How To Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
When I Read It
During the summer of 2023, largely while vacationing in Puerto Rico. Ever mindful of my tendency to distractability and playing with my phone, I ran interference in advance by picking a book that reminded me of my purpose for vacation: to do nothing.
What can I say? I’m on the nose. I brought a manual on how to vacation while on vacation.
What It’s About
The subtitle reveals Odell’s angle: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell’s work is a product of the late 2010s-early 2020s. Something has gone wrong. A rectangle of plastic and glass has hijacked our lives. What to do?
Odell: Nothing. Firecely nothing.
Odell’s text is a broad philosophical and artistic study that drives deeper than the self-help genre usually does. She is not satisfied with strategies for decreasing your screentime. She wants to know why you even care that it’s a problem. She wants you to notice that we’ve all been carried away in a cultural current, a riptide pulling us away from the shore of our normal lives. She’s shouting from the shore. Our memories are inadequate to the task, to helping us reorient ourselves back to the lives we lived before the commercial success of digital technology gave massive companies the power to influence our every waking moment and then some.
For Odell, there is no other solution but to ground ourselves consciously, materially, purposefully here, in the real world (ironies abound as I try to convey my meaning via the medium I’m critiquing). And she takes the reader through a journey that’s both reasonable and emotional, striking at core values, reading deeply into the wisdom literature, experimental artistic expression, and everyday life.
She characterizes the general problem and provides a way out, but not so much in the way you might expect a self-help book to do so via named strategies and bullet points. Odell’s point is that the focus on efficiency and instrumentalism is part of the cultural current that is carrying us away. You are a human being. You are so much more than a consumer in the attention economy. Remember who you are.
Odell’s project is about consciousness raising and cultivation of new (old) ways of knowing and being in the world that bring us back into communion with the world we live in and the communities we are a part of.
It is a deeply human book. It is, I think, an important book for our time.
What I Learned From It
I learned how to do nothing. It is (weirdly) not easy, at least for me. It is a process. And it’s a process that I am committed to. Because my humanity depends on it.
What does doing nothing look like? More walks in the arboretum. Learning about local trees. Looking up at the stars. Sitting quietly. Playing board games with my wife. Having fun.
Who Might Find It Helpful
Anyone who is struggling with your relationship with technology—phone, TV, Internet, etc.
Last Word
I needed this book. And I am grateful to Odell for writing it.