How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“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 the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the ‘off time’ that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.”

This is the first paragraph of the book, in which Odell spells out the problem right away. Everyday technologies are impacting our time in negative ways. Many of us know that and feel it, but it’s difficult to break the cycle of distraction that these technologies work to maintain. She sets the scene here for advising readers how to recapture serendipity and free time without an electronic screen.

“On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other.”

Moving from the plight of the individual to those of a community, state, and country, Odell notes that the lack of time for deep thought and conversation will be detrimental collectively since we face so many serious issues. We’ve lost the personal connections necessary for the give and take required to find complex solutions to the existential issues of our time. Already here in the Introduction she uses the word “context,” something she notes later is needed to restore meaningful communication.

“I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.”

With a title like How to Do Nothing, one might think this is a book written by a Luddite about dropping out altogether. It isn’t, and the author wants readers to know that up front, stating that there are positive uses of technology that help build the kind of lifestyle she advocates.