How to Do Nothing

 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell is a thoughtful extended essay on redirecting our attention. Specifically, the book wants to replace smartphone addiction with a reconnection to the natural world and, to a lesser extent, left-wing activism. Odell lives in Oakland, and she spends much of How to Do Nothing describing its history and landscape. This is inviting and interesting. The book on the whole is a useful, nudging challenge to be more present in the world, and it's impossible to read the whole thing without evaluating your own mental habits.

Some of the book struck me as unintentionally funny. Odell, an artist in academia in the Bay Area, has a specific assumption about the world, and it's what you would expect from an online, millennial, lefty narrator. She often cites performance artists, for example, that undertake extreme (and to this reader, absurd) "installations" as examples of resisting technology. I had trouble understanding the connection between celebrating bioregionalism and, say, living in a welded-shut cage for a year. Another time, at a reading, she is corrected by her audience for using the app "iNaturalist." This is not because bringing technology to her nature walks is counterintuitive, but because learning the names of plant and animal species privileges an "itemizing, scientific view" of the world. The scolding, jargony language of academia infringed on much of Odell's otherwise good ideas, and made for a complicated read. Despite these somewhat silly asides, I enjoyed How to Do Nothing and found myself rooting for Odell's argument.