On How to Do Nothing

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a book that demands focused attention. For one, its subtitle is literally “Resisting the Attention Economy,” but it’s more than that: Odell builds meandering arguments, packed with references to critical theory and ancient Greek philosophers and conceptual art projects. Now that I’m out of school, it’s been a while since I had to focus so carefully on a book, re-reading sentences to make sure I fully absorbed their meaning. This “report” is actually less a book report than a dispatch, as I’m still making my way through the book. It feels good to read this way, and also alarmingly hard.

In many ways, How to Do Nothing is about exactly the problem that first sparked my idea for the Book Report Project. I wrote back in January, “I now seem to chop the free time I do have into tiny little segments, each dedicated to a discrete glance at another place rather than a full-fledged walk into that world: a rapid-fire succession of 800-word articles as I sit on a train, a scroll through Twitter or Instagram in between answering texts, a 20-minute hit of a podcast while walking to work. In these moments, I still have one foot planted in my day-to-day reality; the other foot is just making a thousand tiny pivots along the way.” Like Odell, I’ve been interested in how I can get out of the loop of what she terms “24/7 data productivity” and use a slower pace as as a tool for approaching the world with more intention and, hopefully, more meaningful impact. Reading Odell’s book feels like anchoring this goal in the theoretical structure I didn’t know I was missing. She weaves between wildly diverse influences and references, taking the time to draw connections between them; that in itself feels like a bit of a balm for the “discrete glances” I’ve found myself getting burnt out on. I always feel like my mind is working best when I’m able to see a pattern or unexpected connection between two seemingly disparate things — I just want to get better at giving myself the space to do that.

In addition to sharing theories, historical stories, and descriptions of art projects, Odell speaks from her own experience for much of the book, whether she’s writing about conversations with her parents or her relationship with two crows who hang out near her house. She also roots a lot of the book in the Bay Area, where she’s from; the two things the Bay Area is primarily known for — technology and staggering natural beauty — are two of the core focuses of her book, and in some ways serve as counterweights to each other. For me, a fellow Bay Area native, this has made the book resonate on a deeper level. It’s been fascinating to read stories about old-growth redwoods in Oakland or labor strikes in San Francisco that I didn’t know about. It’s also been remarkable how her descriptions of the area’s deeply familiar landscape trigger the sense of calm wonder that I still feel whenever I’m there: as I read, I can picture myself walking under giant trees or watching the ocean crash onto the rugged Northern California coast. For me, her call to engage with nature also feels like a call to access a bit of childhood again: the joy of walking barefoot around a tide pool or staring down from a mountain, doing nothing but experiencing.

You can do this indoors, too. One of my strongest memories from childhood is a random moment: I was sitting silently on my bed, and my dad walked down the hall and flipped off the light in my room, thinking no one was in there. I yelled, “Hey!” in response, and he came back to turn the light back on, asking what I was doing. “Thinking,” I said, matter-of-factly. That’s what I want to get back to: the ability to focus on a train of thought, to follow my curiosity and form connections without a million little distractions getting in the way. As I make my way through How to Do Nothing, it’s been telling how many times I’ve wanted to pick up my phone or scroll through Twitter instead of just focusing on the book. It’s a work in progress, but I am practicing — and there’s power in that practice.