How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

"Exhaustively researched yet philosophical and poetic in its delivery, How to Do Nothing will make you rethink your relationship to thought itself. Incorporating history, journalistic narrative, scientific studies, literature, philosophy and even the study of trees and birdwatching, Odell mounts a convincing defense of individual attention. Her observations are fresh and often surprising. She wisely points out that the boundless connectivity afforded by smartphones is no substitute for knowing your real-life neighbors (less and less a commonplace reality these days, in the age of social media); neighbors, not Facebook friends, are the networks that spring to action in the event of local emergencies and climate-related disasters. And against the grain of the average social science polemic decrying technology’s impact on our attention spans, How To Do Nothing argues that the designs modern media and technology have on our attention, while real and invasive, are ultimately shallow: it is much, much harder to penetrate and hijack levels of deep thought—the kind of reverent, insistent attention we pay to art and music. That’s the mode of devotion we should cultivate. This book changed my life, despite not a word of it being pedantic. I hope it will change yours, too."

"Totally different. I chose it for a very autobiographical reason: a very good friend of mine put the book in my hands recently, and it was the greatest act of friendship. The book itself is a manifesto of how to be a good friend to yourself. Odell writes about opening up to a new kind of experience: the experience being not having your nose pressed into your phone, and how fascinating the world around you is if you actually tap into it. As someone who’s constantly wired in—I do not want to tell you my screen-time hours; it’s terrible—the weird but fascinating thing about reading this book was the purifying element of it. Now I’m back on the internet, having read this book—and keeping it in mind—I find myself feeling less addled. I feel a little more zen, a little more grounded. In a way, it’s an indictment against living on Twitter. She talks about Twitter being a very out-of-context ecosystem: Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities—things we like, things we’ve bought, friends in common—geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no “obvious” instrumental reason to care about. On the internet, everyone is so isolated. There isn’t much nuanced connection, or a sense of a community coming together and figuring out how to solve a problem or enjoy themselves together. There’s a pervading alienation. Right. And she talks about the natural order of things: how people, especially after a disaster like an earthquake or something, are suddenly forced to scramble and help each other: Not only did these neighbors organize and provide each other with food, water, shelter, medical aid, and moral support—often crossing social boundaries or upending norms in order to do so—but these local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks often got the job done better, or at least faster, than the more institutional aid that followed. She’s talking about this democratic, criss-crossing world where there is no hierarchy; this deep, multi-connected world where things aren’t just essentially like Twitter—which, if you look at it, is a bit like blocks of different people basically yelling. Odell writes: “the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a ‘take’ after having read a single headline.” These people are not talking to each other, really—or rather, there’s no correlation among the different “takes” you’re seeing. As an internet addict, I go back and forth between to trying to be offline a bit more, but since reading How To Do Nothing I’m also just not feeling as wound up in it as I was. “Odell writes about opening up to a new kind of experience: the experience being not having your nose pressed into your phone” It’s also just incredibly smart: it’s a lot about conceptual art, philosophy, and activists in California. It’s a very interesting patchwork quilt of a book. It’s not a self-help book that shames people about the effects of the internet on our brains. Odell’s interests do not overlap with mine, and nevertheless I was fascinated to hear her tell me about, for example, the longshoremen in San Francisco in the 1920s and 30s and how their union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, was built up. I don’t even know the name of the tree outside my building in Brooklyn, but Odell is really interested in looking at and classifying nature. Since reading it, I’ve stopped now and then outside my building and just tried the experiment of looking at a bunch of leaves sprouting out of it in the sidewalk. I’ll notice, say, a beautiful formation of ants moving around. I’ll stare at it for a little bit and think, ‘Life isn’t boring—you just have to get better at living it.’ It’s very good, and very well-written. That’s the thing—it’s really satisfying. As someone who 99% of the time reads novels, I thought this book would be good for me, but in fact it was a pleasure . I only underline the heck out of books when I’m assigned to review them. But when I read this on my own steam, still I couldn’t stop underlining. It was a way of acknowledging to myself what resonated with me. It wasn’t for coming back to later so much as it was a way of high-fiving Odell along the way."