Welcome to Easy stories in English, the podcast that will take your English from ok to good and from good to great.
I am Ariel Goodbody, your host for this show.
Today's story is for advanced learners.
The name of the story is the end.
You can find a transcript of the episode@easystoriesinenglish.com end that's easystoriesinenglish.com end e n d there.
You can also download the episode as a PDF recently I've been connecting more and more with nature.
Despite growing up in a family which loves going on camping and walking holidays days, I was never really interested in nature as a child.
I was always absorbed in my own world, and I preferred staying inside and playing video games to exploring the great outdoors.
For most of my adult life ive been able to appreciate nature, but equally I felt very disconnected from it.
It frustrated me that I didnt know the names of trees, that I was ignorant of much of what was going on around me.
It didnt help that I associated it with my parents, who always seemed to care too much.
When we were in the car, theyd break out of nowhere to point up and say, look, a buzzard.
A buzzard is a kind of bird of prey, a bird that hunts other animals.
I saw my parents extreme interest and found it a bit embarrassing.
But as life got more stressful over the years, and as climate change has become harder and harder to ignore, I found myself returning to nature more a few months ago, I read a book called how to do resisting the attention economy by Jenny Adele, and it completely changed my attitude.
The book talks about the attention economy, the idea that these days big companies like Apple and Google are fighting for your attention, and that to pay close, slow attention to things is often an act of resistance, a way of fighting back.
So the book isnt really about how to do nothing, but rather how to be more intentional, how to move through the world consciously and think about what youre doing.
Of course, these days there are plenty of courses and discussions about digital detoxing, where you cut yourself off from technology for a set period of time.
But these are usually seen as personal actions, a way to reduce stress and go back to work more refreshed.
What Jenny Odell argues in her book is that we need to do nothing as a political act, as something for our own wellbeing as well as that of others, not just for productivity.