I’m back after a long break! I first read How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell in 2020 at the dawn of the pandemic. I absolutely loved it at the time, and I recently decided to re-read it. After a few chapters, I went through a thrilling realization that the impact this book had on me a few years ago was much bigger than I had recalled. I certainly remembered that I resonated with the book and took away a lot from it, but after re-reading it, I realized that this book nudged me over a shift in perspective on how I spend my own life, and many of the things I took away got baked directly into my personal goals in later years, long after I had forgotten that this book was where much of it came from.

So what is the book about? My partner has told me that he finds the title funny because it seems that doing nothing is easy. It doesn’t require a book to tell you how! Obviously, this book is a little more than the literal title. I would summarize it as a sharp, almost academic essay on how we can regain ownership over how to spend our lives, and how we can reconnect to the world that feels increasingly disjointed.

Odell begins the introduction with the struggle that many of us are familiar with: “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 that we use daily”. As implied here, “nothing” in this book doesn’t quite mean literally nothing, but rather “nothing” from the point of view of the entities that financially exploit us. This not only applies to entities that exploit our time and labor, but to those that exploit our attention.

In the first chapter, Odell discusses her personal state of crisis, following the 2016 election, that led to her necessity of doing nothing. She considers that we live in an “attention economy”, where fear, anxiety, and disruption is the oxygen for profit. I resonated strongly with her sense of being completely overwhelmed by my social media feed, which consisted of a jumbled mix of cute dogs, someone’s vacation in Greece, and breaking news about some politician doing something completely outrageous.

In such a state of abused attention, our existence in this world becomes fragmented and start to lack context. It’s easy to react to what we see, but increasingly difficult to contemplate and take continued action. It’s easy to make ourselves “useful” (in a capitalistic sense) by working every possible hour, but difficult to not let the joy of life slip through our fingers. It’s easy to hit “like” on our friend’s post, but difficult to find someone to call in times of vulnerability.

When I was experiencing a similar state of overwhelmed distress at the dawn of the pandemic, I entertained the thought of dropping everything and living in the mountains somewhere. Or more realistically (?), quitting my job and moving in with my grandma in Japan. In the second chapter, titled The Impossibility of Retreat, Odell discusses many examples of people attempting to retreat from the exploitative society, much like how I pictured my escape plan would look like. These examples range from the dropout movements in 1960s U.S., where people attempted to escape to the middle of nowhere to construct their own peaceful and self-contained societies, to a philosopher called Epicurus from fourth century B.C. in Ancient Greece. These attempts and their frequent failures have much to teach us about the “challenges inherent in trying to extricate oneself completely from the fabric of a capitalist reality, as well as what was sometimes an ill-fated attempt to escape politics altogether”.

As a way to “resist the attention economy”, what Odell proposes in How To Do Nothing is not an escape from “the world”, from other people, or from politics. Instead, it is “to remain in place while escaping the framework of the attention economy and an over-reliance on a filtered public opinion”. In other words, Odell gives us the tools to gain back ownership of our own attention, liberating us from the captivating flashes that attempt to exploit our attention for profit 24/7.

And how does she do that exactly? Although she introduces us to many helpful anecdotes, perspectives, and exercises, what personally spoke to me most is what she describes in her introduction as “a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us”, and “a movement downward into place”, which then leads to her emphasis on bioregionalism. Simply put, (and perhaps overly simply put…) this can be summarized as re-connecting with the people, land, animals, and the natural environment that physically surrounds us. Odell tells her journey of “growing outward” and “growing downward” through several profound personal anecdotes: developing a relationship with a city-dwelling wild animal, spending time in a nearby rose garden while contemplating the history of comminuty and labor rights, and re-discovering the splendor of the natural landscape of her hometown, which up until then she considered the most boring suburb in America.

In 2020, this book helped me realize that my mood and my whole sense of the world was so deeply affected by what I see on my little screens day to day, if not hour to hour. I would be stressed and overwhelmed trying to use every possible hour I have for “productivity”, glued to my screen while the beautiful summer sky was encapsulating the blooming flowers and people at the beach in the rich warmth. I would open Instagram for a break and get inundated with reactional political outrage, and I would truly feel like the world was falling apart, even though my day had been going perfectly well. But when I bring myself back to my immediate, physical environment, I realize that the world is NOT falling apart.

Since 2020, I’ve been on my own journey of reconnecting with my time, place, and people. It certainly doesn’t happen overnight, and I’m still working on it every day. Funnily enough, my recent passion for learning history has helped immensely in feeling more connected with the world as well - it offers perspectives on how I fit into the world, geographically and temporally. (It also gives me comforting context that, considering the history of this country, the history of my own country, and the history of the world, I can most definitely say that the “breaking news” I’m seeing is not a catastrophe!) It’s a continuous journey, but its a one that brings me more and more joy as time passes. I’m so glad I read this book in 2020, and glad that I decided to pick it up again!