The Precarity of Doing Nothing

I’m very sensitive to the precarity of doing nothing for people who are not in a position to do nothing. Jenny O writes that the “removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries” between them and their employers (15). So even in my own experience, I’ve been unfairly berated by union reps for opting out of civil disobedience, or doing nothing, because of the state of precarity I inhabit as a Black man and underpaid public worker. And only for those same union reps to do nothing when I experienced institutional clapback for doing what was right in the face of institutional malevolence. I was protecting my students. This isn’t to say “pshaw” to doing nothing or even that unions are bad, but rather that doing nothing requires a lot of community, therapy, cognitive dissonance, and liquid courage. (AJ-15) [139]

[Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019]