Standing Apart

Judging from the copies on BART and the recommendations of friends, Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing felt a few months back like the Bay Area "It" book du jour. I overcame the disinclination to read the book this popularity inevitably produced in me and have been enjoying it quite a lot when I can. I may say something about it when I'm finished, whenever I have time to finish it, a problem with which it concerns itself delightfully I might add. Anyway, from the end of the second chapter, without comment or context:

As the attention economy works to keep us trapped in a frightful present, it only becomes more important not just to recognize past versions of our predicament but to retain the capacity for an imagination somehow untainted by disappointment... [S]tanding apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal.