How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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.