How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
2026-03-05 Tags: books, books-nonfiction
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell has been on my list for a long while, as somebody who wants to do more nothing and wants to do less compulsive scrolling of reddit and youtube.
I spend a lot of time on my computer, and a lot of time thinking about how to be a person that doesn't just want to spend all my time on my computer. I've read "Digital Minimalism" and other books by Cal Newport and liked them, about managing our relationships with technology and the adversarial relationships with tech companies that constantly want more of our time and attention.
How To Do Nothing is a very different kind of book, and not what I expected. It isn't a list of tips and strategies for managing your attention, or a deep dive on the incentives and structures of the modern tech company attention economy.
I think her thesis is that the type of attention we pay to twitter and the type of attention we pay to the real world are very different, and we need to develop rich and disciplined attention to the people around us, the physical world we live in, especially the natural world, the species and ecosystems there, the physical and cultural history of it. By doing that we'll naturally resist and reject the fleeting anxious attention to social media and apps. We don't need to set time limits or uninstall apps, once you're fully engaged to the real world you'll be able to engage with facebook or youtube in healthier, non compulsive ways.
The book goes into depth on the history of resistance to capitalism - union organizing, living in a cabin in the woods, bioregionalism, and a lot (a lot) about birdwatching.
I do kind of wonder how prescriptive the book can be/should be interpreted as, and how much it's a description of her experience and her specific brain/attention. I have a much harder time being fascinated by bird life while going for a walk. Is that because I'm trapped deeper in the scattered and anxious attention of social media?
I liked that the book provided no easy answers but a lot to engage with and think about. Per the book, "doing nothing" is a big mix of not letting capitalism and productivity consume your free time, but isn't about just having more leisure time and doing worthwhile hobbies. I took from it a good challenge to my own desire to want to do more useful things (like programming video games, reading good books) - those things are good to, but her conception of doing nothing is more grounded in community and nature.
I'd definitely recommend it!
Follow ups: I picked up "Braiding Sweetgrass" about human connectedness to nature, cited a bunch by Odell in this book, and recommended by my sister in law recently.
I still need to get back to "The Sirens Call" by Chris Hayes about the mechanisms of the attention economy. Semira didn't like.