JENNY ODELL ON WRITING AND SHARING "HOW TO DO NOTHING"

I LOVE this talk that Jenny Odell gave about her book, "How to Do Nothing." It's really good. She talks about what it felt like to write a book about resisting the marketability and capitalistic attention economy and then have to sell the book and appropriate parts of it into sound bites and neat categorizations. She says at one point she found herself wondering, "Am I bird watching or fulfilling the image of bird watching? Am I living or am I maintaining my brand?" 

She then describes some of the positive results of putting the book out there, which included hearing from people who appreciated for specific reasons and shared their ideas and books they were reading. She found it to be a crisscrossing of different genres and types of people and it made her proud that her book was part of the conversation.  

She concludes by saying "...it turns out that this process (of sharing ideas and self in conversation) might apply to the conundrum of self-promotion as well. Because this experience of hearing from and being with others, including this conference, mimics something I described earlier, which is the uncanny sense of self I had while writing the book. In opening a connection among people or parts of history that might not have been in conversation, my ego once again disappears and I'm once again in the realm of surprise, emergence and encounter. I was never comfortable with the self-promotion because that's not how my identity works and it's not how the book got made. But I am okay being the atmospheric river that connects two places or field that provides the meeting ground for others where something new might happen." 

This last part especially resonated with me because that is often when I feel "most myself", when I can provide a loose space for conversations and connection to be made.  It's a mindset that works well with my need to be constantly growing and shedding, dreaming and questioning.