses that are so gorgeous, you can't believe it in

the South Bay.

And so I'm on the path and I stop and I'm staring at these roses roses.

And she runs into me, which fair enough, I'm on the wrong side.

And I stopped.

But then she goes, pay attention.

And I'm like, oh my God, I'm paying such close attention.

I'm just not paying attention to what you want me to pay attention to.

Right?

Exactly.

But we're going to.

You're paying attention to what you want me to pay attention to.

And to be fair, what the rest of the world has decided is what can't pay attention to.

and to me what your work is is

let us be clear we are definitely paying attention but we are paying attention to a very small sliver of what is available to us as humans to pay attention to to the detriment of our own humanity yeah totally yeah right it's like paying attention to to what I used to become morbidly fascinated with how I would look when I was on social media, like around the time that I wrote How to Do Nothing.

It's like always the same, right?

Like I'd be like, like very hunched over.

Yeah.

Like my brows are furrowed.

And I still think about this all the time.

Like

the phone is not very big.

It's actually like a really small part of your visual field.

And it's crazy that you could just be in that little rectangle.

Like there's all this stuff, even if you were somewhere very boring, you know?

Like just thinking about like fraction wise, like how much space the phone is taking up in your entire visual field.

And you're just like looking only at that.

And then I often would find that I was not breathing very deeply, which, like, that's the whole thing, like screen apnea.

And that I'd sort of like forgotten that I had a body.

Like, that would happen a lot.

Like, I would just become this pure.

cognitive force of like likes and not likes.

Yeah.

And like nothing else.

And like, I don't have a body.

I don't have a history.

I don't have a future.

I don't have an appetite.

Like, it's just, you know?

Yes, I do.

And then I would go to the rose garden and I'd be like, oh, yeah.

Right.

Like, I'm actually in the world, like this like three-dimensional world with like smells and light and all this, you know.

But it's like amazing how quickly.

you can forget.

And it's designed that way.

Like that's absolutely what it's designed for.

So it's just doing its job.

I mean, yeah.

It's like when we were in Wyoming recently and one of our kids looked at the freaking most beautiful landscape I've ever seen and said, oh my God, it looks just like a screensaver.

Like, I was like, holy shit, they think that nature is trying to recreate screensavers.

Or like the screensaver is the primary image.

That's right.

Right.

This thing is just trying to match that.

Okay.

Productivity versus creativity.

Jenny never, never suggests that we all just drop out of everything forever.

This is not

the idea.

But it does feel to me like you have found lots of ways to maybe

switch your goal from being productive to being creative.

So can you talk to us about how you define the difference between

being productive or actually being creative and how there there are different ways to kind of walk around the earth.

Yeah, I mean, I will say that even, you know, as an artist and writer, like you do usually need some mix of both.

Yeah.

I think for me, the main difference is

that productivity feels to me very industrial, right?

It's like assembly line work, basically, like even in your mind.

And creativity to me feels

much more related to encounter.

So So this is ironic, but

I have a work log in my Scrivener document for saving time, which Scrivener is just like the software that I use to write saving time, which meant that I had to decide what counted as work to go in the work log, right?

Like obviously it's like finished, you know, XYZ book.

That's goes in the work log, right?

Interviewed someone, okay, that goes in the work log.

But then sometimes things would just happen to me.

I would encounter something or I would have an unexpected conversation with someone or

like I would see something and it would kind of start this whole train of thought.

And I realized that I had to also put those in there because they were like the most important part of the process, like the actually creative part.

And so

if I have to distinguish those two, one feels much more solitary than the other, right?

Like productivity is like I'm alone and I'm producing something

and according to a plan.

And creativity feels more like I went outside and I got surprised by something.

Yeah.

Is productivity productivity also like related to a thing that I have to make something?

This is what I,

this is so weird, but when I think about my understanding this version of your work, I think about, okay, we're on a lifeboat.

Okay.

We're on a lifeboat with like seven other people and we don't know if we're getting rescued.

And the productive people

are like making new shit on the lifeboat.

They're like, look what I made.

I made a new thing.

Like look at my thing.

Like a sale?

Whatever they've made.

That's what I'm wondering, Abby.

I'm like, what the hell are we making on the lifeboat?

Like, are we making a fishing?

Toward our survival.

No, just a thing.

All right.

They're just, they're being excited that they made a thing because they're being productive.

And the creative people are like,

look at this thing over here.

Let's all focus our attention on this beautiful part of the lifeboat.

And then everybody's like looking over there.

And then we're spending 20 minutes looking at like the threads on the lifeboat and like how it actually makes this beautiful pattern.

And we're all passing time in that way.

Whereas the productive people are like just making more shit and they're going to sink us because they keep making more shit.

But the creative people are focusing our attention in different spaces so that we can see what's already there with fresh eyes.

Like I think of in your book, Jenny, the Applause Encouraged the art project where the person set up chairs at sunset and had people come into the red velvet ropes and sit and watch the sunset and then applaud.

It's like part of creativity is look what's already here and how beautiful it is, as opposed to look what I made.

Yeah, totally.

That's a perfect example also of that encounter.

There's the encounter on the side of make, of being creative, but then also there's creating a space for others to have an encounter.

I'm assuming the people who went to that performance all live in that area and have seen the sunset over the ocean before,

but maybe never had it framed in that way.

