Diving Deeper: The Full Depth of “This is Water” in Odell’s Book
It is not very often that we step back and evaluate our routines, ideas, and values that accompany us every single day. Jenny Odell works to change that, though, as she challenges our everyday habits and thinking in “How to Do Nothing.” She urges a removal from the busyness that our capitalist society thrives on as a call to resistance of the attention economy. Her underlying goal is to help us find more meaning and perspective in our lives by not feeding into the anxiety the attention economy thrives on. Her book is an inspiring analysis and reminder of the important aspects of our lives, such as relationships, peace, nature, and hobbies. What makes her book and ultimate goal so effective is the synthesis of different writers into her own piece, as to strengthen and highlight her own points. These additional sources are an essential part of Odell’s work, and act as a base of which she builds her own ideas.
One piece that serves to reinforce Odell’s ideas is “This Is Water,” by David Foster Wallace. Wallace often wrote dense, satirical pieces analyzing American society and culture, and “This Is Water” is no exception. It is actually a commencement speech Wallace gave to Kenyon College in 2005. A man who struggled with mental health, he does not struggle to offer advice on ways to make our lives more fulfilling and meaningful. Although a fairly short piece, it brims with insightful ideas, and, similar to Odell’s entire book, challenges our everyday habits. Despite its abundant and deep ideas, Odell only quotes the speech three times over the course of one front and back page. After that, her use of it seems to have vanished. However, the rich ideas of David Foster Wallace’s brief speech can be seen throughout Odell’s entire book. I would argue that much Odell’s writing is actually rooted in DFW’s writing. Yes, Odell quotes it for one page, but the contribution of “This Is Water” does not end there.
Odell’s suggested activism against the attention economy is not the typical weekend getaway, digital-detox removal from the world. Rather, the form of “political refusal” she suggests “retreats not in space, but in the mind” (38). Doing “nothing” does not necessarily mean escaping our productivity-obsessed environment physically, but mentally and emotionally. Odell calls this “standing apart.” By standing apart, we “take the view of the outsider without leaving…look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be” (61–62). This removal of the mind and standing apart that Odell suggests is an idea that David Foster Wallace talks about too. He believes that our escape from the busyness of the world comes from “exercise[ing] some control over how and what you think…being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” This requires an alteration of the mind. For him, similar to Odell, true change comes when we adjust our thinking, not where we are or what we are physically doing.
This thinking that Odell and Wallace propose requires a shift in our “natural, hard-wired default-setting” (DFW). Wallace states that this “default-setting” is the “deep belief that [we are] the absolute center of the universe.” He is not claiming that we are all selfish by this statement, but simply pointing out the fact that we really are the center of the world that we experience; everything we experience is from our point of view. Therefore, changing our thinking also changes our first-person perspective. Odell speaks of the very same thing when she says that shifting our “attention brings us outside the self” (107). It is not always natural to look at things with a grain of salt or to think about the effects of something on someone else; that entails an alteration of perspective, one outside of our own. Odell argues that this is possible, though, and when the “pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently” (122). DFW believes the same in his speech as well, declaring “if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.” Like Odell believes, he says that you can determine how you see things, which comes from a shift in the mind. Clearly, Odell and DFW both have parallel ideas about our usual attention, how we can change it, and how that change will affect our perspective.
Additionally, Wallace’s ideas are seen in Odell’s thoughts about the actual effort of shifting our attention. Because we are wired to view things as they impact us, changing that thinking is not normal or easy. Odell does not shy away from this point. She writes bluntly that “if we’re to truly encounter anything outside of ourselves…we have to want it” (130). Like most things, if we want to achieve something we must have a drive to do it. DFW discusses this drive in “This is Water” through an example of being at the supermarket. He points out that we can either be caught up with the idea that everyone in the store is slow, in our way, and rude, or, we can “choose to force [ourselves] to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am.” The key word here is choose. This thinking is not a part of our natural default-setting. Wallace is blunt about the reality of the conscious decision to look at things differently: “it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort…some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to.” This is why our attention requires discipline.
Now, Odell does acknowledge how this choice that Wallace frames here connects to her thinking about discipline. However, she does not talk about the fact that he also discusses these ideas of discipline, building upon his own example. Many times in “How to Do Nothing,” Odell refers to the “relationship between discipline and attention” (112) and her interest in a “disciplined deepening of attention” (119). Obviously, she believes refocusing our attention requires a trained level of discipline. Wallace focuses on this same connection as well, that being conscious “involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort.” Through his supermarket example, he actually paints a vivid picture of the discipline this requires:
The supermarket is very crowded…and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop…and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people…and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle…and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice of death.
Wallace clearly and accurately portrays how we think about our reality. But he also portrays the possibility of a change in this reality by suggesting that we can consider “that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.” By giving this humorously explicit and valid example, and then the harder, but opposite way to think about a situation, he shows his understanding of the actual discipline that is required. His example aims to show that changing our perspective is possible, but also not easy, echoing the similar points of Odell. In addition to the ways Odell could have used Wallace even more to support her points, I would also argue that she missed an opportunity to add humor to her arguments by including his frank yet amusing details.
What is most interesting to me, is Odell and Wallace’s overlapping thoughts of the attention economy. Odell makes it very known that she disapproves of the capitalist influence on society. One of her biggest reasons for this disapproval has to do with her “most serious grievances with the attention economy…its reliance on fear and anxiety” (xx). This is why she pushes for a change in attention, so we can free ourselves from the anxiety the attention economy entraps us in. We find that Wallace makes this same connection too. He claims that one of the reasons being conscious about our thinking is difficult is because “the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.” Without explicitly stating it, Wallace is talking about the attention economy! He too realizes and points out that our society runs off this capitalist notion of fear and angst. As a result, he urges us to change our awareness — “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.” Odell also focuses on the concept of reality. She states that “Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along” (125). For both of them, changing our perspective away from the attention economy is difficult, but it is really only an attempt to view the true reality of a situation.
Odell points out that Wallace’s “This is Water” has a great connection to a point she makes…in one page. We can see though, that DFW’s ideas are prominent throughout Odell’s entire book. His writing connects not just to one of her idea, but several. Quite frankly, all of Odell’s main points can also be seen in Wallace’s speech: the project of changing our thinking habits as a form of activism, how this requires a shift in our first-person perspective, the discipline this shift involves, and the problems with the attention economy itself. Wallace’s brief speech actually makes quite the appearance in Odell’s book, indirectly. Now, I am not claiming that Odell wrote her entire book from this small speech and claiming all these ideas as her own. The way that Odell expands clearly shows she has her own ideas and passions. Rather, I think it is cool to analyze how these two pieces, with different direct goals and tones, are so similar in ideas, and I wonder if Odell was considering the message of his piece when writing her entire book. I also wonder if more additions from Wallace would have further enhanced her piece, because his ideas are both similar to hers and rich in style and humor. Should DFW deserve more credit or mention in her book? Maybe. But if nothing else we should be left with an appreciation for the similar passion of these two writers and the inspiring works they created.
