My six-year-old nephew has learned how to take and send images on the phone. Since time began, his dad/my brother has loaned his phone to my nephew for video chats and phone calls. After all, he’s a child of the COVID era.
One day, a few hours after we’ve spoken, I glance at my phone to find 149 messages.
I suck in a breath and then check them. The first is a voice message saying, “I’m sending you the pictures now.”
And, true to his word, he does. 70+ of them.
In our earlier conversation, he’d shown me his How to Draw Pokemon book as he was asking me if I’d figured out what I was going to get him for Christmas. I’d evaded his question and asked if he’d figured out yet what he was going to get me for Christmas. He said he hadn’t. But then after a bit of back and forth between us, after we established that my birthday had already passed and Christmas would come around first, he decided to draw me a Pokemon or two for my Christmas present.
As far as I can tell, he's taken and sent pictures of every page of the Pokemon book. But he’s also taken pictures of the handful he’s drawn. I save those and carry on scrolling through the rest.
Below the majority of shared photos are a missed call and four voice messages.
The first message says: “Call me back as soon as you can!”
The second message says: “Call me back AS soon as you can!”
The third message says: “Sorry. I meant, I meant to just say. . . send one, I didn’t mean to send two. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
The fourth message says: “And I hope the pictures didn’t overwhelm you. Because that was a lot of pictures to make.”
After I share the voice messages with my mom and we laugh a bit, I call my nephew back and assure him I got all the pictures.
Later, I’m pondering the idea of overwhelm because it fits into what I’ve been thinking about lately. What I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
I’ve only just finished reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Spoiler alert: the book isn’t really about doing nothing. It’s a discussion on how to be an artist, human, creative, living creature who resists the constant pull to be a commodity and attempts to stop creative, cultural, and ecological devastation while living in a capitalistic world which uncaringly creates the need for things like the New Yorker article titled, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death”[i] because the gig economy (among other things) is, in many insidious and blatant ways, exploitive and does celebrate that.
Spaces like the bird-filled slough and “libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria—because of the ways they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area.”[iii]
When she talks about “giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one,”[iv] I feel the echoing need for that in my soul. For a moment, my shoulders relax as I remember standing in a forest, hiking along some mountain trail, stepping up to the edge of a Norwegian lake, watching the spiders build their webs in Oregon, or sitting on a rock at the top of a Scottish hill listening to the birdsong and eating the snack I’d brought along.
And while I find my focus is stronger and my attention less fractured when I leave my phone across the room when I read or write instead of next to me or in my hand, in this year of “professional writing,” I’ve also spent a fair amount of time exploring how to utilize those very apps, algorithms, and online spaces that are so eager to capture my time and attention for their executives’ profit. As I try to figure out how to capture others’ attention and turn it my way, I encounter a million different ways to do it, and all of them guaranteed to work for a one-time fee of only $27 or by the end of one masterclass.
For many, to many, to be “successful” means to be rich and famous. And to achieve that goal involves trying everything and being everything all at once, all the time, over and over again. Being constantly relevant. Managing with persistence and luck to catch that break. Going viral. Fighting for attention in the attention economy and getting it. Being so good no one can ignore you. And doing it all consistently, productively, and with speed.
Not long ago, a poet I follow on Instagram said, “In recent meetings [with] my biz coach, we’ve shifted our questions from: ‘How to generate more revenue’ to ‘How can I grow impact? Who can I better serve? What’s the best gift I can share with the world?’”[v]
For to be a creative and a businessperson is to be split in two.
And I want to be both. Most days.
It’s my Gemini nature, I suppose.
I do want to succeed. Whatever that means.
Most of the time, what succeeding means is being able to write the stories I write, to share them with others who want to read them, to touch that emotional core within myself and others, to use the skill I’ve developed over the course of my life, to stare off into space as ideas form, to find the space, time, and little inspirations that remind me I’m alive, and to continue to work towards mastery.
But I want those things in addition to being able to support myself in a world that makes it increasingly hard to do that by doing one thing well—and not just for creatives.
The gig economy along with capitalism encourages all of us to normalize having a day job, a thousand side hustles, and caffeine-fueled endless energy to work ourselves to death in order to survive.
It’s not my nephew’s pictures that overwhelm me. It’s the struggle “to be in the world but not of it” [vi] – to use a phrase generalized from something Jesus said of his followers in the Gospel of John and used here for creatives rather than disciples. It’s the continual changing of hats from writer to editor to cover designer to social media manager to marketer to website builder to salesperson to advertiser to conversationalist to living-breathing-life-loving human being to writer to editor to cover designer… and back around again that makes me feel as if I’ve slivered myself into a hundred personalities. Or rather that I need to. That I have to.
But, by God, I’d better be authentic if I want to gain followers, stay relevant, be seen, be liked, use my voice, not be cancelled, sell a book.
But, by God, most of the time, wouldn’t I rather be back in the Wyoming Wilderness so once again I could be just another wild thing pressing my footprints into the snow?
To want conflicting things is to be an interesting character. Or perhaps a tortured one, which in story is often what piques or keeps interest, moves the plot, and creates the tension. If nothing else, I’ve got that going for me.
To want to resist the attention economy and live on my own terms while also making a living wage seems too often like idealism. But what can I do? It’s genetic. My dad passed the idealism on to me. He always said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
But whose bootstraps are sturdy enough to pull themselves up these days? And well, if we’re honest, the pulling up is the easy part. The hard part is making the boots from scratch. And making those boots fast and good. No, not good, great.
Don’t we all want to be great? Or maybe we just want to believe we matter. To be loved. As I write this, I pick up my phone, that attention-demanding device, and stumble across a video clip of Mister Rogers being asked how he wants to be remembered.
He takes a moment and then says, “To be remembered, wow.” He pauses as he thinks then he goes on. “I heard of somebody who was very very famous asking somebody else, ‘Do you think I’ll be remembered?’” He stops again and lets out a soft huh. “I was sorry that he had such misgivings about that, you know. I’d just like to be remembered for … for being a compassionate human being who happened to be fortunate enough to be born at a time when there was this fabulous thing called television that … that could allow me to use all the talents that I’d been given.”[vii]
There is no duality there. Not for Mister Rogers. For me, maybe wanting two conflicting things is, in the end, simply asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking “Do you think I’ll be remembered?” It might be better to ask and answer, the way Mister Rogers did, “How do I want to be remembered?”
And if my answer is the same as his, that’s wonderful. If it’s different, well, that’s wonderful too.
There are ways to resist the attention economy and ways to use it.
There are ways to be both creative and business-wise.
There are ways to be in the world and not of it.
There are many, many ways to be.
Because I can, I sit outside in my mom’s garden. And there, even as I echo my nephew by saying, ‘I hope these words didn’t overwhelm you. Because that was a lot of words to make,” I see the fading sunlight strike the filigree webs forming a design like the Golden Ratio between the stems of the Illinois Bundle Flower in front of me. And I remember what it is to be caught by wonder. To see beauty. To be alive.
I get up and take a picture. Not 149 of them, not that many, but, yes, enough to share.
[i] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, page 33
[ii] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, page 176
[iii] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, page 24
[iv] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, page 73
[v] @joysullivanpoet
[vi] John 17:14-16
[vii] Mister Rogers video interview https://www.instagram.com/p/DRAmHt6Eq0M/
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