On doing nothing.

Antwerp, BE 6.2022

Somewhere at the end of March 2020, a friend send me a link to a book Slavoj Žižek had just published. It was called Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. My friend added the caption: “Could you just f*cking not, Slavoj?” The idea of churning out a critical analysis of COVID-19 less than two weeks after the World Health Organisation officially declared it a pandemic indeed felt - to put it mildly - a little too soon. Of course, the definitive accounts of what the pandemic has meant in economic, social, environmental, or, let us not forget, medical terms, have yet to be written. Yet from a purely philosophical point of view, the pandemic remains an unparalleled, cataclysmic event, which seems to put it beyond our ability to capture it conceptually. But if we shift our focus instead towards the context of everyday life, the pandemic reveals itself as an event characterised by innate contradictions and unexpected ambivalences. Especially when it comes to balancing work within our lives.

Like most knowledge workers, I found the experiences of lockdown at first surprisingly rewarding and then increasingly perplexing. Working from home initially provided a welcome shelter from the attacks that online culture and administrative bureaucracy have waged against our ability to engage in continuously focused work. Yet the disintegration of a clear bifurcation between work and leisure quickly resulted in the experience of work that is not productive and leisure that is not restful. Exacerbating this process was of course the ubiquity of connectivity and virtual interfaces that have come to symbolise the so-called attention economy. The devices that up until then merely facilitated our thirst for entertainment and distraction suddenly revealed themselves as the capitalist platforms that they had always been. From Zoom meetings and Slack discussions to Netflix binge sessions and Headspace meditations: every activity of pandemic life was captured, commodified, and sold as a subscription. During the pandemic, our attention has indeed become one of the most profitable resources.

Minds grasped by the attention economy - from subscription fatigue and doom scrolling to living inside your inbox and pull-to-refresh dopamine addiction - have become characterised by emotional instability and an incapacity to remain focused for long stretches of time. It is therefore not a coincidence that these developments have coincided with a need - if not a demand - to become more productive. In an attempt to curb the experiences of overwhelm that pandemic life has effectively normalised, we are now being told that we simply have to become more productive. So as one could naturally expect, there is now an entire industry dedicated to the enhancement of productivity: (audio) books, newsletters, podcasts, online courses, and, of course, apps are sold on the promise of offering you simple ways to becoming a productivity master and - as all of them dramatically state - taking back control over your life.

It is probably at this point that you are wondering why you are reading a blog post on productivity on the website of an obscure academic. While my work indeed does not directly address the attention economy and the lures of productivity, I have - from both a practical as well as an academic perspective - always taken some interest in these phenomena and the ways they can(not) be navigated. And I am not alone. Under the well-known phrasing of publish or perish, the demands for productivity have since long been a fact of life for any academic set on making a career. This is of course often purely a matter of performativity. The need to be seen as productive by means of constant flows of outputs such as publications, grant applications, conference attendance, and - I am by no means absolved here - blogposts has become an integral part of professional culture in academia. Subjected to the trappings of the attention economy, academics are now required to constantly remain ‘on top of things’ by maintaining relative awareness on any recent development in their field. In IR, this effectively means that scholars are expected to have a critical take ready on any recent event in global politics, regardless of one’s area of speciality. Like having an eloquent opinion on the latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without having ever seen one before, major events like the pandemic or the war in Ukraine often trigger a flooding of hot takes in the shape of bitesize opinions that ultimately provide little substance beyond the 280 character limit. The epitome of academia’s reshaping in the attention economy was, for me at least, attending a conference panel during which live tweets about the discussion were projected behind the panel members.

So how does one escape both the attention economy as well as the lures of productivity? In her recent book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell makes a compelling argument against the binary of either completely embracing or rejecting the attention economy. Indeed, popular trends like a digital detox (i.e. instituting a social media hiatus or breaking up with your phone) often end up reinforcing what they seek to reject, like corporations handing out Headspace subscriptions to their employees in order to make them less stressed and more productive. Similarly, in academia, the publish or perish mantra leaves young researchers with little option but to play the game of productivity on endless repeat. In most cases, the precarious life of an untenured early career researcher simply does not offer much beyond the cascade of gruelling sacrifices, which are often romanticised as rites of passage by their senior colleagues. However, if one looks at the other end of the career spectrum, where decades of unresolved work-life imbalances have become fertile feeding grounds for a burnout epidemic among senior academics, it is clear that the goal of productivity is impossible, untenable, and unhealthy.

Then where does this leave us? Odell argues that there is an alternative, which simply - but by no means easily - consists of doing nothing. Doing nothing here does not mean to retreat or disengage but rather to return to, in Odell’s terms, the ecology of one’s direct surrounding. What has indeed been lost in the attention economy and performative productivity is the ability to experience and pay attention to one’s direct environment without this being captured by some capitalist platform. Whilst this may sound privileged coming from someone in my position, the point here is not to present the reality of academic careerism as something that is up for negotiation for everyone. It is rather a case of finding ways to navigate the illusion of performative productivity and taking control over one’s attention. Small yet hopeful alternatives are on the horizon. They provide those who do have the ability to negotiate the attention economy with the option to actually do so. The preprint movement for instance circumvents the peer-reviewing process by offering (early career) researchers a direct way to have their work out in the world as an open access resource. And then there is the slow science movement, which seeks to liberate research from the need exhaustive pace with which research is produced in the attention economy. Ironically, it has been the experiences of pandemic life that has reinvigorated both movements in recent years. More so, the so-called Great Resignation that we have seen during the last year may well be a promising indication that productivity - especially when it is performative - can never become a goal in itself. As someone much more clever than me recently put it: “Doing nothing may well be the most productive thing to do right now.”