How to Do Nothing

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

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)