Something strange happens between 11:59 PM and 12:00 AM on the night of Thanksgiving. Immediately, every brand and store in America becomes laser-focused on Christmas. Black Friday deals, Christmas trees in every window, holiday music blaring on loudspeakers. Any store you go in is packed. Invites to holiday parties, familial and work-related, jostle for our attention. It’s hectic. It’s busy. 

I’ve never been a huge fan.

Every year, without fail, my December calendar books up before November 30th. Any free time not in the presence of people wearing purposefully-ugly sweaters and reindeer antlers is spent trying to shop for beloved friends and family. It’s a demanding time of year and, well, I’m already pretty damn tired. 

This year I haven’t been dreading December because of the parties or the music– I’ve been dreading having to run the blog between it all. I know, I know, we content creators aren’t supposed to acknowledge that this thing we choose to do for fun is work. But it is. After a year of writing and editing multiple posts in a week, keeping up with my Instagram schedule, and managing a newsletter, I’m pretty burnt out. 2021 Cyndy predicted this, thank goodness. In her infinite wisdom and love of being a witty little twit, Past Cyndy chose Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing for December’s Book of the Month. 

Originally a speech given by the author at the 2016 EYEO Festival, How to Do Nothing is a book about the attention economy that has arisen around our use of technology and social media. Buoyed by the viral response to her original speech, Odell expanded it into a book, adding research and references to fill the gaps and bolster her ideas. The finished product discusses the aim of capitalism in diverting our attention and how a soft reset in our relationship with technology may help us resist it. It’s a poignant idea for those who grew up during the rise of social media and now find themselves looking for introspection and silence as opposed to the dings of notifications. 

Adjusting our relationship with social media and technology may sound like a funny idea from someone running a blog. After all, doesn’t the success of my blog hinge on keeping you all coming back for more? But that sentence, in itself, is the problem. I started this blog for fun. I wanted to practice writing consistently and maybe get a chance to meet some other people who enjoyed tea and books. As innocent of an idea as that is, I thought I could do it while still maintaining a healthy relationship with my work and social media. “Success” of the blog was never my ultimate goal. That mindset didn’t last long.

Combine a Pavlovian notification system, productivity culture, a genuine desire to interact with like-minded folks, and a sprinkle of an anxiety disorder, and you end up with a disaster. My “healthy” relationship with this blog died about two months in. It was such a quick, silent shift that I went from, “Oh, I hope someone reads this one,” to me checking my stats page every five minutes after a post went up. I began equating my free time with capital, thinking about how to maximize my time for the most engagement or the most views. The blog, and the social media I had to help it along, turned something that had started as fun into a capitalist hellscape. If I wasn’t doing something for my day job, for the blog, or self-improvement, wasn’t I wasting my time? 

I’m not the first person this has happened to. And those of us creating content aren’t the only ones falling into this trap. Whether you’re creating content or consuming it, the apps and websites we use don’t care. The hit of serotonin your brain produces when seeing a notification is where they want you to be so they can divert your attention from your life for more ad revenue, or more engagement. Our attention, our contributions, and our data are now products to be sold, and all require our voluntary buy-in. 

How to Do Nothing could be the valuable reframe we need to engage with the world around us. While How to Do Nothing may be geared towards technology, it may be able to impart lessons we can carry over into other parts of our life. I hope you’ll join me for the last Book of the Month for 2022 as we read about how we might better engage with social media, tech, and boredom during one of the busiest times of the year. Until then, happy reading!