Tag: jenny odell (page 1 of 1)

View from behind a small tan-and-white terrier with tall, alert ears, looking out over a sunlit patch of green grass with tree shadows falling across the lawn.
September 2, 2026 / 1 Comment

See You Outside?

Last night, I sat in the gym for several minutes after my elliptical run, scrolling Threads in my phone’s web browser. I clicked like on fan art and memes about the latest episode of the HBO series Lanterns and news of first-round wins of some of my favorite players in this year’s US Open alongside a smattering of other Women’s Sports news and conjecture. What I was interacting with wasn’t the problem. These are all things I enjoy and am actively invested in. Very few empty calories in this session. The problem is that it shouldn’t have been happening at all.

A few weeks ago, I removed all the social media apps except for Instagram from my phone. No Threads. No Facebook. No Bluesky. No LinkedIn. Instagram is hidden and requires my face to unlock it. The impetus was realizing that idle scrolling sessions were getting longer. They were keeping me from falling asleep at night or getting out of bed in the morning. The meaningful stuff—women’s sports, TV & film discussions or industry news, Los Angeles news & culture, interesting reads, communicating with friends and acquaintances—were shifting to shocking or stupid videos, rage bait, or digital ephemera that was intended to keep my attention but not ignite my mind or heart.

And still, here I was in the terrible browser experience of my preferred social media timeline, and it keeps cajoling me to reinstall the app. I haven’t succumbed. Yet.

Jenny Odell, whose writing on this topic has long been a critical resource for my attempts at avoiding the brain-rotting effects of modern digital society, recently suggested on the How to Touch Grass podcast that one approach is to take an “outsider’s perspective” to our relationship with our phones and apps before attempting to change anything. Examine how what you’re doing in these spaces makes you feel, like a scientist observing a subject, without judgment, and then treat the findings as an experiment.

She describes digital habits as grooves formed geologically over time, which is why cold-turkey attempts fail. Social pressure and muscle memory pull us back. This is exactly how I ended up fumbling around threads.com in the Chrome mobile browser. Text mesages between me and Tiffany and our basketball friends are dotted with shares from Instagram and Bluesky and Threads and even though I know I can usually wait until I get back to a desktop experience to consume and enjoy the memes, jokes, and news, the thumb clicks because of course it does and now I’m looking at my notifications and here’s a good point about the latest episode of my favorite TV show and some stranger is wrong about the Los Angeles Sparks and there’s a random dashcam video of people doing stupid things on a freeway somewhere in America and what terrible thing did Pete Hegseth do now and, wait, where did the time go?!

I don’t want this on my phone, and I definitely don’t want to lose precious minutes of my life thoughtlessly while sweating post-workout in the middle of the gym or in the car for who knows how long after I’ve reached a destination.

Do I need a physical impediment to curb these habits, or can I figure out how to “stand apart” from the device on my own?

In Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, she examines how tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection by creating these experiences that we seem to find so useful and inescapable and then building so much wealth and power around them that it is nearly impossible to disentangle ourselves from them individually or as a society. 

While reading through her own spelunking into the deep crevices of her Google search history, Amazon shopping orders, and ChatGPT chat logs, I smugly thought to myself, well, I don’t use these things like that.

Lies.

I used Google Search over 2600 times in the last 12 months. I watched over 2400 videos and shorts on YouTube in the last three months. I’ve made only nine purchases via Amazon this year, but as I dug into these troves of data, I realized that what I do online is ultimately beside the point. What I know and what many people are coming to the realization of lately is that when I think about the most meaningful experiences of my life and days, they are hardly ever connected to something I experienced on a screen. When my father passed, I, of course, looked to my digital world to make sense of things and found it lacking. I was using an AI-powered journaling app called Dot at the time—it’s now defunct—and while I was initially impressed by its seeming insightfulness, I quickly found that a software program cannot express true empathy and understanding. When the things in your life that you most wish would not happen occur anyway, healing comes in the presence of other people. I walked through my grief with my friends as we hid in my mom’s sewing room during the repast, sipping Japanese whiskey and laughing through the tears. I gave shape to my loss by listening to my mother, sister, and others as they expressed his departure’s impact through their own words and actions. No chatbot could give me that.

Vara similarly and to great effect exposes how she used ChatGPT as a partner in writing an essay about the grief of losing her sister at a young age. The piece brought her great acclaim, but ultimately, she realized the parts ChatGPT “created” were memories that weren’t hers. Even if clever, it wasn’t real.