That maybe made the experience a lot more intense.

Like just the decision to sort of mark off the time, like I am going to start watching the sunset now.

Oh, also, no phones were allowed.

I feel like that's an important.

So they're like, people are not taking photos of the sunset.

They're just like sitting there and watching it.

That's something that I really love.

I mean, I end at the end of the book, I talk about do-nothing farming, which is very similar.

Traditional or industrial farming in particular, right?

It's like, I want to grow this amount of corn and I'm going to use all these pesticides and sort of

do whatever I need to do to the land to make that happen while, meanwhile, you're exhausting the soil and making this impossible in the future, versus do-nothing farming, which was this Japanese farmer who came up with this method of farming in a way that used no fertilizer, it had no tilling, like sort of none of the inputs that rice farming in that area that they normally would use.

And

the irony being that his farm ended up being very productive, like it produced a lot of what he was growing.

But his attitude, you know, in the book that he wrote about it is very different.

It's, it's much more humble.

Like he's like, I'm a participant in this environment and I can make these sort of tweaks to make it sort of do something where you get this food.

But I'm only able to do that because I am aware of the existing relationships and that I'm, you know, maintaining.

And so I just feel like that is also very creative.

Yes.

And I also, I should say that I think that maintenance is very creative.

I think that it's not often recognized as such, but I live in a neighborhood that has a lot of repair shops, a shoe repair shop.

I've gotten my watch repaired twice at the same place.

Even like, when you pick up your dry cleaning, there's like that sewing area.

Like always like looking at all the little threads.

Like that's such an art.

It is just an art.

And to say nothing of the fact that I know I have friends who are really into like mending and like the very moment in which you decide that you might mend something is also

an opportunity to change it to something that suits you better or that's different, you know?

And so I think there's this like sort of notion.

the more like traditional notion of creativity, which is much closer to productivity, which is like, I made something from nothing.

Like, I made this big thing, there wasn't anything here before, and then I made it.

Whereas I think that there's really amazing, kind of more amazing examples of creativity that are much more like,

I arrived at a situation, I observed the relationships, and then I intervened into that and produced something new, even if that's just a new experience for someone.

Like, someone is able to experience the sunset in a new way.

And I think, like, if you ask those people, like, they would undeniably say, like, yeah, I had a new experience.

Yeah.

Like, I wouldn't have had it otherwise.

So it is new.

There's such a dignity in that, the maintenance piece of that artist who

wanted to showcase caring for her young baby in all of the minutiae of the day-to-day as she was doing that, that that practice of maintenance.

And she said, This is my art.

This is this work that I'm doing every day

is art.

And it's the creativity of maintenance that keeps things

alive and that builds bonds.

And

I love the dignity of that because because we don't value it,

I think there's an internal devaluing of it.

It's just beautiful to claim that as creative and as a

part of our life force that we are using in really creative and very smart ways on a daily basis.

Beautiful.

And

I think this is risks being like a ridiculous oversimplification of your work, but this is the remedial student.

I just, I took away from all of this.

It's like, yes, if you choose to dip into this humanity piece of this, this

non-commercial, non-productive experience, It is true that you might miss something.

You might be late for class.

You might not get the promotion you wanted.

Period.

And

the true story is if we are not dipping into that, we are also missing something.

There is no way of doing the life as set for us in the ideal

capitalist, productive attention economy world without missing things.

We're missing it.

Can you have it all?

No, decidedly not.

Right.

But so it's kind of like a choose your poison thing for me.

It's like, do you want to miss the humanity part of your humanity?

Or you want to take a little look-see and see what you got going on over there.

Yeah, totally.

Although, I should say that it makes me think of something.

There was a Spanish journalist who said there was a phrase going around there at the time: Do you need a therapist or do you need a union?

and i i do think that like one of my hopes for that kind of like

the doing nothing and the attention as a preliminary step is that one of the one of the things is that it opens up is actually the feeling that hey like maybe i um you know you can't have it all but maybe you can have more than you were told and maybe it doesn't need to be such a binary i've just been so inspired by the writer's strike and how like that's an example of people taking their blinders off looking around sharing stories about about, oh, I thought I was just grinding really hard and I was a failure, but it turns out everyone else around me was having the same experience.

They start talking, they, and then they just like materially changed their experience of time and how much their time is worth and how much security they have.

It turns out they didn't have to choose.

Yeah.

But,

and I think that's so important to.

to like to harbor that, right?

Even if you're at the very beginning of a process like that, like actually that we are right to

to have it all, I guess, you know, like you shouldn't have to choose between security and feeling alive.

That's right.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

That would be wonderful.

Jenny.

Thank you.

Thank you for all of your work.

Are you going to write another book?

Just, I'm just hoping you can be productive.

Okay, great.

Great.

Yeah.

Good.

I'm thinking about it.

Okay.

If you do, can you send it to me like just as soon as humanly possible?

Thanks.

Thanks.

Okay.

No pressure to be productive or anything.

Just

pod squad, we love you.

Be human this week, and we'll see you next time.

Bye.

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I give you Tish Milton and Brandy Carlisle.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine

And I continue

to believe

That I'm the one for me

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks are map map.

A final destination

lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a hard pain.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the

problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination we lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a heart pain.

We're adventurous and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places

they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do

hard

things.