I'd like to comment on... reading How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

I know that a book is doing something to my thought pattern when I return to its pages and see I’ve asked myself some questions while reading. So, upon returning to the beginning of How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, I found such a margin question on page one of the introduction.

What’s interesting about you? I asked myself.

“In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.” This is the first line of Odell’s that I underlined, which is the second sentence in the book. It’s now a book full of underlines and notes. I spent as much time parsing quotes like this one as I did reading to move forward.

Productivity. The buzzword of our time? I couldn’t help but think about how I used to run a “productivity report” at the end of every year in a system called Digital Measures to be sent to my yearly evaluators to determine how I’d be rated for the last year of work. It filled me with dread, fed my anxieties. But this year, it did not. Instead, this year, I finished a crappy first draft of a new novel on December 30th, and then paused and celebrated the new year before getting back to edits of said draft. So much more sane.

But this connection of attention and productivity that How to do Nothing teases out was not lost on me. As the creators of attention deficit programs try to focus our attention elsehwere, Odell doesn’t just impolore us to unplug but to re-contextualize our interactions, both on and offline. One of the ways in which she does this is to take to task the very notion of productivity:

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.

We see the “unplug” as a kind of vacation, but Odell suggests that its not enough. We need more sustained connections to place and person (or other beings, like animals and plants). We are now bombarded in politics as in work by intense and furious activity, and the need to understand how attention and the attention economy works has never been more important. And yet, this is not a new book; it came out in 2019 before the pandemic. I picked up a copy at Main Street Books in Frostburg, Maryland, and, if you read my Substack regularly, you know I was called a “subtle reader” upon its purchase. Not just for this book, but the others I chose, and since being called a subtle reader I’m developing an ongoing subtle reading list. Instead of counting how many books I’m reading in a year, I’m focusing on how well I read the books I’m reading. Odell might call this recontextualizing my reading.

Goodreads will hate this. Luckily, I barely touch my Goodreads. I don’t need Goodreads to contextualize my reading experience. I really need my pen. Maybe a good cup of coffee and a good chair to sit in.

It will be difficult for me to summarize Odell in any overarching way. These are, at best, some things I found interesting and important. So, rather than try to summarize, I’ll instead look at some of my notes and self questions, and think about how the book invorgated my way of thinking. To me this both honors the project of Odell’s book, and the whole project of being a subtle reader. But if there is one overarching takeaway, at least for me, it is this: I liked who I was reading this book. I was a very thinky self.

Several times in the margins I wrote “productivity ≠ progress,” meaning these two expressions or values are not the same, do not equate to one another. Interestingly, the first occurance is next to a question Odell poses to the reader: “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”

Ironically, as the wildfires began to consume Los Angeles, I was reading this book.

The next not-equals sign I used was “usefulness ≠ worth.” In Odell, this means: “To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entreprenuership.” Odell has the wonderful audacity to suggest that “mere experience of life as the highest goal,” and, perhaps, a better sense of both usefulness and worth.

That kind of scraps the five-year plans we’re encouraged to make. But how arbitrary is a five year plan?

I get where some might agree with Odell and also come back to the practical concerns of food, shelter, and health insurance. But following her train of thought also allows one to think about what things should be more centered, and how, to use the technical term, batshit-crazy our tethering ourselves to the idea of productivity is. Productivity for what, by what, in service to what? Or, it’s Odellian counterpart, where could a life of sustained attention lead?

She asks of us, throughout, to look at our patterns of attention, or what we choose or don’t to notice. She asserts that capitalism “thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction,” before she makes another audacious point: what if we found out that everything we wanted is already here? (empahsis mine.)

To which I asked in the margins: "Is most of what we ‘know’ really garbage?” Followed by: “Are most of us (me) uncomfortable with just our selves and our thoughts?” When productivity is a never-ending driver, enough is, ironically, never enough. So if we don’t take back and recontextualize our enoughness, and our having enoughness, what is it that we actually know, and how can we ever know ourselves well enough that we are comfortable with that self and those thoughts?

It’s a bit circular. But also a way to push back on the mindless ways we often spend our precious atttention.

Place and context are ideas that Odell returns to frequently in the book. These are often sucked away from us through our interfacing with technology, which commandeers our attention in virtual noplaces. As a result, we often react before we have time and space to think, which usually ends us in a kind of anxiety loop. “Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of ‘arms race’ of urgency that absues our attention and leaves us no time to think,” she writes.

