When the pandemic hit in 2020, and things started to shut down gradually all over the world, we as humans had to reckon with something unprecedented in our time: we had to nothing. Just a month into lockdown, with my university closing down and no online classes yet scheduled, it dawned on me, while writing in my journal, that we never really do nothing. Doing nothing is itself nothing, and so it doesn’t make sense. This made our lives look strange, not only individually but also collectively, since we were all forced to stay in – and do nothing. The fact that a microscopic virus shut down the whole of capitalism, and it made for strict rules that people shouldn’t be working, whom otherwise are forced to work, was both comic and weird.
But while doing something is difficult, depending on the nature of the work, its difficulty makes up for the ‘fun’ of it as well – or at least for the continuity of engagement. Doing nothing, on the other hand, is bizarre. Doing nothing means, if we reverse it, not doing anything. It means avoiding doing things that we usually do. And while the immediate reaction to such a sudden and utter nothingness might be joy or even euphoria, soon enough we’d realize how difficult it actually is to live under the ‘unbearable lightness of being’. What to do with so much of time, all of a sudden, in continuity, day in and day out? Doing nothing is much more difficult than doing something.
There is a Milan Kundera quote where he writes that sitting on a hill with a dog and doing nothing wasn’t boring in the past times, it was peace. If anything, this quote might point towards the history of doing nothing, and how it has changed meaning from the times before to the present. Perhaps, let’s say in the medieval ages, doing nothing, meaning nothing significant, like lying around, staring into the sky, going for a walk, talking for hours, and just chilling, wasn’t boring, it was peace. Even more so, it wasn’t guilty either to just lie around, since capitalism and its ‘productive narrative’ didn’t exist back then; it was okay, it was normal, it was worthy and deserving.
So, it means that the current stigma towards doing nothing, or the idea of it, is a product of our current times, that in turn reflect the systems which measure our lives in terms of productiveness, financial liberty, ease of life, status and success, and more goals and achievements.
Odell’s book, herself a digital artist and at the core of our technologically invested generation, is a resistance towards this ‘attention economy’: an economy which feeds by exploiting our attention, turning us into addicts, and effectively chorusing our sociability, animality, and our connection to the natural world. Odell’s book started off promisingly: the introduction to this book is really attractive and sets up the reader with expectant joy and liberation, especially someone as anti-capitalist as me.
Being conscious of my amusement while reading this book, I started looking for the causes for it, and soon enough, I found it: self-help. This is a self-help book, and like all other books in this genre, it is supposed to make you ‘feel good’; it is basically its selling point. While that realization took away the innocent merriness out of me, the rest of the book did more things wrong to, eventually, make this a disappointing read.
Odell divides her book into six chapters, basically trying to present an anatomy of a successful resistance to attention economy. But while it showcases the distinct components of how to do and why to do nothing, given Odell’s extensive understanding and knowledge about each chapter’s topic, it never really comes together to form one cohesive message about doing nothing. Chapter one explains why we need to do nothing, now, while chapters two and three explains how to do nothing while remaining within the society, rather than becoming a monk. Chapters four, five, and six are really autobiographical, in that Odell tries to explain her points through her life as an artist and a resident of Oakland: mainly how we need to come together locally, rather than going deeper into never-ending chaos of Facebook and Twitter.
It’s a book about parks, birds, and neighborhoods; about authors old
and new, and their books; about Odell’s life and her reckoning with an urgent
and essence-of-human consuming issue – but it’s not a book about doing nothing.
It is so in parts, but never as a whole. I was left wanting when it came to the
general idea of doing nothing, the purpose of life, a renaissance to living
less-clutteredly, of regaining that peace over today’s boredom and guilty
consciousness.
Ratings: 3/5 *** July 24, 2022_