#117: How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell

May I have your attention for a moment?

Hello everyone!

Welcome new readers, I’m so glad you’re here.

I love books so much. It has been a rewarding reading year thus far. This week I’m talking about a perfect pairing to Four Thousand Weeks, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s another non-fiction that I really enjoyed and that I’m glad exists in book form.

I wish I had found some flowers for a backdrop, but it was winter in Colorado and hadn’t been snowing, so my options were brown or brown.

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a strong contribution to the anti-productivity movement, but the title might be a little misleading. The subtitle, “resisting the attention economy,” more accurately describes the intent of the book. While reading it and since reading it, rather than sitting around doing nothing, I’ve been actively working on my own resistance and paying more attention to my…attention. Or where I place my attention. Odell writes in the introduction:

The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).¹

Disengage with placelessness and reengage with placefulness.

How to disengage

Odell makes the case that completely disengaging from society is impossible. Rather, she argues for engaging with the world, including the political fabric of the world, from the perspective of an outsider:

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.²

The constant barrage of social media and 24-hour news, the “channels” through which I encounter the world, have led me to say extreme things like “I’m going to live in the woods, off the grid, away from all the craziness!” Or “I’m going to be a Buddhist monk!” Or perhaps less extreme but still impractical: “I’m trading in my smart phone for a dumb phone!” Or perhaps the worst of all: “I give up on politics. The system is irreparably broken, my vote doesn’t matter, why even participate?”

Odell writes about Thomas Merton, who tried to give up everything to become a monk, but then realized one day, in the center of a shopping district, “that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”³ For Merton and what I hope can be for me:

...removal and contemplation were necessary to be able to see what was happening, but that same contemplation would always bring one back around to their responsibility to and in the world. For Merton, there was no question of whether or not to participate, only how.⁴

Odell adds: “The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.”⁵

This idea that the world needs me pushes against the cosmic insignificance theory put forth by Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks, but only if we define “the world” on a global scale. I think Odell’s world, the one that needs her (and that isn’t her enemy) is small, local, and centered in community. She has shifted her attention from global level events delivered via placeless channels to the things happening in her neighborhood and city. Each of our communities would benefit from our participation, which Odell writes can be as simple as having more conversations. Conversations should be part of the channels mentioned earlier, the channels through which we encounter the world day to day.

According to Odell, some of those conversations need to happen with the non-human beings around us.

How to reengage with “something else”

I’ve taken up “bird noticing” since reading this and recruited a few co-workers to join me. It’s fun! Birds are cool! And they are everywhere. Odell says:

I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.⁶

The thing about bird watching along a busy creek path is that people see you with binoculars and want to know what you’re looking at. This opens the door for a conversation, even if all you’re looking at is a blue jay puffing and preening.

There are many ways to plant one’s attention in the historical, public, and physical realm. Learning about ancestral homelands of indigenous people is one way. Learning the source and destinations of local creeks and rivers is another.

Boulder Creek runs right past my place of work and I can walk to it in 10 minutes. I used to walk along not knowing much about it. Now I know that it starts in the Green Lakes Valley in the Rocky Mountains, runs down Boulder Canyon into town, turns north east and connects with the South Platte River just west of Gilcrest, CO. The South Platte meets the North Platte near the town of North Platte, Nebraska and together they journey on as the Platte River across the great state of Nebraska. Immediately south of Omaha, the Platte joins the Missouri River which flows down to Kansas City before cutting across Missouri to St Louis where it joins the Mississippi, which as we all know outlets to the Gulf of Mexico in New Orleans. From the Green Lakes Valley on the Continental Divide to the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder if the Pooh stick I threw in last week has made it to the Gulf yet.

Will this information make me a better citizen? A more informed voter? Less anxious when election season rolls around? I’m not sure, but I’m glad to know more about where I live and work. I am grateful that people like Jenny Odell exist — she’s an artist, a thinker, a philosopher, and her writing is like a stirring piece of music.

I hope you get a chance to read this and that you find it rewarding. Please let me know if you do or if you already have!

Until next time, thanks for being here and for the conversation!

Kyle

1. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. xviii)

2. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. 61), emphasis mine.

3. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. 58)

4. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. 59)

5. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. 61)

6. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing (p. xii)