YouSaid · the spoken record

Jenny Odell

lines on the record: 60
first: 2022-01-23
most recent: 2022-01-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Just like your heart rate is kind of weird, or you're like, you feel too hot, or you just like it's just bad, it's bad. You feel really bad. And it got bad enough that I think I was trying to feel my way out of that. Like it finally reached a point and everyone has their point, I think. Even if you come back later, but there is a point where you're like, this feels so intuitively bad that I need to change something.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they were pretty bad by my current standards I will say in my defense that I taught digital art at Stanford. So I had to be kind of. Aware of things that were happening. And a lot of my friends were making new media work. So we're kind of like in that world. But I definitely. It'd be really interesting to go back and look at journals from that time because I actually have no idea. I have no idea what my screen time was. The time, but I definitely was feeling like it's like I'm sure many people know this feeling, it almost feels like you're sick, right? Like you're.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think in the context of the attention economy, It's so reactive, right? It's like, do you like this or do you not like this? Do you hate this or do you not hate this? And then there's like this other option of like, what if I just wasn't there? Like, what if I just walked away from this question? Or what have I thought about it some more and put it in some historical context or something? Or what if I talk to a friend about it? Do I really need to be in this state of constant reaction, which I think is what I was feeling around? On myself. I honestly think it's a really interesting exercise even now to when you're in that state, just like pretend you're a fly on the wall and look at yourself. You're probably in a little ball, you know, on your face is really strained.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's all this stuff that falls into that category like care, you know, caregiving, maintenance. I have a fraught relationship with the phrase self-care, but you could put self-care in there as well, right? Right. So, really, nothing just means. Things that don't sort of appear in the value system that we typically have when we talk about productivity or producing value.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, but I don't necessarily mean, although now during the pandemic, maybe this is different. I didn't necessarily mean lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. But it sort of tongue-in-cheek, right? It's like nothing is supposed to mean nothing from the point of view of a very Sort of capitalist cut and dried, you know, objective way of thinking like producing X and Y results to go back to the garden. The maintenance of that garden from the point of view of producing something looks like nothing. There's so much work that goes. I've learned from being there. There's so much work that goes into roses all through the year. You have to do all this stuff, even in the winter when there's like nothing, it doesn't look like there's anything going on.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other ways of valuing experience, other ways of being like, I go there, I'm just a person. You know, I'm not a producer of content. I'm not a consumer of content. And so I just happen to be spending a lot of time there thinking about that. And then I was asked to give a talk at a conference called IO. So I wrote this talk called How to Do Nothing to Give at that conference in the summer of 2017 that is about those things that I sort of thought about and learned about being in the garden. I did not expect it to resonate really with anyone outside of that conference, necessarily certainly not as much as it did. And I also didn't expect it to turn into a book that was not my idea, that was suggested to me by someone who was at the conference. And so, yeah, here I am. And it just came out in Korea.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think after a while, I started to wonder why I was doing that and why that felt so different from the rest of my day, a lot of which was like, you know, doom scrolling, feeling like a lot of anxiety and information overload and not being able to process anything. And so it kind of just started with that like sort of movement from here, you know, where I am, my apartment to this park. you know, the more time I spent there, the more I started to think about how the values that were embodied by this garden were very different as well. Like it's, you know, it's volunteer maintained. It's a space that's very valued by the community, but it's not really productive in the ways that we would normally use the word productive. It doesn't create a profit. You don't get any results from going there that you could sort of quantify. It just sort of gestures towards this other kind of value system.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it kind of started out in a almost happenstance way in that I live about five minutes away from this municipal rose garden in Oakland. And I found that around that time. I was just without really thinking about it consciously, I was going there pretty much any chance that I could get I was teaching at the time, so I had a little bit of a flexible schedule. But I was just going and kind of like, you know, thousand yard stair, like sitting in the rose garden.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compared to even a year ago, it's like I really have zero desire to look at the feed of any social media. I just, I actually don't want to.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I feel like I've learned in the last year, especially, is that there's like kind of an opposite loop where somewhere in there you break the cycle. You know, that could be anywhere, really.”
2022-01-23 · Pod Save America · Offline: Jenny Odell on How to Do Nothing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source