Book Review: How to Do Nothing

Jenny Odell's book, "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" was nothing short of amazing and enthralling. I read, post its in hand and tabbed a sentence or a paragraph on nearly every page in the book.

She starts out with this bold quote:

"Here's what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time they check back ever more diligently...Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of 'arms race' of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. The result is something like the sleep-deprivation tactics the military uses on detainees, but on a larger scale."

But what really encapsulates the book is her statement that to truly take our attention back we need ""To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there." Taking the time to focus, something that is lost more and more each day, on what the world, what people need from us, how we can be the answer.

She breaks the book down into six chapters; each talking about a different part of the attention economy and how to pay attention to different parts of life. She makes it clear she isn't anti-social media (she has her own Twitter account anyway) but what she is interested in is, "...a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together."

Because what matters, what truly matters in this firey hellscape (fully acknowledging the privilege that it is to have only been truly terrified since 2016, rather than for my entire life-something Odell does remark on frequently throughout the book) is the fact that "[t[he world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether but how."

She also points out "[the] cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight." And further still, "[m]eanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we're so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can't even consider the option of not reading and sharing them."

Each person in this current day and age must decide for themselves, how they commit their time, energy and body to the frenetic attention grabbers. And not to say anything of how ecologically and physically this buzzing economy takes a toll. This book helps us take a step back, several actually, and re-examine, well, everything.

A must read for everyone and everyone.