But if there are messages, you also feel let down. If there are no messages, you feel disheartened and keep refreshing. In this vein, the late critic Mark Fisher deemed the temptation to check our digital messages a compulsion “akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches.” Like all compulsions, it feeds on dissatisfaction. But she’s opposed to the way corporations buy and sell our attention-specifically, the “invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”Īnd who among us hasn’t been thrown into a state of jealousy or rage by a seemingly innocuous photo we see on Instagram? Odell values the types of technology that serve as tools to allow us to observe our natural world and be more present. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter take advantage of our natural interest in others and hunger for community and profit off them in a way that’s misguided and ultimately harmful.

Much of our current technology hijacks our attention and blocks us from meaningful self-reflection, curiosity, and community. In her New Yorker review of How to Do Nothing, Jia Tolentino makes a haunting declaration: “I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank.”

In other words, in an era where we’re attached to our devices 24/7, doing nothing may be our most important form of political resistance.ġ. Odell argues that by refocusing our attention on the natural world, we can undertake more meaningful forms of political action, reimagine our relationship to the environment, and develop better understandings of happiness and progress. And while there may be a sort of “engineer’s satisfaction” in streamlining our lived experience, Odell writes, “a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.”Īnd this is because deep down, we know that much of what makes life meaningful comes from interruptions and accidents-the “ off-time” that technology seeks to eradicate. We interact with algorithmic versions of each other online and fastidiously create our personal brands. Odell is right: in a world where value is measured by productivity, every minute is scheduled, every second optimized-even our free time. “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” artist and professor Jenny Odell opens her recent book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

How to do nothing by jenny o dell