Since I have been reading books that look at culture more broadly (and through a lot of examples of modern art), I thought it might be time to reread How to do Nothing.

As it turns out: yes, the book felt a lot easier to read this time, no doubt helped by the 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 much.

For me, the biggest weakness of How to do Nothing is that Odell doesn’t explain any of the basic assumptions she makes. She seems to operate from an assumption that the reader is just like her in thinking and therefore will understand what is going on. The biggest thing she misses out is a working definition of the Attention Economy – is it the algorithms? the broader ecosystem? the structure of the economy? For most of the book, Odell seems to be critiquing something larger than social media, but she doesn’t ever explain what she is critiquing. I get that the addictiveness of social media is a problem – I’ve read other books on that – but without knowing what she’s trying to talk about, it’s hard to evaluate her arguments and proposals.

This glossing over things that really should be explained happens in other, small places as well. For example, Odell writes that:

“I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.”

Introduction, How to do Nothing

I have to admit that I do not see how the four things are linked. Capitalism without limits and an abuse of the environment, yes, but what does that have to do with colonialism? Is she saying that countries never had capitalism before the idea of colonialism? Given that capitalism is a system where there’s private ownership of resources and a free market, I’d like to know how the merchants of China (a class that existed as early as the Zhou dynasty) were trading goods if there was no market or private goods for them to trade. I’m also not sure how loneliness is linked with the other three and I don’t even know how to start guessing.

In another line in Chapter 3, Odell starts an anecdote with the following sentence:

“When I was working at my corporate marketing job in San Francisco, I used to take long lunch breaks as a small, selfish act of resistance.”

Which made me wonder: what is she resisting against? Her company specifically (where they doing something particularly illegal or unethical that it needed to be resisted but not in a very obvious way)? The fact that she had to work? Something else entirely? I have no idea what she is resisting or why she is resisting, other than the fact that she did something she considers an act of resistance.

I suppose that all this is to say that Odell’s worldview is not very clearly articulated and so while I agree with her on a few points, I have no idea what she thinks is the problem (apart from the attention economy which is linked in some way to nature?) and what she thinks the world should look like if we have solved its major problems. Even though Odell talks about slowing down and connecting with others, she doesn’t seem to have realised that there are a multitude of worldviews and not everyone sees the world the way she does. This might not have been such a big problem in a book that tries to tackle a narrower problem (i.e. “here is the problem with social media [insert specific topic], here is my solution” but since Odell tries to take a broad look at society (presumably American but this is also undefined), the lack of a concrete base became a fairly big issue for me.

By the way, Odell also talks about Zhuang Zhou a few times in the book, but because she doesn’t actually contextualise his life and work; Zhuang Zhou lived in the Warring States period, a time that was full of unrest and where many different philosophies were being created and discussed. Odell just mentions that Zhuang Zhou is a fourth-century Chinese philosopher and tries to connect his writing to the idea of “resistance in place” (specifically, resisting Capitalism) when I’m not sure if that is how his writings should be interpreted. Sure, he spoke in “apparent contradictions and non sequiturs” but who was he writing to? What was he debating? Zhuang Zhou wrote a foundational text of Taoism and it feels a bit glib to just cite him as a philosopher without looking at his ideas in the context of Chinese philosophy and history.

All this said, there are things that I do agree with Odell about. I didn’t talk about this in depth in my first review but I definitely appreciated her chapter on the impossibility of retreat a lot more this time around – I agree that a complete retreat from the world is impossible. Instead, we should be strategising how we want to engage with the world without letting social media and other movements sweep us along an unthinking path.

I don’t regret rereading How to do Nothing; it’s interesting to take a book that I found difficult and see how far I’ve come in my ability to comprehend (and hopefully evaluate) its arguments. I only wish that I had more positive things to say because I do think that after reading so many books like this one, I should be able to find one I’d like to rave about.