I first heard this book from the Would Quitting Instagram Make You Happier episode of Why’d You Push That Button. One of the hosts mentioned that How to Do Nothing captured her feelings about social media pretty well, and it got me curious enough to read. This is a pretty difficult book to summarise in one paragraph, so here’s my understanding of the six chapters:
Chapter 1: The Case for Nothing talks about how doing nothing has its benefits. The example of Deep Listening, which is “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing”, is brought up as an example of how we need to hone our ability to stop to listen, which in turn will allow us to change our attitude to the world. The decreasing ability of humans to stop and listen/practice Deep Listening is tied to the “battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” In other words, we’re getting so busy we won’t have the time to sit back and evaluate if this is the life we want and to change our attitudes towards the world.
Chapter 2: The Impossibility of Retreat looks at people who opted to drop out of society. Odell looks at the communes of the 1960s and why they happened and how they failed.
Chapter 3: Anatomy of a Refusal continues the story started in Chapter 2 and looks at how people might refuse to participate in the ‘attention economy’. Odell also raises the concern that we are losing our ability to refuse and its consequences.
Chapter 4: Exercises in Attention was a little harder to understand, but it’s about attention and will. I think the chapter can be summarised in this sentence: “if attention and will are so closely linked, then we have even more reason to worry about an entire economy and information ecosystem preying on our attention.” There’s also something about bioregionalism in here.
Chapter 5: Ecology of Strangers was when the book tries to tie ecology to the attention economy and talk about why the attention economy is bad.
Chapter 6: Restoring the Grounds for Thought is the final chapter and the start summarises the previous few chapters (in a way that’s much clearer than the preceding chapters, in my opinion). The chapter then goes on to talk about how “the loss of spatial and temporal context happens within the attention economy” before ending with the imagination of the utopian social network.
As you can probably tell from the above, the book is full of ideas. I’ll admit that a lot of it went over my head, partly because most of the examples in the book are related to modern art, which is something that I did not get. Plus, the author is coming from a more Marxist/Socialist economic perspective (something I realised only when I went to google what late-stage capitalism was), which is not something I studied very much. And while I do with the book that we need to learn to take breaks from social media (I think it’s good she didn’t advocate a complete break but rather intentional time away from the app), but the book didn’t really push me towards Marxist economics.
If you haven’t read the book, you might benefit from knowing what the following two terms are (I had to look them up while reading):
- Attention economy: According to Wikipedia, “[a]ttention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.” It’s a way of analysing things, but with the wholly negative way it’s described, I suspect that the book uses it the way Digital Minimalism (review to come) defines it “the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.”
- Late Stage Capitalism: Also known as Late Capitalism, this was a term that originated with Marxist economists. I think the book is using this to describe all bad things associated with capitalism, as mentioned by this article in The Atlantic.
Now for my thoughts on the book: It was a little hard to read. But this is something the introduction mentions (that the book isn’t as coherent as we might mention) so I was prepared for this. I would have liked for the author to be more upfront about her worldview – with all her talk of understanding nuance, she talks as though concepts late capitalism is something that we all know and agree with, while it’s something that I didn’t really encounter while studying Economics (no surprise because as mentioned above, I didn’t focus on Marxist economics). That said, it’s mostly my personal preference to know where authors are coming from so that I can keep their biases in mind when reading the book (to think “is this a fact? is this an opinion? how is this account of events coloured by the way the author sees the world? etc”) and it’s probably not a big deal for most people.
I did like that the book doesn’t advocate for readers to just disconnect with technology, but to take a more holistic approach and learn to take breaks. The sections about ecology, were frankly, over my head so I ended up not taking much in.
Overall, I think this book will appeal to its audience: people who lean towards Marxist economics and who enjoy modern art (it’s not for me so I don’t understand a lot her examples). Personally, it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I did find food for thought and it got me to read more on digital minimalism, so it was effective in getting me to pause and think. That’s what the first chapter is about, so I suppose that the book did point me in the direction of ‘how to do nothing’.
This doesn’t sound like a book for me after reading your thoughts on it. I do like that the author doesn’t favor giving up technology all together. I think breaks are good. I am afraid my knowledge of economics is so dated… That part would go over my head for sure.
I took economics in uni and it was pretty tough for me too – mostly because it’s not conventional economics 😝
Great review! Very insightful, and I’m impressed that you pushed on through the book despite not getting parts of it.
I resonate with your discovery that the author seems to assume everyone is with her on the Marxist train. I’m not sure how to express why this resonates, but I’ll try …
I was raised in an environment that was socially conservative yet somehow also hippie. So, we believed in traditional sexual morality (for example) and free market capitalism. But we were also in favor of the simple life, staying in touch with nature, being frugal, handicrafts, books, libraries. In fact, many of the conservative folks I knew were farmers.
Nowadays, I sometimes encounter people (like the author of the book above) who seem to assume that being in favor of a simple, quiet, bookish life that is in touch with nature is the exclusive province of leftism. Like, if you frequently take nature walks or go to the library, or if you garden, you must be Marxist. Hence, anyone who would pick up and read a book called How to Do Nothing must be Marxist, right?
It’s as if they conflate capitalism and consumerism. To me, a free market, capitalist system is one in which people have private property (which would include owning their own houses and farms, by the way), and are free to buy and sell to each other as they see fit. It doesn’t have to mean giant corporations, an obsession with earning money, or spending all day at the mall. But that’s what many authors seem to think it means.
This means that books written by and for bookish nature girls are also written for leftists, not for conservative bookish nature girls like me. It’s as if no one knows that the latter kind of person exists.
Sorry about the rant. Perhaps I should turn this into a post rather than leaving it as a comment on your blog.
I would love you to turn this into a full post! As someone from outside the US, I have noticed that bookish spaces seem to be very segmented (especially after the Sad Puppies Hugo drama).
I suspect that the filter bubble effect is making this division even more pronounced than before.
And I am with you on the conflation of capitalism and consumerism. It’s a pity people look at capitalism and then jump to the extreme version of it without looking at whether we can moderate its effects for the better.
[…] difficulty level of Everything and Less, which makes How to do Nothing feel like light reading. But looking at my original review of the book, I do think that my opinions haven’t changed all that […]