How To Actually Do Something

Actually Doing Something – 10/23/2023

Throughout my reading of Jenny Odell (2019) I kept thinking about David Foster Wallace (2005), his speech “This is Water”. Lo and behold it appears in chapter 5, “The Ecology of Strangers”. Doing the kind of nothing that precipitates action/change requires acute awareness of having other options from what you’re immediately doing. I recently went through a breakup that sharpened my focus onto the person who hurt me. I couldn’t see or consider anything else; didn’t want to. This mindset made it damn near impossible for me–for 8 whole weeks!–to consider other possibilities as to why things went down the way they did. It turned my inner voice to static. Once I turned my attention away from the source of pain and onto the multiverse, my perspective changed! I also uncovered a bunch of unresolved shit having everything to do with me and nothing to with my ex or our relationship. With more compassion toward her and myself, I feel as though I’m on the path to healing and moving on, but what’s this have to do with Odell’s (2019) concept of doing nothing? For me it’s as simple as giving others the benefit of doubt, while also being reminded that you are not who you think you are independent of others “whose depths are the same as your own” (129). Moving out from our default setting is hard f*cking work, but like the woman who suffered a seizure in front of Odell (2019) on her way to the grocery store, disasters often or rather should prompt us to, like Odell’s dad, realize that “it’s just you with yourself and your own crap” that you have to deal with – “the point is that petty frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is going to come in” (Wallace 2005)–and once you do, you can actually do something. (AJ-16) [312]

[ODELL, How To Do Nothing, 2019]; [WALLACE, “This Is Water,” 2005]