Julianna Williams ’30
Contributing Writer
My friends thought I was joking when I told them my first-year seminar homework was to do Nothing. I laughed a little too when Professor Rutherford assigned it to my InterArts class, even after reading the first few chapters of Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing,” knowing that Nothing with a capital “N” did not actually mean that we had no homework.
Rather, we were required to do Nothing with intention. To do Nothing, as Odell puts it, to “protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality.” Odell sees doing Nothing as a form of refusal to participate in the capitalist commodification of our time and attention: it is a “refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.” Engaging in Nothing would forcibly cleanse our attention spans, turn doing into reflecting, listening, looking inward and hopefully giving us a fresh approach to our creative processes, our lives and how we spend our time.
As much as I enjoy participating in forms of capitalist protest, the idea of spending two and a half hours sitting by myself with no books, no music, no homework, no sleeping and no phone was daunting, and frankly annoying.
As a first-year student athlete, I was busy with schoolwork, pre-season training, club meetings, and social activities. I didn’t have time to sit around and do “Nothing,” even if it was a homework assignment. Both Professor Rutherford, and Odell herself would have told me: that’s the point. The attention economy has conditioned us all to commodify our time and attention to the point that if we’re not doing something productive, something that has perceived value, or at least something that entertains us every moment of the day, it feels wrong. Although I might have considered ways I could get out of actually doing the assignment, I found that I didn’t have as much trouble with it as I thought I would.
Mid-afternoon on one of those warm, breezy, perfect September days, I had finished classes and practice, and was procrastinating the start of my homework. I sat down on one of the benches outside Mather — where, among the mossy stones and ivy-covered trees, I could sit for a moment, feeling the sun on my face coming through the tree branches.
As my hand moved automatically to my phone, something stopped me. If I just keep sitting here, I realized, I’ll be doing Nothing. I set my phone firmly away from me and started my watch.
I experienced the expected drifts of boredom, the flashes of what am I doing? What a waste of time! I have so much to get done! But I also found it to be a pleasant excuse to fully appreciate my surroundings, to watch students bustling around in every direction, through gothic archways, past twisted trees and lush greenery, and I remembered how I had dreamed of being in a spot exactly like that one, back in the fluorescent-lit, locker-lined halls of my high school.
But despite my calm sense of first-year gratitude, the people around me were caught off guard by what I was doing—or rather, what I was not doing. I received many suspicious side-eyes and strange second looks, but what was particularly humorous was the number of kind people who approached me with great concern. “Are you all right?” someone asked, evidently concerned for my sanity; probably wondering why anyone in their right mind would just… sit there? Another good samaritan asked if everything was okay, believing that if I was sitting alone (and not even on my phone??!), something must have been gravely wrong. “Everything is great,” I would assure them. “I’m doing Nothing. It’s a school assignment.” My explanations did not seem to clear up their confusion or apprehension.
Odell claims that “platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them.” Does this explain why sitting peacefully, doing nothing, is so shocking, so confusing, so rare, on a campus that seems so perfectly designed for it?
Even with the eyesore of ever-growing construction projects, the most disgruntled student would have to agree: Trinity’s campus is extremely aesthetically appealing (remember that Architectural Digest ranking?). It is also full of benches, chairs, and tables; places to sit and admire it, while reflecting on ourselves and our surroundings.
However, if we do not take the time out of our days to shake free the claws of the attention economy, we will miss out on the many gifts being offered by the world around us. We should be getting outside to find a bench for the enjoyment of Nothing, before the temperature drops and the snow freezes us in.
We all procrastinate our work, so why not procrastinate by reflecting, instead of by scrolling? We may find our moods lifted, our creativity restored, our attention spans growing, and an increased ability to joyfully perceive and engage with the small, unproductive particles of our lives if we get off our phones and do Nothing instead.