the way you do nothing is not political

go touch grass

I have mostly detoxed from social media for about 2 months now. Coming back to it a bit over the last few days has been shocking. It’s a lot of people talking about normal human things as if doing them a certain way has great political importance. Examples are: your purchasing decisions, what you decide to retweet, the reasons you decide to do things, what you hope will happen, etc.

I hate to break it to you but: having completely pure thoughts is not all that politically helpful. Even your retweets are in fact not that politically helpful, unless you are blessed to have a truly large platform, and even then only marginally so.

a case study

A friend recommended the book How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. I started reading it. I like the book. But I do think the motivation Odell presents is a little, well, weird:

On a collective level, the stakes are higher… In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other… What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

In this view, literally doing nothing is political. It is an act of resistance.

I hate to break it to you but: no its not. In fact, if you view doing nothing as political, you are no longer doing nothing. You are doing effortful expression which you are then misconstruing as political action.

a problem with seeing politics everywhere

If you see politics in every action and every thought, you are in a mode of constantly policing yourself by the imagined standards of others. This is, well, a lot of effort. You are probably in a constant mode of judging and trying to correct all of your thoughts. I don’t need to mention the parallels to particularly guilt-drenched forms of Christianity, but they’re definitely there: sinners in the hands of an angry God; middle school Catholicism designed to make children feel bad.

Take it from me, a person who is unlearning this rigid self-policing habit: this is a lot of effort, it creates anxiety, generates a negative self conception, and prevents personal growth. It also is not politically useful—a thing I can say definitively because I have worked in politics for 3 years. Political parties do not try to make people think a lot of pure thoughts, they try to get money and votes and media attention.

This self-policing also is based on a pretty weird model of our brains: there is an assumption that we can purify all of our thoughts. And that’s like, not the case. Our brains are complex, we have many random thoughts, and then we have the conscious part of ourselves which can decide what to do with the thoughts. It is much more important to develop good decision making with respect to the mostly involuntary thoughts we have than to try and purify our thought stream itself. In fact, if you try to make your involuntary thoughts fit a political program, you will start doing obsessive-compulsive things: batting thoughts away only to have them return more forcefully, judging yourself for this, and developing compulsions to try and make them go away. Not everyone is going to end up with clinical OCD like me, but you may end up doing some of the patterns.

When we get in this mode of thinking our thoughts have great political importance we paradoxically also do less effective politics. Politics is a public activity, not something you do in your head, or in the particular way that you do silent mountain retreats.

let sociologists do the sociology

If we view even the way we do nothing as political, I think it’s impossible to really do nothing. We lose freedom, individuality. We also lose the ability to focus on the thing itself. We can’t just touch grass and be in that moment, we need to also think about how the particular way we are touching the grass interacts literally and symbolically with like, the world system or something. That’s a lot.

I’m a sociologist. So I can say that our everyday actions in fact do sometimes have political components to them. If you are a US citizen hiring a non-citizen for work, that’s political in some sense. But if you focus endlessly on the politics of every situation, even ones that do have political components, you are liable to lose the very real human elements in them and also to get the politics wrong.

If you are a citizen hiring a non-citizen, you can trust that you are getting the politics right by treating them with respect, rather than trying to adapt some sociological study of the working conditions of non-citizens for your particular use case. That study is only relevant on average and your situation is likely not average. Focus on the situation you are in, and treating the other person with dignity as best you can.

bursty politics

I think it’s much healthier to think of politics as something we do some of the time, rather than being the the foundational thing underlying everything in life. When you are voting, you are doing politics. When you are advocating for an issue, you are doing politics (but again, your retweets are probably not changing things all that much). When you are volunteering with your local party chapter or donating money, you are doing politics.

But when you are touching grass, you are hopefully resting. And you can be blissfully free of politics for that time, leave it to the other people and the politicians, and disconnect altogether. Be yourself, be free of all of the big cares of the world for a few moments, and be grateful that we live in a time where we have the luxury of politics being a sometimes thing rather than an all-the-time thing.

i’m going to stay away from social media, mostly

The politics-is-all-the-time crowd are very active online. There is a lot of guilt and shaming: if you don’t think about politics all the time you are not taking problems in the world seriously, etc. I want to tune out that type of guilt, it isn’t useful and it gets in the way of my personal growth and my happiness. I also suspect that people guilting you themselves feel guilty. It’s one big circle of guilt.

Instead, I’m limiting my social media time mostly to sharing things. Less consumption, more sharing. And sharing things where the sharing is useful for me, like this post.