How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
- Sep 20, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 22
★★★☆☆
I’m a sucker for titles like this. Don’t ask me why; I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that I neither want nor expect these books actually to be how-to books in the traditional sense. That is, I don’t expect them to outline a ten-step program for achieving the title’s purpose, thereby solving all my problems. And Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is no exception. Though I’d added it to my list nearly six years to the day when I started reading it, I imagine I would have eventually removed it. After all, my want-to-read list has swelled to almost 500 books, I manage to read 20-30 books per year, depending on the year and what I’m reading, and I probably add that many to the list, or more, each year. Simply put, I can’t possibly read everything I think I want to read. Many of the social or politically topical books I don’t get to, the ones that are often timely and quickly become dated, like this one, get culled regularly. But I needed a book for the flight home, and this was the least expensive book that was both on my list and on the store shelf. That’s not an auspicious beginning, but I promise you, the fact that How to Do Nothing made it from want-to-read to currently reading by cheapness and luck has nothing to do with what I thought of it.
And what did I think of it? I already said I didn’t expect it to offer an easy guide to resisting the attention economy. Beyond that, I didn’t put much thought into what, exactly, I thought it would be. To dispel any myths to the contrary, it is not a book about doing nothing. (A rough-looking woman sitting two stools over at an airport bar at DFW saw what I was reading and said pithily, “I’ll tell you how to do nothing.”) While it’s not a book telling you how to do nothing, it is a book about how to think about what we choose to do, and why—or, more accurately, what we choose to put our attention to, and why—and how we could be putting that time to better use, not in terms of productivity (as in, If I stopped doomscrolling social media I could finally write that novel!) but in terms of spiritual, emotional, and interpersonal health. That all sounds very new-agey, and though Odell is from the Bay Area, I can safely say there is nary a whiff of crystals, mala beads, or incense to be found.
But in not telling us exactly how to do nothing or how to resist the attention economy, How to Do Nothing becomes philosophical rather than practical. That’s fine, but the fact of the matter is that, like many books of this ilk, though it wasn’t written with the intention of preaching to the choir, it’s safe to say that those who are already of the mindset that social media isn’t doing us any favors are likely the only ones making their way to this book. I’m obviously one of those people. And that’s also fine, but I neither need a practical nor a philosophical guide on how to resist the attention economy, and I’m guessing the same is true of most readers of this book. Despite what I think are very honorable intentions, this book ends up serving only to confirm what we readers already know to be true.
Put this in the hands of high schoolers, or even middle schoolers, if I thought they could comprehend it (and I worry many high schoolers also could not), however, and I can see a more compelling argument for the book’s existence. Adding this to the reading list in a college philosophy class could also have merit. The former seems unlikely, as I’m not sure that primary schools are still in the business of encouraging students to think critically. The latter seems plausible, though it might be too late to change what would have by then become long-ingrained behavior, even if it results in healthy debate. Business certainly has no interest in curtailing the attention economy: Eyeballs equal dollars, even if those dollars are made at the expense of polarizing, tribalizing, radicalizing, or isolating consumers. In a saner world, the government would have a very real interest in creating guardrails, but we don’t, at the moment anyway, live in a saner world. If you’ve seen the film Idiocracy, and perhaps even if you haven’t, you know where this is headed. It’s not good.
I’ve drifted a long way from Odell’s book. It’s a good book, not a great one, and not quite as thought-provoking as it might have been—at least not for this poet who, by necessity, pays close and careful attention to things beyond the attention economy: flora and fauna, weather, seasons, people, interactions and intersections, interiority, history, context. (You might argue that this is an awfully long review for something that didn’t provoke much thought. You might be right.) If the book did anything, it reignited my hostility to social media—I returned to it almost exactly two years ago after a seven-year hiatus, hoping to have a different type of engagement with it this time around—and more doleful that there are few other avenues for promotion, awareness, and connection as easy to find. The fact of the matter is that 1) I love to create, but hate to promote; 2) I want to know what’s going on, but often wish I hadn’t; and 3) I want to be connected, but, just like before the hiatus, despite my very best efforts, I can’t in any way approximate true connection virtually.
If there’s anything I’ve done to make social media work better for me, it’s to find things happening that I’m interested in—and then actually attend those things in person. But I can, with a little effort, find most of those things via other means, and in ways that spare me from the inundation of algorithmically generated content I’d prefer to avoid. That takes care of number two above, and, in many ways, number three, too, depending on the kinds of connection we’re talking about. That is, the things I attend in person necessarily connect me to others in attendance. But what about family or friends in disparate locations, those you can’t get together with personally? Doesn’t social media make such connections possible? I think social media thinks, and wants us to think, it makes them possible, but, having partaken, abstained, and returned to it, I’ve learned that what we get isn’t connection but is, at its best, interaction, and, at worst, voyeurism. The former leaves me hollow, the latter dirty. It’s long been a plan of mine to create personal stationery, using up my worthless childhood stamp collection in the process, to (again) begin writing personal letters to friends and family. If I want to put my money where my mouth is, I’d better finally do it. Only time will tell if anyone writes back. I hope so. That leaves number one, and, as with number two, with some effort, and perhaps while also redefining what promotion means (or even success), that, too, can be achieved through means outside the attention economy.
How to Do Nothing never sets out to demonize either the attention economy or its users. Instead, Odell is more interested in raising awareness of what it is—and what it is not—so that we might be able to resist. Resistance is not abstention, but neither is it moderation. Once you start looking at the forces that are using and abusing you (and profiting from you), you rarely opt to simply “cut back.” I’m no doomscroller, wasting hours of my day, but even two or three or five minutes now feels like it. What Odell has managed to do with this book is to accelerate what was already gnawing at me the past few months: that, despite my best efforts to recontextualize and reframe the terms of engagement, this second dalliance with social media is on the same trajectory as the first. I know how the story ends, should I choose to end it that way (and I can hear my spirit screaming for it). The difference, this time, is that I have means and intentions at my disposal that I either didn’t have or didn’t want before, means and intentions that can keep me engaged and connected in real ways to what matters to me. Perhaps, like Bartleby, Herman Melville’s famous protagonist, who replies to nearly every request made of him, “I would prefer not to,” we can each find our own forms of resistance to the attention economy, wherever and however we find it.
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