How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

The author states in the Introduction that this first chapter was originally written in the aftermath of the 2016 election and amounts to “a plea on behalf of the spatially and temporally embedded human animal” (xx). That is, it was a direct reaction to an online world that had become chaotic and toxic. The focus is the Rose Garden, near her home in Oakland, where she went to both find peace and brainstorm ideas for a keynote speech she was scheduled to give on doing nothing.

As an artist, Odell has always been drawn to “found art,” or art in everyday objects, which forces us to break out of learned habits and limited viewpoints. A project called “Deep Listening” by musician Pauline Oliveros did just that with sound. It reminded Odell of bird-watching, which she always thought of as mostly “bird-listening.” In the Rose Garden, she began intentionally listening for birds rather than letting their songs just occupy the background. She compares this to walking in a labyrinth: “Each enacts some kind of interruption, a removal from the sphere of familiarity” (9).

Such interruption can be beneficial. John Muir had a period of interruption when recovering from eye troubles, which refocused his attention on the natural world instead of his job. Odell’s father had a similar experience, dropping out of the workforce for two years, which changed his perspective. He ended up back in the job he formerly disliked with a new approach and mindset, now aware it was only a small part of everything going on in the world—and rose from technician to engineer. While such time away from work can seem to be available only to the privileged few, Odell maintains it’s still everybody’s right even if it is denied to many people.

She is reminded of the 19th-century labor movement push for the eight-hour workday, to accompany another eight hours each of rest and personal leisure. Creativity requires space and time, but both are under assault these days. The old labor union divisions of time have been erased, such that workers are commodified beings reduced to what they can produce—and in the gig economy that means 24/7. Every waking hour can be used for work when we’re all connected online, and even leisure time is monitored and evaluated by algorithms of apps.

This had been going on before the 2016 election, but afterward it only seemed to intensify for the author. Ever-constant connection pushed out silence and interior space in people. Connectivity was reduced to “chatter”—and what’s worse, chatter that was incentivized by money. Her bird-watching during this time helped her remain grounded. In particular, she paid close attention to a group of night herons that gathered near the KFC close to her home as well as to crows in her neighborhood. She left peanuts out on her balcony for the latter, and before long an adult crow and its offspring started to show up regularly.

This had an effect on Odell’s perspective, as she wondered how the crows perceived her: probably just as a human animal that interacts with them for some reason. In addition, as she watched crows in the Rose Garden, she realized there was no distinct Rose Garden for them; it was part of a space that was an interconnected whole. She understood the appeal of the Rose Garden for her during that difficult time was that it affirmed her self as a human animal occupying space in a location full of life. It was reality, not virtual reality.

It took “doing nothing” for the author to realize this, but she emphasizes that she doesn’t advocate purely retreating for the sake of isolating. For her, doing nothing is, in a sense, action: It’s a rejection of the push to be constantly productive. Hence, its lesson is twofold, starting with the healing and self-care necessary to reengage and do something at a later time. At the same time, it gives us a heightened sense of listening, especially in an effort to understand each other.

Beyond these two things, doing nothing pushes back on the constant drumbeat of growth, which implies a linear expansion, always further outward. Instead, we should pay more attention to “maintenance”—cyclical actions that preserve and sustain what we have. This puts us more in connection, not only with other humans but also with all forms of life in our particular locales.

The second chapter examines the impulse to withdraw fully from a toxic society and ultimately concludes this is not only difficult to do but also wrong. The author begins with her own example of unintentionally unplugging from everything when she took a break to work at a camp in the Sierra Nevada. She didn’t know the camp would have no internet or cellphone signal; after briefly freaking out, she got down to work and enjoyed it, but she knew it was only temporary. It reminded her of Camp Grounded, founded in 2011 by Levi Felix, where people could go for a “digital detox.” Felix had been an overworked tech guy when a health scare and a trip to Cambodia with his girlfriend gave him inspiration to jump off the hamster wheel and share his message with others.

This kind of retreat from the modern world has occurred for millennia. One of the earliest known examples is Greek philosopher Epicurus in the fourth century BCE. He founded a school called The Garden in a rural area outside Athens, where a diverse group of people lived and studied together. It was notable that he accepted people who were often excluded from regular society, like prostitutes. More recently, a large trend of retreating from society took place in the U.S. in the 1960s. Motivated by the turmoil of that decade, young people dropped out of society seeking utopian communes outside of mainstream society. Odell notes, however, that an actual utopia was not easy to create.

She cites examples from among the 50 communes that writer Robert Houriet visited in the late 1960s, many of which had a hard time staying together. It seems they were trying to start over in a way, with a clean slate rather than accept what society offered. The problem was that very rarely did they consider and deal with internal politics in the general sense of human relations. That is, they didn’t replace the structure of relationships found in the society they left. The communes were largely escapist in nature and thus without structure.

Houriet describes how an initial sense of “naïve optimism” in communes was often followed by “a more rigid and less idealistic approach” (44). The latter type of utopia was described in the novel Walden Two, by B. F. Skinner, which had newfound popularity in the 1960s. First published in 1948, Walden Two told the story of a utopia where people are happy and seemingly free. They think they have free will, but in reality they don’t; in fact, their behavior is controlled by a set of stimuli known as “the Code.” The creator of the Code, a man named Frazier, founded the community and acted as a kind of benevolent dictator. Thus, people were reduced to automatons—albeit happy automatons. For Odell, this is not an acceptable alternative to even an oppressive society.

Next, she discusses an art exhibition put on in 1983, called The Tendency Toward the Total Artwork. Its purpose was to show the work of artists who tried to merge art and life into one, to live their art, in a sense, reducing the gap between art and life. The curator of the exhibition concluded that art worked best when kept separate—transcending life as the Other—which creates a kind of electricity that inspires new visions of life. People who are outside society can offer a unique vision of it, one reason that hermits and the like have been sought out throughout history.

The chapter concludes with the story of another kind of hermit, in a sense, Thomas Merton. He was a monk at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, who was initially drawn to the order in the 1930s, out of a despair for the state of the world. His desire was to withdraw and live in silent community with the other monks. Then on a trip to Louisville, he had an epiphany of sorts that caused him to change course and reengage with the world. From that time until his death in 1968, he became active in social affairs, commenting on events, such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

This is where Odell reaches her ultimate stance on the lure of utopian retreats from society. She agrees with Merton that we should remain engaged with society and proposes a tactic she calls “standing apart.” By this she means refusing to take part in the negative aspects of society not by withdrawing from it but by staying in society and working to change it.