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Jenny Odell on why we need to learn to do nothing: ‘It's a reminder that you're alive’
The author and artist’s keynote address on our fractured attention spans went viral. Now she has a plan for how to heal them: lose ourselves in natureNearly two years ago, the artist and academic Jenny Odell gave a keynote address on “how to do nothing”. In it she talked about the impact of modern life’s ceaseless demands on our time and attention, “a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living”. And she discussed how she herself had found respite in nature.Her talk was written for the Eyeo festival in Minneapolis – described as for the “creative technology community” and attended by the kind of blue-sky thinkers unlikely to balk at references to concepts like “observational eros”. Yet, when the 10,000-word transcript was published online, it went viral. Not only that: many people read it to the end. Continue reading...
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