Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell is a book on many abstract, sometimes esoteric, concepts like the self, bioregionalism, focus, the attention economy, the effects of late-stage capitalism and what it means to resist falling prey to corporate overlords.
This isn’t a how-to guide on how to unplug or leave social media, and though this book inhabits the same space as books like Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport) and How to Break Up With Your Phone (Catherine Price), it isn’t even about digital detoxing. Neither is this a psychology book, offering insight into the psychology of consumerism.
Instead, this is more like a philosophical treatise about how an individual (and by extension the collective) can live a more fulfilling life by disengaging from the attention economy, and finding more meaningful, authentic things to focus on.
I do appreciate how this book dives deep into what it means to have our focus and attention redirected into things like endlessly updating social feeds or the news cycle. Odell begins with the obvious; stating that fragmented attention affects our ability to think clearly and reflect on how we really feel and experience things. But she also takes it deeper, by looking at how decaying attention and context collapse erodes our relationships with other people and even the environment around us.
She asks us how we can ever be authentically ourselves when we boil down our complex identities, ideas, feelings and experiences to character-limited online spaces. If we think of people as brands, how does that affect our ability to connect with others? Or even ourselves?
I found many parts of the book to resonate with myself in my own life, and I think there is a strong argument for how our lives have become dominated by small, curated, profit-driven echo chambers, and what that means for us as individuals, for our relationships, and for the world around us.
Having said that, it does often read as self-help for leftist intelligentsia, and Odell seems at times oblivious to her own privilege — which, to be fair, isn’t uncommon for liberals living in their liberal bubbles (but how the blind optimism of liberals has lead to inequality in globalism is a conversation for another time). But as an artist and an art teacher at Stanford, I can’t help but feel like I’m at times talking to the town hippie, who is an overeducated eco-socialist and finds birdwatching to be a proto-spiritual experience.
Odell often advocates focusing your time and attention on art and nature rather than social media, and there’s a whiff of intellectual snobbery palpable in the passages where she waxes poetic about the transformative nature of art and the many museums she has had the pleasure of exploring in the Bay Area.
Art and nature, yes, are wonderful things that often have transformative effects on those who can experience them, but access to these things aren’t a given for everyone. Especially, in large cities where nature has been pushed to the sidelines or reserved for the rich neighbourhoods, finding a patch of nature that you can genuinely enjoy can be a real challenge.
When we lived in Lahore, a city of 13 million people and 26th largest city in the world, the lack of nature was jarring to me, the Scandinavian used to having nothing but nature around me. But the chaotic way in which many parts of Lahore have sprung up over the centuries means that city planning doesn’t reach everywhere, and even in the nicer neighbourhoods, the only nature to be found was in the walled gardens of the big houses.
Parks in Lahore were usually also walled, and you paid to get in: it’s not cheap maintaining British-style gardens (designed for the moist, maritime weather of Britain) in a semi-arid climate. I was considered as the neighbourhood nut, because I brought my Scandinavian habits with me and insisted on going for walks. People would shake their heads in baffled disbelief. They didn’t understand why I didn’t just get a rikshaw instead. Who walks?!
And I saw what they meant. (Just because I was “crazy”, didn’t mean I was not observant.)
The roads were in abysmal condition, the streets tiny and cramped as they weaved through neighbourhoods that had been built higgledy-piggledy over the centuries, there was trash everywhere and no city clean-up crew to come and take it away (residents regularly burned trash where it lay). If it wasn’t a main road, it had more pot-holes than road and took twice as long to traverse. It was hot and dark and people parked their horses and donkeys outside their front doors. There were no pedestrian streets, only roads for cars, and so, there were no zebra crossings and if you wanted to be the chicken that crossed the road, you had to learn some survival skills, because there were also only lights and traffic wardens at the big intersections.
“Getting out into nature” wasn’t something that was culturally relevant either.
When you’re struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis, you’re not looking for extra ways to spend money – such as going to one of the maintained gardens – and even when “natural” areas are available for public use, they’re hard to get into.
We had a football field near our house, that had a small copse of trees and a green. During wedding season, there wasn’t a day a wedding tent wasn’t pitched up in it. When it rained, it became a muddy mess because no one took care of it.
And when there weren’t football matches or weddings taking up the “park”, people lived in it (reasons for that ranged from being a farmer selling your produce from your farm which was far away, and you slept with your produce cart at night so it didn’t get stolen, to living below the poverty line and not having anywhere to go). If you wanted to go into “nature”, you packed up the whole family in the car and drove up to the mountains for a vacation — even this was only accessible for a family with a certain level of income.
In the Nordics, we’ve got the right to roam.
The freedom to roam, or “everyman’s right”, is the general public’s right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the “right to roam”.
The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.
This right does not include any substantial economic exploitation, such as hunting or logging, or disruptive activities, such as making fires, bothering livestock, or driving off-road vehicles. In countries without such general rights, there may be a network of rights of way, or some nature reserves with footpaths.
This means that to get out in nature, you can walk through these areas on designated paths and these areas will often be interspersed with housing communities. So, when we say “go for a walk” we pretty much mean step out of your front door and start walking! In the US, where nature has been designated to public parks and national parks, and you can’t walk on private farmland as you can in many places here, it’s more common to have to “drive to walk”, meaning that you need to first get to a park in order to walk there.
