I was assigned Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing as part of the Three Books program. I didn’t take a COLLEGE course in the fall, so I have relatively less of an idea if the program was taken seriously, but from my perspective it was comprised of a) an email that told me it existed, b) a free book that was—I think—presented to me on my arrival to campus, and c) no further mention of it ever. A long while later I decided to read it.
There are discussions of great merit in How to Do Nothing—but they are both poorly executed and tied to other beliefs that I disagree with, which ultimately has created a work that mirrors the program that recommended it: a core of goodness enveloped in the overgrown vines of bad.
To address the former portion of my critique, I will turn to the common adage that the hallmark of true understanding is being able to explain something simply. Jenny Odell has not done that here. This book is a wandering text with no driving argument. Whatever tidbits of knowledge are to be found within it are sprinkled throughout at random intervals, and then repeated, each time as if she has forgotten about any previous mention. I felt as if I was reading a first draft the entire time.
To the latter half of my critique, what arguments are articulated in How to Do Nothing are themselves something of a mixed bag. There are portions that I resonated with strongly:
I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.
p. 119
Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”
p. 34
But they are often followed up with just terrible addenda. I suspect it comes down to the following fundamental disagreement between myself and Odell:
…I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.
p. 5
This is what leads her to follow up potentially interesting suppositions:
The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else.
p. xvii
With nonsensical conclusions:
That “something else” is nothing less than…. bioregionalism…
p. xvii
This exchange in particular is typical of a type of thinking in the book that I do not understand in the slightest, which prizes non-humans over our own species and asceticism over greatness. That stance smacks of a particular branch of Christian thought that sees “lesser” states as inherently more “pure.” The plant is prized over the person because it is incapable of sin. The mendicant over the industrialist, because why seek out anything in this world when the world to come is what matters. This view does not move me. Let all of the righteous acts that Odell proposes be done at scale as a testament to our glory.
One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something… you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.
p. xxiii
There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world.
p. 53
“The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”
p. 55
There are no limits to what we are capable of. Attention is the tool by which that potential is made manifest.