In a world where our value is determined by our productivity ( and money), writes author Jenny Odell in her landmark book How To Do Nothing, Many of us find our every last minute and most of our dollars “captured, optimized, (tracked) or appropriated as a financial resource” by the technologies, corporations and political parties we are assaulted by daily, hourly, minute by minute.

We submit our free time to numerical evaluations, interactions with algorithmic versions of each other, and struggle to build and maintain personal identity and space to think. This kind of economy, this kind of politics, does not enrich us or protect us. It’s more likely to destroy us.

We are increasingly angered, agitated, distracted and robbed of our resources,  made anxious by this feeling of being alarmed, overstimulated and often unable to be left alone with a coherent or realistic chain of thought. We are increasingly angry and aggrieved by the loss of community or people who speak the truth to us.

Horrific and disturbing pours down on us and blackens our consciousness and vision. Vast techno-platforms that pretend to unite us instead teach us how to hate and lie and embrace conspiracy and get us to pay for our denigration and the destruction of our civic life.

How many children paid for this betrayal with their lives this year?

Day by day. we see the ravages of the attention economy, it doesn’t liberate people, it addicts people,  misinforms and confuses them, turning them into unthinking, enraged, gullible-minded robots. It is so easy to fall into this sinkhole way of life, it is liberating to break away from it.

There isn’t a day when I am not flooded with hysterical pleas for money from people who call themselves progressives. or disturbed by the hatred and lies that have become the ideology of an entire political party, which also defines politics as money.

More and more, I am beginning to understand that neither of these ideologies, red or blue, is the right path for me. In fact, it has nothing to do with me. The farther I get from it, the richer and happier I am. And that, I will admit, is a shock to me.

I need to break away and stay away from the people who see me only as a customer or consumer or and  campaign donation or monthly payment for something I don’t want or need.  I am learning to mistrust and ignore people who make assumptions about what I believe and what I think. I will not be taken for granted.

(You can pay monthly? Yearly? Get our discount and your special code now? We see you went to the bathroom this morning? Want 30 per cent off on a big box of quilted toilet paper?

A reader almost broke into tears when I said I didn’t want Alexa in my house. She said Alexa was now essential to her life. Somewhere out there, George Orwell is spinning his grave. Big Brothers is a angel compared to the people running Facebook, Tik-Tok and Twitter. He wanted our souls. They just want our money.

Algorithms track my every move online, and everything I see becomes an e-mail that bombards me with more e-mail. Social media is a hydra, a creature from space that can’t stop growing us and ensnaring us and can’t ever be stopped.  fu We noticed you were looking at this, can we help, were you looking for something? We love you, come back and buy, it’s 20 per cent off. I know when I look at a shirt for 10 seconds, I will be looking at it for the rest of my life, every time I check my e-mail. ,The Techno-masters have spawned the Techno theives. It is no longer safe to pick up a telephone, there is no end to the people seeking to trick me and steal from me. One of my neighbors won’t play back a voice-mail unless I come over to hear it first. 

My e-mail grows by the day, thieves and robbers pepper and scumbags stalk me with phone calls and text messages.

Everyone wants my money, nobody wants me, and I don’t even have a lot of money to steal. I sometimes feel I’m a silver ball hanging in space, billions of people surrounding me to persuade me, enlist me steal from me. It is a s tate of madness, and yet everyone wonders why so many people are angry. They’ve bought Congress and the government, I’m a lot cheaper.

Twenty years ago, before it got this bad, I decided to begin my escape from  this new social and corporate economy (Odell calls it the Attention Economy because everyone wants our attention.) I decided that I would not measure my life by money, but by peace of mind and happiness.

I wasn’t going to live for retirement funds. I wasn’t going to lie for a sense of false security. Real security never comes from money, it comes from the soul.

I wasn’t going to abandon what I love do with what I was told I needed to do. My work would be a calling, not a job.

Honestly, it was as if I stepped out of a giant foul sinkhole and awful chaos and into a quite field next to a soothing stream. My life changed. It is by no means perfect, but it is quiet and beautiful. Compassion and empathy are permitted, community can still grow, government can still care about the needy and the vulnerable.

I  have less money than I ever had before but I have never been happier or more fulfilled. I hear this message from people again and again. It is one of the great secrets of our times. Stay away from the  day job, it is the devil’s road.

