Absorption in the living world displaces attention-economy pulls

Evidence

I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away. That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about me, with my head lost in the trees, the birds, even the weeds growing in the sidewalk. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 617

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key defense of the book against the withdrawal misreading: this is not recommended disconnection — it’s a positive, absorbing replacement, love rather than absence. The attention is redirected, not refused.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘falling in love as attention hygiene’ — the mechanism behind Odell’s phone-free days is genuine absorption, the exact resource the attention economy can’t manufacture.