I’m hungry for real things. When I write in my journal about the things I want to remember from the day, it is rarely a meme, reel, or back-and-forth argument with strangers online. Life is about the other humans in it. Really in it. Life is the people you share a domicile with or a street with. Life happens for me when I talk with a neighbor as I walk to the grocery store. What I remember is meeting people and learning about their hopes and dreams. I also remember being in a sports venue, hugging, cheering, and celebrating with my fellow sports fans.

I also remember when a real friend or family member texts or calls, and we get involved and invested in each other.

Odell fills the time she might have previously spent scrolling her phone or staring at screens with enriching experiences outside of the house. Standing appointments in nature and the physical world. I’ve been thinking about that too. Many of my day-to-day activities and hobbies currently default to an app or a website. Maybe, though, it’s time I sought out learning Spanish in person with others instead of with Mango. Maybe I need more standing appointments to volunteer rather than my ad hoc approach now. Maybe when I’m bored, I go to the park or the coffee shop or call a friend or family member and have an impromptu hang. 

Like the old days.

Maybe I need a Brick.

See you outside?

P.S.

I originally intended to mimic Vara’s book and provide detailed examples of my digital activity (searches, purchases, YouTube videos), but that felt like too much navel-gazing and would’ve pushed me further down the digital rabbit hole, when I really want to be “out there” and not “in here.” My ego, though, is particularly proud of one aspect of my Google activity, so I’m going to share the words I’ve used the “define:” search function with over the last year. 

  • quartile 
  • disambiguation 
  • artifice 
  • fungible 
  • forthwith 
  • apprehend 
  • epistemic 
  • clarity 
  • loyalty 
  • totem 
  • anathema 
  • aegis 
  • quatrain 
  • heathen 
  • heretic

I tend to look up words when I want to be sure I’m using them correctly or when I want to get into the etymology (I just googled to make sure that was correct) of a word or phrase. 

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December 27, 2020 / 1 Comment

How To Do Nothing


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I’ve been off from work since Tuesday, and I’ve got two more weeks before I return to slacks and emails and zooms and the pandemic remote work struggle of balancing work and personal time.

“As far back as 1886, decades before it would finally be guaranteed, workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.’”

— Jenny Odell

During this extended leisure period, I’m still thinking about work or, more accurately, I’m thinking about how we spend time, how we value time, and how I show my team that I respect theirs. To show proper reverence for our most valuable commodity requires me to appreciate my own time and what I do or don’t do with it.

“Ah, let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device.”

Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing opens with a Twitter quote that encapsulates how I often feel when I’ve spent too much time scrolling. Despite efforts to better manage the experience, the algorithms are better than I have been, and I will find myself in the doom loop refreshing and refreshing to find some new nugget that will spark a reaction in me. Joy is rarely the return on investment of that time.

Yesterday, though, I made some different choices with my time. Instead of endlessly swiping through tweets, I read up on the squirrels that roam the trees outside my home office window. That led me down a path to understanding more about the San Fernando Valley ecosystem. Later in the afternoon, when I opened The Wild newsletter from the LA Times, I read it more deeply, identifying things that might help me feel more grounded. Odell writes about having a stronger connection to the physical world around you is more real. It is an actual reality.

Our social media spaces generally lack the contexts necessary to feel real. They present distractions and solicit reactions but rarely in a meaningful way. Odell is quick to point out that she’s not suggesting quitting them all and never returning. “We have to be able to do both,” she says, “to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.”

Which raised for me this question: what do I go to each of these spaces to do? On Twitter, I most want to interact with my friends and acquaintances. Occasionally, I want to be entertained by digital culture (though maybe I’m getting that dopamine from TikTok more these days) or be in the mix of basketball chatter or Los Angeles happenings or catch up quickly on breaking news.

However, I rarely am looking to do all those things at the same time, and that is the social media platform trick. I come to see what my friends are sharing, and now I’m lost in covid news or trying to understand a meme or reading a trending topic. There’s no context. It’s a noise storm that I willingly walk into and remain for far too long.

I have different specific intentions for other platforms yet haven’t treated them with care or discipline either. I’d love an algorithmic reset button for Facebook and Instagram, but I will settle for revisiting my follows and actively thinking about my purpose when I enter them.

And to get engrossed in more soul-satisfying pursuits, including the act and art of doing nothing.

There is so much more to Odell’s book than merely a discussion of dealing with social media. It’s part philosophy, part history, part naturalist, part adventure. It is not, however, a how-to book.

It kept my mind ablaze throughout.

I highly recommend.