What We're Reading Now: "Embracing Jenny Odell’s HOW TO DO NOTHING During Shelter-in-Place" by Melissa Darcey
As an English major, English teacher, and reader, I find relevancy in most of the literature; it’s part of my job. Still, it’s particularly satisfying to stumble upon a book that seems absolutely essential to read at an exact moment. So the experience of reading Jenny Odell’s HOW TO DO NOTHING: RESISTING THE ATTENTION ECONOMY while transitioning from social isolation to California’s stay-at-home order, during the Covid-19 pandemic, felt felicitous.
I first learned about Odell’s 2019 nonfiction “field guide to doing nothing” in Jia Tolentino’s essay collection TRICK MIRROR: REFLECTIONS ON SELF-DELUSION. It was one of Tolentino’s many references and I logged it away in my memory, in the black hole category of “I should read that but I’m too lazy to write it down, so let’s hope I remember it later.” As expected, I returned Tolentino’s collection to the shelf after finishing it and forgot about Odell’s book until, months later, California public schools started closing their campuses—including the one where I teach—and the state recommended social distancing. Within days there was grumbling about the anticipated statewide shelter-in-place order and, terrified of being locked up at home, my neighborhood library closed for the foreseeable future, I rushed to the nearest bookstore to stock up. Odell’s book fortuitously came to mind.
Odell’s book is considered a self-help-manual-meets-political-manifesto on moving away from capitalist-driven efficiency and data-driven productivity (essentially, the attention economy), in the interest of focusing more on observing the world around us. As brick-and-mortar businesses shuttered, parks and beaches closed to the public, and the eight-hour workday collapsed, How to Do Nothing felt like mandatory reading. As I read the book, I quickly discovered that to call it a guide on slowing down and removing our capitalist-tinted glasses would have been to sell it short. It is not a how-to on digital detoxing, nor does it offer any kind of recommendation for “slow living.” In the span of her six chapters, Odell explores ecological histories, bioregionalism, and suggests that refusing to adhere to what our culture categorizes as “useful” or “useless” is a form of activism. She’s a proponent not of doing nothing but of resisting the “attention economy,” wherein our inherent value is determined by our productivity. As she explains towards the end of her introduction, “I hope that the figure of ‘doing nothing’ in opposition to a productivity-obsessed environment can help restore individuals who can then help restore communities, human and beyond.”
There is plenty of food for thought here on the connection between ecology and our economy, activist art, and existentialist philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of the “I-It” relationship. As the world seemed to be collapsing around me, as the pandemic revealed—or reminded me of—the instability of our economy and the ugliness of American capitalism, I was most taken, however, with Odell’s perspective of stepping off the hamster wheel and doing “nothing” as liberation. In her first chapter, Odell describes how we fall prey to this lifestyle:
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 on 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.
In an every-man-for-himself capitalist economy, the number of work hours, side hustles, and digits in a paycheck tend to serve as universal barometers of success. I am a workaholic who once embraced the so-called hustle, but during this time “hustle” suddenly seemed meaningless. Odell’s book helped me shift my focus to surviving and helping others survive.
It helped me recognize, too, how inundated I am with content on how to do more with my day. From entrepreneurial sites to women’s lifestyle magazines, the sites offering advice is infinite: how to wake up early to accomplish more by 9am, the most lucrative side hustles, multitasking makeup products to speed up your morning routine, five-minute recipes for quick and easy lunches! Recounting one of her past work experiences, with a large company that attempted to trade in the nine-to-five model to a more flexible environment, Odell explains the underlying problems with this seemingly liberating lengthening of the leash: “every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone.” Odell continues, “unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning.” Burning the midnight oil doesn’t make you a saint; it makes you tired.
At 31, I have dedicated the last decade of my life to my career—first in corporate communications, then teaching. It was my self-prescribed purpose in life. I thrived on the busyness of it all, until the country shut down in the wake of Covid-19. School transitioned to distance learning. I was housebound, confined to 900 square feet. Nothing was happening in my previously constructed framework of what mattered; everything was happening outside of it. I had no choice but to shift from non-stop productivity to “doing nothing,” observing the world from my tiny balcony. Odell remarks of this shift that “when the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.” And so I did. I slowed down, not just because the circumstances allowed me to, but because I wanted to. I sat with my cup of coffee. I listened to the wind. I watched the rain, and I sat in the sun. By preventing myself from thinking about how to do more with my day or why I hadn’t accomplished as much as so-and-so—by “doing nothing”—I constructed a new framework of what mattered to me.
Odell explains the process of re-rendering her reality: “[A]s I disengaged the map of my attention to the destructive news cycle and the rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human-community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at.” Odell turned to nature, too, learning about plant species in her neighborhood and taking up bird-watching as a hobby. She tells of the shock that comes with adopting a new pattern of noticing: discovering just how little you knew about your own habitat. I have lived in San Diego most of my life, but only during the pandemic have I realized how many bird species live in my neighborhood. These birds have always been here; they were just “seen but not noticed.” As I made it a habit to pour sunflower seeds into a dish each morning and wait for the flock to congregate, I saw brown birds with red heads and black birds with yellow breasts, doves that kicked the seed and made a mess, and small birds that neatly sorted through the seeds.
Outside of the shelter-in-place mandate, I would have pushed this information out of my brain to save room for I don’t know what: facts, tidbits, lessons I could use to become a better teacher, a better writer, and more productive. Odell warns that “if we don’t expand our attention outside that sliver,” we risk living in a world “where nothing has meaning outside of its value and relation to us.” Our economy, driven by commerce and bottom lines, has trained us to rate everything around us based on its direct benefit to us.
I would love to say that this routine of observing birds and watching the coffee brew became a habit. That reminding myself of a handful of passages or chanting Odell soundbites like mantras has helped me cut my umbilical cord to the attention economy. But in fact, once my school’s distance learning picked up and I established a daily work schedule, I started falling into my old patterns, making to-do lists, and rushing through my daily tasks. Odell remarks that “if we’re to truly encounter anything outside of ourselves [...] we have to want it.”
“[T]he pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques,” Odell concludes; “they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race.” The pandemic has shown that our productivity-obsessed, well-oiled capitalist machine of a society was in some respects a facade. Two weeks into California’s shutdown, major businesses that boasted billions of dollars in value couldn’t afford to pay their employees. Millions were without healthcare. Stock markets had tanked. In this economy, quantifying my personal value in terms of my productivity ultimately wasn’t going to get me very far. Reading Odell’s book helped me resist a descent into pessimism, slap my own hand a few times, and and feel my way forward.
—
Melissa Darcey is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Louisville Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Nat. Brut, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere.