It is absolutely true that money, which we are all manipulated into thinking is the goal and purpose of our existance, does not bring happiness or peace of mind. Just think of the wealthy people you know. Ask them if you don’t believe me.

Thomas Merton says the answer is finding solace in solitude, but its more than that now.

If you want to be happy and have a meaningful life, you really do have to change the way you live, and put your faith and hopes in yourself. You have to learn to be nothing, and want nothing before you can be amything.

I am my salvation, no political party I see can give me the life I want, or even wants to.

Sometimes I think the haters and the trolls are the happiest people I know, since they are finally free to do what they love to do – hate without restraint or consequence. Because they are stupid, they are free. The demons have been unleashed and are free to roam at will.

In her book, Odell, a writer, artist, and Stanford University professor, quotes the great philosopher Seneca:  “Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed  you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire [in rage and hatred], in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you, you will perceive that are dying before their season.“

More and more, this is what life and America seems to look like for many people. I am determined to live my life in a meaningful and compassionate way. Once I gave up the idea that I could allow myself to be measured in money, that I need to save money out of fear, and buy  so many things I don’t want or need When I broke away from that way of thinking, the shadows began to recede and I saw my path much clearly.

What I didn’t realize is that I had to change so many things in my life that I had always been told were essential for a good life. Every one of them involved money.No one had ever talked to me about a good and meaningful life without couching it in terms of a fat salary, early and continuous savings, and money to die with when I got old, as if I would care.

The challenge and the goal is how to hold my place in the sun, not to save a million dollars so that I could grow old and die in in a fancy nursing  home.

I remember reading something that stuck in my mind more than a decade ago: it was that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs strickly limitted or forbid almost all of the things they created and marketed to the world. They may have changed the world, but their children were raised in a different one.

There is no simple or one way to escape the web around us. One thing at a time, one step at a time. For me, the most important thing was to stop – I spent a year on top of a mountain – and decide what kind of a life would make me happy and give me meaning apart from money and things. I bought a farm with animals. And started my blog. And committed myself to doing good for other people.

That’s the path I got on, the path I am still on. A lot of people don’t understand it. A lot of people don’t like it. I don’t care.  It’s the right path for me. It’s the light and the salvation. My life will not be deetermined by whether or not Donald Trump becomes President again. That is yet another device to entnrap us into their greedy and valueless world.

I will choose the kind of life I want, and work day night to create it for myself. It’s on me, not them.

Death is, in fact, the great equalizer, I’ve seen that at the Mansion and in my hospice therapy work.There is far less difference between those fancy fragrant places and Medicaid’s assisted care than one might think. When you get very old, you stop thinking of things that don’t really matter in the long run.

I am learning do less and less while doing more and more. I have broken with the idea we all are taught from the day we can think: that money will buy us happiness, that an economy that rapes and ravages us at every turn will give us meaning. Perhaps I don’t have to die before my season.

“…the pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques,” writes Odell,  (and gimmicks and moneys-sucking toys),” they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmetnal politics, class and race.”

And of compassion. An economy devoide of love, compassion, empathy – of anything but greed – can’t fail to diminish, corrupt and degrade us, as it has been doing for years now. Just look at the news. Ordimary people are turned into monsters every day right before our eyes.

I choose to not be one of them.

Rejection this kind of economy is now an act of political resistance. Compassion and truth have become radical beliefs in the information economy. They are seen as weak and valueless. They don’t make enough money.

The political parties pretend to be so different, but look at your e-mail. The all want to scare us into giving them money. And what, exactly will they do with our money that will make us happy and secure? I believe it is time for me and other people who perceive life to be more than a step or instrument towards something else and therefore something  that cannot be bought or optimized or marketed or tracked or scammed.

I refuse to believe that me and the people I love are not enough, can never be enough. Even billionaires are not enough.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram, writes Odell, act like dams that  manipulate and exploit our nature desire for community and our interest in others, exploiting our deepest and most intimate desires. And raking in billions of our dollars for the privilege of destroying our minds.

What has Facebook done to bring us all together? Facebook feasts on our best to profit from our worst.

“Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be  recognized not only as ends in and of themselves,” writes Odell, “but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky to be alive.”

This is an amazing time for anyone who thinks. It is full of chaos and hope and opportunity.

There are amazing rewards for people who are willing to change and go inside of themselves for truth and direction.

I know now that I can’t look outside for the life I want. I need to separate myself from the platform and attention economy and take responsibility for my own life. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to come along, but I will be happy to share the  trip.