Jenny Odell

“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

“To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

As it turns out, my dad went through his own period of removal when he was my age and working as a technician in the Bay Area. He’d gotten fed up with his job and figured he had enough saved up to quit and live extremely cheaply for a while. That ended up being two years. When I asked him how he spent those years, he said he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math and electronics, went fishing, had long chats with his friend and roommate, and sat in the hills, where he taught himself the flute. After a while, he says, he realized that a lot of his anger about his job and outside circumstances had more to do with him than he realized. As he put it, “It’s just you with yourself and your own crap, so you have to deal with it.” But that time also taught my dad about creativity, and the state of openness, and maybe even the boredom or nothingness, that it requires.

True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for—and thus the spatial underpinnings of—“what we will.” A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

That’s because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.

This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial.

To me, Fiverr is the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi’s “fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor.”16

And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.