How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

It was well-written and interesting, but focussed too much on art history and literary history, and didn't actually spend a lot of time on the concept of the attention economy itself. I was hoping for more social, technological and historic context.

dnf at 81 pages (31%)

i tried really hard not to dnf this but the last two nights i've found myself doomscrolling for hours to avoid picking it up (ironic, i know). i wanted to keep reading because there is a lot of really interesting info and i love hearing Jenny Odell's thoughts. this is just a bit too dense for me, especially in the midst of seasonal depression time.

i will say it wasn't quite what i expected; it is very academic and the first third is made up of a lot of musings and examples of said musings. absolutely nothing wrong with it, just not anything my poor brain can handle at the moment.

Some interesting passages, but the overall premise didn't wow me. The book was written in the early years of DT's first term; it's disconcerting to read how strongly Odell reacted, considering that an even more horrifying four years (yes, I'm being optimistic) looms on the horizon.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, it felt more like an inspirational piece than something to truly help you resist the attention economy. Still I found it interesting in some parts, but found a lot of platitudes in it too.

It felt very "artsy" with a lot of new year vibes but gave some (even few) interesting advices on how to approach our world, our relationship to others and to our environment.

The migrating birds return each year, for now anyway, and I have not yet been reduced to an algorithm

Not at all what I expected. It felt more like a naturalist handbook than an aide for dealing with technology, and not only that, weeks after reading it, I completely forgot that I had read it?! What can I say, it just wasn't for me.

I loved this activist, anti-capitalist book wrapped in a disarming, self-help floral cover. It's consolidating a lot of what I've been reading lately that's been a reaction to our always online hustle culture.

Time is money and it's gone well beyond #girlbossing, the grind, and side hustles — expanding the boundaries of our work life. It's the fact that for many of us, every waking moment sees us building our personal brands, submitting our leisure time for numerical evaluation via likes, comments and views. We're constantly checking in on our performance and monitoring the value of our personal brand. Even self-care is framed in terms of returning to work replenished, to optimize ourselves to do more.

It's not like stepping away is going to be easy. History is scattered with the remains of those that felt they could escape the grind. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Odell has us consider the work of maintenance, disrupting the attention economy and escaping its pervasive framework. To listen, reflect, heal, and repair ourselves. Stupidity is never blind or mute. Maybe holster that hot take, touch grass, and do the work of doing nothing.

An activism book disguised as a self-help book

Read this because Ayo Edebiri recommended it on her insta story

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by technologies we use daily.

How to Do Nothing

Great insights on how to be more present with nature, ourselves and the communities around us.

I definitely thought this was going to be a book about putting your phone down and doing hobbies/self-care. That's only a small portion of it. It's about so much more: noticing and listening to the environment, questioning the status quo of productivity and “hustle culture,” and challenging systems of oppression and power. I read this at an interesting time having finished Braiding Sweetgrass a month or so ago - the author talks a lot about the book - and watching Everything, Everywhere All at Once. These three pieces work so well together and have given me a lot to think about meaning and value.

I loved it so much and recommend it to anyone who is a human.

As others have said, this can be a tough read mostly because the author's writing is rather academic and not really what you'd expect from a book with this title. But it's a fascinating meditation on the attention economy and how to slow down, and will definitely be something I continue to think about it. 

Good read, the topics she brought up were interesting on their own but as a whole book hard to follow. She introduced this at the beginning that it was sort of a mind wondering experience and it reflected in the book and maybe wasn't the strongest choice to get something??? across? I'm not even sure if there was a point or just a discussion...maybe that was the point? idk

Anyway, yep, def. introduced some new things to me and pov to explore. I feel like people have such a distaste for social tech. but I think it needs to be said that media literacy plays a large aspect here and I see many people not scrutinizing their sources with adds to this pile of mis/mal information. I believe Tech can be good...but also maybe vulnerable.
Here's a song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqyXvMrQDk8

Anyway...also has some hint of shared trauma by living in the worst timeline ~* RIP

Stopped reading...

Glad I came back to this and finished, some great stuff, albeit not the most exciting read at times.

I thought the commentary and historical references were great, but the content ended up not being something I found really engaging.

Changed my life type of book. (Also pushed me down the Greek philosophy rabbit hole. :)

this book is not what it looks like on the cover & everyone should read it.

One of the most challenging books I've read this year. It's leaving me feeling like I can completely rethink many ways I live my life — but also left me feeling encouraged, known, and excited.

I listened to this book on audio and it took everything inside of me to do so as the narrator sounded like a robot. Other than that, it was great listening to someone put many of my thoughts and beliefs into form.

