BOOK REVIEW: ‘How to do Nothing’ by Jenny Odell

OPINION:

HOW TO DO NOTHING: RESISTING THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

By Jenny Odell

Melville House, $25.99, 256 pages

In “How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy,” Jenny Odell, an Oakland-based multi-disciplinary artist and writer, asks us to look at how we are spending perhaps our most valuable resource — our attention. TLDR; not wisely.

Ms. Odell shows us ways in which taking control of our attention through specific acts of noticing can be both personally meaningful and politically crucial. What might have been a typical admonition to put down your phone becomes an elegant guide to why it’s important to truly be where you are.

Ms. Odell gathers together her examination of attention using sources ranging from Diogenes to Donna Haraway, from communes to the compositions of John Cage. And she believes that this examination of our attention is essential because through our attention, we create our reality. This is no small problem when our attention is owned by corporations through our phones.

A warning: To properly read this book, we must set aside the knee-jerk argument against her definition of “nothing.” The nothing she wants us to do is not the absence of activity, but a redirection of time, energy and focus toward things that cannot be monetized. Looking at or creating art can be nothing. Wandering in a forest can be nothing.

What she is critiquing is the addictive and invasive aspects of social media and technology in particular. Every time you pull to refresh Twitter, your attention is part of a capitalist exchange. Twitter sells your attention. When you pause life to do the “nothing” of watching birds off your porch, no one makes any money off that. (Unless perhaps you write a book about it.)

So, can “doing nothing” be an act of resistance when the world demands constant productivity? Ms. Odell quite persuasively argues yes. However, as valuable as it clearly is to reclaim our attention, her book doesn’t seem to quite accomplish this feat.

As I read, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the children’s classic “Momo” by Michael Ende, in which Time Thieves make the world “more productive” at the expense of living life and being happy. Ms. Odell writes: “I see people caught up not just in notifications but in a mythology of productivity and progress, unable not only to rest but simply to see where they are.”

Ende’s hero, Momo, has a special talent for listening, and she must save those around her from the erasure of free time. The artful myth of Momo hit home for me emotionally. It tells a truth of “doing nothing” that I recognized and embraced. Why, then, did I find the experience of Ms. Odell’s book so stressful?

I have a theory. I think it’s because it destroys the nothing it’s trying to save.

For some readers, like me, Ms. Odell’s thoughts will sit in a very uncomfortable uncanny valley. Yes, I am a park sitter, a library lover, an animal observer, a seeker of space and time and meaning. I have cried in nature. I have been fundamentally changed by encounters with art. Judging by her author photo, we may in fact literally see through the same glasses.

But here’s the thing. The parts of me that use my quiescent liberal arts education to justify and self-analyze those activities are exactly the parts of me that I’m trying to quiet down when I do them. I want to notice, not notice that I’m noticing. By subjecting our “nothing” to this kind of analysis, creating social capital rather than coin, all future instances of doing it start to feel performative. I am not “doing nothing.” I am doing a performance of nothing, because I am obsessed with what the nothing means and quite capable of conveying that to others, because that is my nature.

Ms. Odell’s actions make so much sense. Taking a walk in a rose garden is good for the soul. Taking a walk in a rose garden under a cloud of Deleuze is not doing nothing. It is another inability to rest, to see, to silence the inner passenger that justifies your activities to yourself. I am essentially paying myself to do them. Is that any better?

Nevertheless, some of us will always need to strangle inner peace nearly to death in order to actually let ourselves experience it. I am one of those people, and I know many of those people, and so I have been talking incessantly about this book to anyone who will listen.

Days after putting down Ms. Odell’s text, as I watch birds I cannot name and shadow-box my uncanny imaginary interlocutor instead of using these minutes to churn out the text that makes up both my livelihood and my art, even I am forced to admit that this has changed my attention, in part simply because it has my attention. In the way she intends? Perhaps not. But even so, it’s not nothing.

• Tara Wilson Redd is the author of “The Museum of Us” (Wendy Lamb Books, 2018).