So, for the author to speak of nature as being so easily accessible, when herself living in an area where the cost of living is 25% higher than the state average and 76% higher than the national average, housing is 202% more expensive and utilities about 33% pricier than the US average, I have to assume she wrote this book for the middle-class and up.
I do agree with Odell that context collapse and the effects of social media on focus are detrimental, both to the individual and society as a whole. And in an ideal world, we would all find more meaningful and compassionate relationships if we just looked up from our phones to interact with the real world.
But in a world where 30% of women have experienced intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence — that’s 736 million women around the world — I viscerally understand the reaction to not venture out. So, in a world where access to nature is gated on several levels, I have to ask ‘How?’.
Odell’s offered solution is to focus on bioregionalism, which I can absolutely get behind. Bioregionalism advocates for a way of relating to the area where you are (wherever that is) and to design society with not only economy and politics, but also culture, in mind, to create a world where we are more connected to both each other and the environment around us.
When we lived in Lahore, and I was feeling the effects of not having nature around me like I was used to, the little sparrows that came to our house every morning became my lifeline. After a while, I started noticing that nature is relentless in her encroachment into human life. Our house was full of spiders and flies, they attracted geckos. The fire ants routinely marches across our floors and we had to watch out for poisonous larva during the monsoon season so we didn’t step on them and get hurt.
The streets were full of feral dogs and even our house cat had been dropped on our doorstep by her mother once she was old enough to “claim” a house as her own. Our neighbours had pigeons on the roof and dogs in the yard, and they regularly hosted a slaughter in their yard for Ramzan. I used to go up on the roof and balefully look out over the sea of rooftops, just like ours, and despair. Then I’d hear the cry of a hawk and I’d be lost in searching the sky for a little dot.
And on my walks I used to pass a house that had no door, only a curtain. Street dogs would often sit by the door, heads ducked under the curtain, tails wagging, because the lady of the house was cooking and she used to feed the pack living outside her door.
The internet isn’t perfect, but it has helped democratise resources.
The internet has offered many opportunities for those who might otherwise have had none. I’m not saying social media or the internet are perfect, even Odell agrees that the internet back in the early days was a totally different beast, the truth is that online interactions today are driven by profit-motivated corporations.
Even so, even knowing how full of shit the internet is (it’s only an extension of humanity, after all), I still choose to interact with it on a daily basis. Heck, my career is on the internet. And I think that while mindless scrolling is bad for anyone, the internet and social platforms have still sparked plenty of meaningful conversations, that have even brought about change in the physical world.
And as toxic and vitriolic as social media can be, it has also helped those be seen who might not otherwise be seen.
Is it difficult to find those accounts and creators and resources that don’t drive a huge profit? That give marginalised voices a chance to be heard? Gods, yes. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Can we, each and every one of us, do better? Contribute less to the noise and employ more critical thinking? Absolutely. but that doesn’t mean we’re going to. Because a thinking mind is linked to education and reading, and if we’re just going to read less and less, think less and less, we’re also going to take that unthinking-ness with us wherever we go.
While Odell does acknowledge that nature or art aren’t easily accessible everywhere, it feels half-hearted when you’ve read a whole book encouraging the reader to embrace their privilege.
Did I enjoy it?
I did. While books about the same thing tend to treat the hijacking of our attention and the tyranny of algorithms as a foregone conclusion, making digital detoxing seem like a life-or-death situation, Odell manages to avoid sensationalising this paradigm and focuses on what you can do as an individual.
She doesn’t even advocate total removal of oneself from the digital economy as a viable option, which I appreciate. The internet and social media aren’t going anywhere, so discussing opting-out 100% is pointless. Instead, her message that we can all train our focus and attention on things that bring us true joy and connection is achievable for anyone.
While this book isn’t new or groundbreaking, I think it says a lot of things that we need to hear — especially us liberals in our liberal bubbles. Odell doesn’t shy away from telling her own story. She uses her own experiences to draw a fascinating map of present socio-political circumstances through the context of history and geography. She writes about her half-Filipino identity, her experiences in the corporate machine of Silicon Valley, her personal relationships, her home and hobbies, her love of art and nature.
Odell’s references are diverse, though she does reference Thoreau a lot, she draws wisdom from Audre Lorde, MLK, labour movements, environmental activists and many other sources. She also provides historical context to the issues she brings up, as an antidote to social media’s tendency to keep us forever anxious about the present.
She traces context back to the communes of the 1960s and breaks down what worked and didn’t work in a deconstruction of social design vs social activism. In that same vein, she takes us back to Ancient Greece and reminds us of the cynic Diogenes, who lived life of resistance among the very community he denounced. And she describes something that happened in recent Californian history: the strike of longshore men who were overworked and the string of problems they encountered as they began to solve them.
While I think the meta-takeaway that the act of reading her book in itself is an exercise in the kind of deliberate anti-productivity she encourages, is a little much, I do agree that reading books with no other purpose than to read them is valid.
My own relationship with social media has fluctuated on a spectrum of inspiration to hate to anxiety, and this book had many good reminders for me when on social media. I think Odell intentionally avoids using the world “mindfulness” because the purpose of this work is not to build on buzzwords. What she’s advocating is awareness in how we go about our digital (and non-digital) lives, and she urges us to seek deeper meaning and connection in everything we do.
My favourite takeaway was the Herman Melville short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, who kept saying “I prefer not to” to every request. I think it’s the quiet resistance in his words that Odell thinks we could all aspire to.
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