It made me wonder what I do and don’t have control over, especially as it relates to my time and attention. To this, Odell suggests that “we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to.”

I started to see this in the context of my recent crisis of where to spend my time. Not so long ago, I was in a constant state of anxiety about all the things I would never write, including books, individual essays or poems, long letters to friends and family, notes that might go no where, and so on. My creative life felt shoved in a box and the box kept shrinking, so my creative life had to shrink as well. Or did it? And so I see what Odell is saying, as I also recognize ust how hard it is to live in a world that has balance, let along more time for the kinds of activity that require sustained attention.

But also, anxiety. That’s a thing of medern life, a really terrifying part of the race for our attention, the consequence of an unquelled desire for our productivity, and the overwheliming-ness of all these together. Odell searches for alternatives, many of which feel a bit beyond grasp. The result of working through them, however, led me to the question of say, a Henry Thoreau-type: how much of what I do is unexamined?

It’s easy to simple go through motions.

As a rather “thinky” writer who enjoys “thinky” reading, one might believe that I’m living a rather examined life. But I don’t know that I resist attention traps any better than others. What I hope to gain from the reading is a better practice of examining my life, while not squeezing out the joy of spontaniety, or to be bombastic about sometimes tuning out. I think this would ultimately be in line with an Odellian world. She often talks about being in the moment, especially in nature and most espeically in one of her new favorite ways to spend time: birdwatching. But she doesn’t live in a vacuum. She has a cell phone and a computer and such.

For reading this book, I do think that I am being more perceptive about the cracks that may be in my habitual, that I might investigate them with greater sense of attention for what they might reveal. For instance, I’ve been obsessed with baking a very particular cake. I rarely have the patience for baking, or the skill, or, quite often the right equipment and ingredients. Still, after Odell I found myself making the cake, imperfect as it came out, and enjoying not just the fleeting moment of the product, but the process of it. In her terms, the attention of it. It’s an unremarkable cake to anyone else but me, who made her first cake from scratch (sorry Dunkin Hines and Betty Crocker).

From my margin notes, I see my awareness of the relationship between time and capital, and the real sense of economic fear that I know I live with and suspect others do as well (which Odell also agrees). She desribes it thourgh a quote by Tiger Sun, a Daily Stanford writer, as “grind or die.” Yikes! But accurate for many.

But if our attention is capital, it is not only something to be earned or spent, but also to be invested. And how do we invest it wisely? Attention, Odell reminds us, “may be the last resource we have left to withdrawl” (italics hers).

One of the great lessons of the book, is how Odell makes a case for actual reality, especially “when we actually look at it rather than through it.”

That seems a good place to leave my discussion with you. If you do pick up the book, and want to chat about these or other aspects, I’ll be delighted.

News and Notes

• Next up in the subtle reading book club (join if you wish simply by getting the book), is Eyes Moving Through The Dark by William Woolfit. Having already dove in, these essays are powered by a gorgeous relationship to words and through a kind of associative force that rewards the slow and careful read. You may have remembered that I was deeply moved by Woolfit’s poetry collection The Night The Rain Had Nowhere To Go, which I also recommend. After Woolfit, I’m diving into Kori Morgan’s Why I Dyed My Hair Purple. Kori and I overlapped our time in graduate school, and recently have reconnected through our books and new discussions of writing.

• Some fun dates! I’ll be at East Carolina University, giving a public lecture “Is There A Poet In This Hospital?” all about art and humanites-influenced healthcare on Wednesday, February 26, 2025 5:30pm to 7pm. At the end of March, I’ll be at AWP with the WVU Press at their booth, so let me know if you’ll be there, too. The following week, April 3-5, I’ll be at the annual conference of the Health Humanities Consortium in Philadephia, with a roundtable about Connective Tissue, the new book series I’m editing for health humanities, narrative medicine, and art in medicine titles. I’ll be doing a session on Book Proposals for Barrelhouse’s Conversations & Connections, their one-day conference at American University in DC on April 12. I’ll also be running some workshops at the annual summer conference of West Virginia Writers, Inc. in early June.

• This month I enjoyed art at both the Palmer Museum at Penn State and the Art Museum of WVU. Hope if you’re able, you might check out one or both. The picture at the beginning of this writing is one I took of a portrait in the Pennsylvania artists room at the Palmer, that struck me as a moment of attention. One particular piece at the Palmer that I’ve been thinking about ever since is by Faith Ringgold, “Marilyn, 1997” in which she (a Black artist) depicts the famous actress as a Black woman: