I read Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy back in May and am just now getting around to recording my thoughts on it.
Odell, an artist and activist, surveys our cultural landscape — anxious and noisy, rife with social media addiction, public square rancor, and side-hustle mania — and proposes that we do nothing.
She doesn’t suggest we retreat from society, or shield ourselves from the struggles of our neighbors or our environment. Rather, Odell suggests that we train to adopt a posture of standing apart — ultimately for the good of each other and the world. The final aim of doing nothing, Odell writes, is “to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.”
Odell explains how this all works by effectively splitting her book into two sections. In the first, she outlines how to disengage from the attention economy, and in the second, she sketches ways for us to reengage with something else.
Doing nothing is not about withdrawing completely — or forever. And neither is doing nothing intended to maximize efficiency in the workplace. (Unlike c-suite executives who flock to silent retreats so they can "recharge their batteries" in order to crush it next quarter, Odell explicitly mentions her proposal isn't designed for us to return to work "refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.") At its core, doing nothing is about deprogramming, healing, and sharpening one's ability to listen. It is about learning how to be rooted, to resist in place.
Odell’s prescribed tactics include breaking out of our filter bubbles (a popular post-2016-election trope, but nevertheless interestingly explored here), and practicing bioregional awareness, which refers to being familiar with the local ecology and committed to stewarding it. For Odell, if we pay attention not only to birds and flowers but also to their context and how they work together, we adopt the way-of-seeing that is necessary to untangle the ways in which the attention economy has knotted us up.
My small gripe with How to Do Nothing is that a lot of Odell’s examples include artistic references and roundabouts that at times feel strained and a bit too abstract for a literal “how-to” book. (Odell is an artist by trade, but some sections feel a little alienating to those who aren’t.) And some of what she prescribes as an antidote involves an exhausting, if not unrealistic, amount of self-examination.
But overall this is a really solid book. Odell proves to be an inspiring guide for people and communities which wish to reclaim their affections from the clamor of the everyday capitalist machine, from the pursuit of hollow chatter, from the atomized existence that deep down longs to be free, see clearly, and stand apart.
If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
Links
The great escape [The Goods]
How Social Media Shapes Our Identity [New Yorker]
Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman [Guardian]
Review: Writing the book on selfies — sociologist reframes social photos [LA Times]
America’s DIY Phone Farmers [VICE]
Until next time,
Hal