Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
When Poppy and I sat down on the Heath to discuss our productivity edit we noticed that we had been affected by the pandemic in different ways, so we wanted to come together and explore this by reviewing Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (we also talk a little about My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh - another great lockdown read!)
As we open the bright pages of How to Do Nothing, you step into the rose garden in which Jenny Odell first came up with the talk that inspired the New York Times Bestseller. Take time to stop and smell the roses for a sec and then get ready to interrogate the attention economy with us.
Jess: I found that a lot of what was covered in the book, though written in 2016, is incredibly relatable to us here lockdown in 2020. Jenny writes about the struggle to take time away from the screen “Given the current reality of my digital environment, distance for me usually means things like going on a walk, staying off the internet, or trying not to read the news for a while.” which is something I think we can all relate to right?
Poppy: Definitely. Jenny argues that we must reinvent FOMO as “NOMO (the necessity of missing out) or NOSMO (the necessity of sometimes missing out).” Whether we like it or not many of us are currently experiencing NOSMO and have more time to reflect and take time for ourselves. Jenny makes the case for self-care as activism as opposed to an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil (think Audre Lorde, not Gwyneth Paltrow). She coins the term “standing apart” which is her answer to how we can participate, show up and thrive in the attention economy.
“It means not fleeing your enemy, which turns out to not be the world -contemptus mundi- but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.”
Jess: When you and I think of the happiest or most fulfilling moments in our lives, I know that channels like Instagram, our email inbox and the hours on our timesheets at work don’t feature heavily. But in lockdown, I’ve found it hard to focus on anything other than the immediate, a schedule of endless video calls and notifications have made it harder to switch off - all this compounded by the fact that the office has literally become the four walls of my flat made it reassuring to read that this feeling is not new to Jenny either. Her summary below made me start to question why I have looked at my productivity as a finite and urgent thing like pounds in the bank rather than something to be nurtured and cared for.
“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes and Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing”. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.”
Poppy: Too expensive and too tiring. For me, the constant news cycle, my addiction to refreshing twitter and my quest to reach the bottom of my Instagram feed leaves me with the desire to ‘check-out’ of the digital world.
And on the topic of ‘checking out,’ we both recently read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh which I saw recommended on Instagram (oh the irony). The plot follows a young, beautiful, privileged narrator who, after the death of her parents, decides that she wants to sleep for a year. With the assistance of a cocktail of sleeping pills and prescription medications, her project is largely a success and she sleeps on and off for a whole year. I described the premise to my boyfriend and watched an expression of horror appear on his face when I told him that the idea of sleeping for a year, actually quite appealed to me.
I read the novel as a criticism of the kind of privilege which gives people the indulgent, and frankly dangerous, choice to retreat into themselves. As appealing as it might sound (just me?), in How To Do Nothing Jenny does not give us that choice. She calls us to ground ourselves in our time, place and community.
Jess: Personally, I can think of nothing worse than the total lack of control that comes with clocking out for a year and the anxiety of what I might have said or done unchecked by my own conscience! But she goes on to say something that I suppose I can really relate to that the “ hibernation was self-preservational,” she says “I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form.”. Through lockdown and particularly in conversation with friends “self-care” and the desire to shape a new version of ourselves through it has been a recurring topic. This indulgent retreat into self that you mention, while destructive does seem to mirror some of Jenny’s examples and I like to imagine could slot quite well into the book as a cautionary tale.
Poppy: One of my favourite stories Jenny uses is about Thomas Merton, an anarchist trappist monk who when faced with the world in the 1940s; depression, unrest and the rise of facism, rejected it. A few years later Merton wrote to a friend and described an epiphany he had;
“in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all of these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.”
This is a theme that Jenny returns to at the end of the book when she comes across thousands of birds in a wildlife reserve,
“I also realised for the first time that my wish to preserve this place was also a self-preservation instinct, insofar as I needed spaces like this too.” It’s a bit like falling in love - that terrifying realisation that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them.”
I think that this message can resonate powerfully with us all living through a pandemic where, if it wasn’t obvious to us before, our dependence on each other for our health, wellbeing and livelihoods has been made abundantly clear.
Jess: Absolutely! What I love about the book is that it is not a how-to guide at all, but a space to reflect on the power of doing nothing and reconnect to something bigger than yourself. It isn’t a call to slack off but an argument for consciously redirecting our attention toward the beauty of our immediate environment and in doing this it helps us to prepare for activism beyond its pages.
The way Jenny draws on so many different examples through history from Diogenes throwing shade at Alexander the Great to Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes that literally changed the way viewers looked at the world afterward. Her careful review of these key moments in time helps us question productivity outside of our own echo chambers. Jenny shows us how the attention economy has developed and by extension what “productivity” has come to mean to us today.
Poppy: What Jenny gives us in How To Do Nothing is instruction on where to focus the attention that we have pulled from addictive algorithms. She tells us to give our attention to the space we inhabit and everything we inhabit it with, the plants, the animals and the humans. To “Stand Apart” is to stand, not alone, but with all of life, and to fill ourselves up with it.
Share your thoughts!
We can’t wait to hear what you think, drop us a comment below if you’ve already read Jenny ‘s book or pick up your own copy here. You can also find her online here: