Now that I’m too sick to work, I have an unprecedented amount of free/flexible time and almost total autonomy over what I do with my time. It’s part of what makes the disability space so… futuristic (something I thought about a little here). Though you might not have any money or energy or health in the non-working disability space, you have t i m e. And your time is no longer structured around the work day or the shifts you’re pulling or your class schedule and it feels like what I imagine the open ocean feels like: full of infinite possibility and totally terrifying.
Because you have literally nothing but time (and, in my case, an energy-limiting condition that keeps me mostly housebound), new normals emerge. Suddenly it’s totally normal that you watched 36 hours of vintage and antique documentaries on the Criterion Channel in two and a half days (which is something I literally did last week). With this amount of autonomous time, any and every single day of the week, it’s normal to water a few houseplants, sit down to read a book for as long as I want or can, make myself a meal or two, watch numerous TV episodes, spend an hour on the phone with my partner on the road, take a nap, and still have so much time for scrolling my phone. There is so much time. Something I never had enough of when I was working.
Having this much time also changes how I spend my attention budget. Before, when I was working, my leisure time was so imposed upon by my work time that it was usually scarcity that drove my attention spending. Back then, if I only had time for one or two episodes between dinner and bed, I felt compelled to only spend it watching something I *knew* I would enjoy not wanting to waste my scarce leisure time trying something new and risking it being a dud. Now, I can time travel through strange independent films from 100 years ago that I know nothing about because I have time to experiment and try new fare since my time and therefore my attention are not so scarce.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell argues that “attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw” and therefore what we *do* with our attention has great power. How we spend our attention, how we engage in distraction, and how we use commodified social media are some of the last places we have power over our own autonomy. As she says, “it is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”
“It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”
Jenny odell, how to do nothing
adrienne maree brown swims in this stream of thought with Jenny Odell and expands on it with her own thinking about “attention liberation“. She says, “to be able to pick your attention up from the main stream of crisis and commercials (and other competitions for your money), and to put your attention where you want and need it, is something i’m starting to think of as attention liberation”.
So we have power in how we direct our attention; as amb says, what we pay attention to grows. We have a mandate, then, to use our attention in the service of our collective liberation. For me, this means I want to contribute my attention to things that are generative, that create more space for more possibility. I want what I contribute to the collective via my own social media and other public thinking to be more generative than foreclosing. I want to make room for abundance and I want to withdraw my attention from oppressive, foreclosing, reactionary, petty, nihilistic, doom-laden content.
I imagine what could happen if we all did this more of the time. What collective power could be built if we all took up the mandate of training our attention. We’re also human and it’s valid that sometimes we need to express our doubts and cynicism and reactionary impulses but what if we all collectively turned away from engaging this kind of content? What if we refused, via withholding our attention, to participate in cycles of platforming that which does not generate, that which diminishes or marginalizes, that which is not constructive for world-building, that which forecloses possibility? With more of our attention and therefore our time freed up, what world-building experiments could we try?