This “crisis” forms the basis of Odell’s new book, described as both a “critique of the forces vying for our attention” and an action plan for how to resist them. “What we are left with,” Odell writes, with no small sadness, “ 24 potentially monetizeable hours … that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. Technology, coupled with economic insecurity, has dissolved boundaries between work, rest and leisure. If that was hard in 1985, when Deleuze was writing, it is next to impossible now. felt compelled to seek refuge in her rose garden after Trump’s election victory She eventually understood the impulse in the words of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: when we are “riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images”, the challenge is to search for “little gaps of solitude and silence in which find … the rare, and even rarer thing that might be worth saying”. Odell writes of feeling compelled to seek refuge in her local rose garden in the days after Donald Trump became president, “like a deer going to a salt lick”: “It really did feel necessary, like a survival tactic.” That a lengthy online treatise about shattered attention spans should manage to hold so many of them is ironic, it reflects wider concern. “I’ve gotten a lot of responses from people saying things like, ‘you’ve put words to a feeling that I’ve had for a long time’.” Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, it shows us how to preserve our inner lives and bring about change in a world that needs this more than ever.“It was really a surprise that it resonated with people outside of that pretty specific context, and that people would have the patience to read something that’s 45 minutes long, online,” says Odell, by phone from her home in Oakland, California. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humanity’s role in the environment, and arrive at a more meaningful understanding of happiness and fulfilment.įar from a simple anti-technology screed, How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking beyond capitalist narratives of efficiency and value. Odell sees our attention as the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to slowing down. But in a world where our value is determined by our data productivity, doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. A galvanising critique of the forces vying for our attention - and our personal information - that redefines what we think of as productivity and reveals what we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.

How to do nothing jenny odell review