On How to Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing is not a classic self-help book; it has far more in common with the work of someone like James Bridle than with Eckhart Tolle or Thich Nhat Hanh. Jenny Odell offers an assessment of the “attention economy” organized around a few themes — the refusal to be “on” all the time, the work of keeping our attention on the small things, the building of community. Crucially, she never argues that we should literally do nothing; this isn’t Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy. She’s calling us to take control of our lives by actively choosing what deserves our attention. There’s little room in that for doom-scrolling, but plenty for recharging away from the constant bustle.

Some of the most interesting material comes early. The second chapter discusses Epicurus, who set up his academy outside Athens, and the communes of the 1960s; Epicurus urged his followers to withdraw from society in defense of the good life — not to bury their heads but to keep the ability to choose what matters. Reading it, I thought about my own life. I’ve written before about withdrawing from social media, partly out of a refusal to accept the fast, knee-jerk reactions those platforms reward, and partly because of what Odell calls “context collapse,” where a piece of content — a tweet, a clip, a sound bite — is pulled out of its original ecosystem and spread across the internet stripped of context. I haven’t been a victim of it, but it’s something I might worry about if I became more vocal online; by building my own website I can keep everything in its place, so that anyone willing to put in the time can see my words as they were originally written. In the end the book is a reminder to slow down, touch grass, and attend to the real things. We may use the internet as a portal to another world, but we have to keep grounding ourselves in the world of the physical senses — when we engage online we act in overwhelmingly cognitive ways, without letting the rest of our faculties take part.