Reads as MFA thesis-cum-journal and contains many (too many?) interesting historical and philisophical references — like Epicurus and his garden school and the rise and fall of 1960s communes — but ultimately lacks structure. Using Odell's own phrase to describe the talk that spurred the book, it's “weird and blobby and hard to define.”

This was a good book to read on a camping weekend, where all of your activity is geared toward being able to do nothing. It's not a simple “life hack” how-to self help book. I'd put it in a category of philosophical book like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or “Paddle Your Own Canoe.”

I was drawn into this book, as I assume many will be, by the title; we live in a time that celebrates and rewards untenable levels of productivity (think: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, that guy you know from college who works as a data scientist and is a published poet and travels the world taking photos for National Geographic in his “spare time”). To not spend every moment of the day working towards some sort of meaningful or profit-driven goal is to waste time, and to waste time is to be a failure, and to be a failure is to be a loser, and left behind. I may be exaggerating but what I'm saying is our work days have grown to far surpass the standard 40-hour work week AND we're expected to have all sorts of “productive” hobbies to boot.

Odell's book is a treatise on how the attention economy is damaging our environment, our sense of self and ability to connect with others, and ultimately our ability to be the best version of ourselves/the most genuinely productive we can be. But don't let that make you think this is some kind of self-help book, for it certainly is not. If anything, it's a bit of a meandering, academic, artful piece of writing that never quite crystallizes into a clear thesis (such that when trying to describe it to friends afterwards, I sound a bit confused, or perhaps just vapid). But to follow a clear structure, to sit neatly between defined lines of an argument, would almost be antithetical to the author's desire to inhabit spaces that are “blobby” and resist clear definition.

That being said, I think I would boil this down as follows:
A) the majority of us participating in the attention economy (i.e. social media, digital devices, mass media) feel the crushing expectations of productivity, the addictive natures of technology, the emotional detachment of the digital world, and the resulting negativity spiral B) to resist this economy as a means of healing what can start to feel like a sickness, our instinct is to retreat entirely – be that via deleting social media, silent retreats (cough Jared Leto), long hiking trips in remote mountains, or even dreams of leaving it altogether to live alone in a remote cabin in the woods or join a counter-culture commune but that C) retreating doesn't fix much, now does it? so D) to live most purposefully we must find ways to participate purposefully in the attention economy: engaging critically with content by contextualizing, slowing down the pace of information to avoid reacting purely based on emotions or immediate reactions, paying attention to the physical world around us – people, plant life, sounds, smells, art, architecture.... and being open to what we can learn from those people/things to continuously contextualize and recontextualize.

Even in writing I struggle to concisely capture her argument without dumbing it down. Regardless, this book has is well-written and full of interesting ties to philosophy, history, literature, flora and fauna, and – of particular interest to me – modern art/performance art. So if any of those things and a bit of a scholarly ramble tickles your fancy, I say pick it up and give it a read.

A review on the back of the book likened the writing to having a thoughtful friend's opinion and insight into a number of issues. I fully agree. I would have never thought of so directly connecting the worlds of tech to nature and simply being. Thoroughly recommend to anyone for whom the description speaks to them at all.

4.5 Stars. A magnificent book, with many insightful things to say about social media, technology, society and the environment. At once a polemic and a serious work of social thought, my only concern with this book is that it was occasionally too wide in scope, straying from the original conceit of a criticism of technology, but perhaps I need to read it closer. Definitely deserves a reread in a year or two. A book I will be thinking a lot about in the coming months.

I decided to reread this book to help me overcome some feelings of “need” to produce. After rereading, I read some of the reviews of this book as being ‘mislabeled', and I found the inspiration to write a review for anyone who would like a different perspective on whether this book has been ‘mislabeled'.

The premise of Odell's novel is to find the joy in doing nothing, in taking life slowly, in #NOMO (necessity of missing out). She quotes Audre Lorde's self-care as “ caring for myself is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Odell writes to convince us and remind of the importance of self-preservation, time away, taking our 8 hrs to work, 8 hrs to rest, 8 hrs to do what we will instead of putting that time towards something like Facebook, Instagram, our brand that primarily serve to make money (and not usually for ourselves).

I suspect that the people upset with this book are exactly the people need this book the most. I imagine those readers picked up this book hoping for the quick fix that Odell is really specifically writing against. It is a book that requires deep listening and forces you to take the time to contemplate rather than produce. By the end of this book, one feels both inspired to tackle modern day issues and to take the time to pay attention to the community around them and make change as opposed to their Facebook pages, Twitter feed, and Goodreads followers.

Putting this aside for now. I keep thinking, “Well that was a lot of words not saying much.” I'm half-way through it so maybe it'll add up to something. So far it reads like an all-over-the-map academic hippy manifesto without benefit of an editor. I'll probably be accused of “not getting it” and so be it.