How to Do Nothing

• Author: Jenny Odell
• Full Title: How to Do Nothing
• Tags: #Inbox #books

Review after finishing [[2026-02-04]]

As the book went on, I enjoyed the experience of reading it more. I liked how instead of spending the entire book belaboring the bad parts of social media (which I think we all generally feel in our bones), Odell focused on the experience of living as a physical being existing in the world.

I think I remember Odell calling this out from the introduction, but the title of the book is a little misleading. The book is probably more accurately titled, "I feel happier when I spend time outside and with other people and you probably will to." Which is a perfectly fine title in my opinion, and a helpful reminder that I need from time to time.

I think the biggest gap in a book about doing nothing, or focusing on building inner awareness, is not touching at all on spirituality. Odell spends oodles of time talking about the environment and bioregionalism, but in a book supposedly focused on helping people recover some semblance of mental control back from the technological society, completely glosses over the inner landscape of the person. I liked Chop Wood, Carry Water for that reason, which is entirely focused on the inner experience of work.

[[2026-01-07]] Initial Reaction

My initial reaction to Chapter 1 is that it leans a little too much, for my taste at least, into a kind of emotionalizing reaction to Donald Trump being elected president in 2016. I would not classify myself as a MAGA supporter or enthusiast. But I have a hard time empathizing with people whose emotional world can be rocked by the change in president. I felt the same during the Obama years when I would hear people say it was a dark day in America after election day.

I understand that was the circumstances of the book being written, but that kind of couching of the entire subject matter is a turn off for me. It's a turn off to me when people make politics such a large part of their identity and state of their mental health. I'll keep pushing through to see where we go.

Highlights

Introduction Surviving Usefulness

• We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. (Location 46)
• We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate. (Location 49)
• Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a “symptom of deficient vitality,” and observed “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.” (Location 51)
• What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. Such “nothings” cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables. (Location 63)
• I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. (Location 74)
• I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the “dropping out” of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community. (Location 82)
• The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. (Location 90)
• I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. (Location 98)
• It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. (Location 194)
• I hope it can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival. (Location 263)

Chapter 1 The Case for Nothing

• wakes up and looks at phone ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device –@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016 (Location 275)
• this period of reflection convinced Muir that “life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.”7 Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”8 (Location 393)
• My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. (Location 414)
• I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, (Location 721)
• Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.” (Location 781)
• “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer.”54 (Location 1146)
• 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 that they check back ever more diligently. (Location 1210)
• In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. (Location 1218)
• We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of these movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call “standing apart.” (Location 1242)
• It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. (Location 1246)
• But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. (Location 1256)

Chapter 3 Anatomy of a Refusal

• It was probably this kind of social stamina that Diogenes had in mind when he said he would only accept disciples who were willing to carry a large fish or piece of cheese in public. (Location 1432)
• Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out? His search for this answer occasioned the experiment’s many harsh “controls”—for it to work, it needed to be pure. “I brought my isolation to the public while still preserving the quality of it,” he said. (Location 1449)
• “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” (Location 1469)
• To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. (Location 1571)
• A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. (Location 1579)
• For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. (Location 1753)
• Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. (Location 1772)
• A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. (Location 1774)
• to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. (Location 1779)

Chapter 4 Exercises in Attention

• So why go down the rabbit hole? First and most basically, it is enjoyable. Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known. Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven’t seen that you’d like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner. (Location 1955)
• paintings are objects in their own right. A picture represented something other than itself; a painting represents itself. (Location 2015)
• Thrown back on ourselves by a “wall” and not a window, we can also begin to see ourselves seeing. (Location 2020)
• what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. (Location 2033)
• James as for von Helmholtz, this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. (Location 2104)
• In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” (Location 2127)
• More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation (Location 2256)
• (Asked where he was from, Peter Berg, an early proponent of bioregionalism, used to answer, “I am from the confluence of the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River and San Francisco Bay, of the Shasta bioregion, of the North Pacific Rim of the Pacific Basin of the Planet Earth.” (Location 2257)

Chapter 5 Ecology of Strangers

• I thought of a print by Hallie Bateman that my boyfriend had bought and which was hanging nonchalantly in our apartment. It was a drawing of a street scene with words scattered across the sidewalk, buildings, and sky, reading: We’re all here together, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHY. (Location 2345)
• But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. (Location 2363)
• For many people, myself included, public transportation is the last non-transactional space in which we are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different destinations for different reasons. Strangers have a reality to me on the bus that they cannot have on the freeway, simply because we’ve agreed to be in an enclosed space in which we are subject to each other’s actions. (Location 2370)
• When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. (Location 2487)
• If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down. (Location 2492)
• An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a “cloud.” (Location 2708)
• I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. (Location 2719)

Chapter 6 Restoring the Grounds for Thought

• Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. (Location 2771)
• in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. (Location 2775)
• Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread. (Location 2827)
• I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement. (Location 2848)
• “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (Location 2899)
• Specifically, she describes three challenges for activists that I think can easily be extended to anyone having problems reading, speaking, and thinking online. (Location 2909)
• First, instantaneous communication threatens visibility and comprehension because it creates an information overload whose pace is impossible to keep up with. (Location 2910)
• Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues. (Location 2913)
• As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings. (Location 2940)
• I wonder what it would be like to experience a social network that was completely grounded in space and time, something you had to travel to in order to use, that worked slowly. (Location 2950)
• What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal, I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse. (Location 3105)
• This is where I think the idea of “doing nothing” can be of the most help. For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework. (Location 3159)
• When I try to imagine a sane social network it is a space of appearance: a hybrid of mediated and in-person encounters, of hours-long walks with a friend, of phone conversations, of closed group chats, of town halls. It would allow true conviviality—the dinners and gatherings and celebrations that give us the emotional sustenance we need, and where we show up for each other in person and say, “I am here fighting for this with you.” (Location 3161)
• I FIND THAT I’m looking at my phone less these days. It’s not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away. (Location 3231)

Conclusion Manifest Dismantling

• Chris Carlsson, local historian extraordinaire and author of the book Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today!, continued to give bike tours of the ecological and labor histories of San Francisco. (Location 3433)
• IT’S TEMPTING TO conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live. But I refuse to do that. That’s because the pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques; they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race. (Location 3458)
• In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention. (Location 3476)
• Beyond the vague cyclicality of what Purdy calls “going on living,” can there be teleology without a telos? (Location 3490)
• The idea of an aimless aim, or a project with no goal, might sound familiar. Indeed, it sounds a bit like our old friend, the useless tree—who “achieves” nothing but witness, shelter, and unlikely endurance. (Location 3502)
• Standing perpendicular to the earth, not pitching forward, not falling back, I asked how I could possibly express my gratitude for the unlikely spectacle of the pelicans. The answer was nothing. Just watch. (Location 3562)