Writing 4: Forwarding or Countering Odell

Nicole Schlesinger

The idea of “forwarding” an idea, furthering it, deepening it, and somehow making it your own, as described in Rewriting, is personally relevant when applying it to Odell’s book.  I think an important part of any reading is to digest the writer’s project and see if it makes sense when considering one’s own life.  In the case of How to Do Nothing, this makes perfect sense. 

I grew up in an affluent suburb of New York City that often seemed to value achievement over almost everything.  While I realize how fortunate I am to have had a good education, excellent teachers, and a concerned and supportive community, too many adults and young people were obsessed with being busy, being involved in a million activities all supposedly for self-improvement.  If a student was not playing sports, participating in a club, or being tutored after school he or she was often looked down upon.  My classmates filled their calendar with all sorts of extracurricular activities that left them exhausted and overwhelmed.  When homework obligations were added onto these busy schedules, stress levels rose even higher.  

Adults were similarly focused on being “busy.”  Many came from families where both parents worked outside the home, but they also loaded extra activities into their own already busy days.  Being productive, being useful, improving oneself were goals that seemed to be driving forces for everyone.  There was no time, and no tolerance, for just being.  Being busy was prized and encouraged.  I get stressed out just thinking about it!

This attitude goes against so much of what Odell states in her book, and I think this would be my personal forwarding of her message. Odell urges people to resist, and this is also relevant to me because in high school I resisted this atmosphere of being constantly busy and productive. Although I did not watch the birds, I used this metaphor as a way to be more aware of the physical world around me. I love being outside just for no other reason than to feel the sun or see the flowers. I won’t pretend to say that I meditated in a rose garden, listened deeply, or paid real attention to the different kinds of bugs in a watershed, but I do think I was able to stay more focused on other things instead of intentionally being too busy to observe them.

Odell quotes Gilles Delueze in describing the abundance of pointless talk that seems to have little meaning. She points out the necessity for quiet, for the peacefulness to be alone and to be silent. This is also something I think is important to forward. I think the world seems full of noisy chatter and needless talk. Odell recalls how she started coming to the Rose Garden every day after the Presidential Election in 2016. Needing time to think, reflect and be alone with her thoughts, Odell also seems like she wanted to get away from the noisy world of political arguments, constant discord, and the angry accusations that seemed to flood the national scene. I can totally relate to this because I lose patience with people who feel some compulsion to fill the air with noise and empty words. This is not to say that I think my ideas are better, but like those who feel some need to stay busy, there are many people I know who feel they must always talk. Why are people so afraid of silence? When I ask this question to my friends, they often answer that being quiet is socially awkward and inappropriate. Again, as Odell states, silence is the way to obtain deep listening; to hear birdsong, and the message the birds want to communicate. In society’s need to feel useful and productive, people also seem to feel like it is necessary to fill any silence with useless words. “What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” Odell is trying to encourage us to “speak deeply” like she advocates “deep listening.” There is no sense to speak or hear words that just form noise.

Jenny Odell’s Project

There is no denying we live in a capitalist society and a country constantly focused on how we can be not only better, but the best. This “we must we number one” mentality has taken over our leaders and has consequently seeped into our lives as individuals. Just look outside in your own community; cars fly by, people rush down the streets, eager to not miss a moment of productivity. This busyness is prevalent in our society, even in ways we may not realize. In her novel, “How to Do Nothing,” Jenny Odell offers a wakeup call to this busyness, and just how much it impacts our lives. 

While “How to Do Nothing” may seem like a strange title at glance, for how can she really give us directions on something as simple as “nothing,” this term is actually much more complex, especially when the project of her book is taken into consideration. Odell’s book is dynamic and constantly developing, but in the heart of her pages is a revolt against our “capitalist value system” and its skewed definition of productivity (xvi). Simultaneously, she calls us to refocus our attention from this attention economy and alter our perspective of productivity. Her guide for us to achieve this is through doing “nothing,” and she offers insight on how to do this and why it is so important. 

Odell’s stance on “capitalist productivity” is quite different from the average person’s view because we are trained to think of being productive as a good, beneficial concept (xi). Odell is not necessarily disagreeing with this concept by saying productivity is a bad thing, but she argues that the context of our productivity makes it either beneficial or not. She discusses the microtasking site, Fiverr, to explain this idea more clearly. The goal of the company is to allow people to use their time, regardless of what they do, to make money. She describes the result of this “work metastasizing throughout the rest of life” (17). She calls out this company for taking advantage of our desire to be productive and successful and taking up our attention even more. This proves her point that we are so often consumed with ways to be better that we stay busy, to the point of work taking over our lives, which is not necessarily the productivity we always want to have. 

Is there really a problem with work, or busyness in general, consuming our life, though? Odell is a working woman, and a fairly busy individual herself even when she is not working, but it is what we spend our time on that she says we should be concerned about. And she feels this concern because of the way that “corporate platforms buy and sell our attention,” like Fiverr, in a way that encourages a “narrow definition of productivity” which ignores the “local, the carnal, and the poetic” (xii). I personally was struck by her evaluation of social media and its deceiving messages. Portrayed as a way to express ourselves, Odell points out that much of social media is actually invaded commercially, with a goal to keep us in a “profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction,” in a way that actually hinders our self-expression (xii). The world in which we live, the capitalist “attention economy” thrives on fear and anxiety, and our worry that we are not good or successful enough (xx).  Because of this we must learn to redirect our attention to the “physical reality,” in which our identities are not shaped by our place in the economy (xiii). This, as Odell argues, is achievable by doing nothing. 

By stressing the damage that the attention economy has on us and our communities, she achieves the first part of her project, which gives us at least a basic understanding of why we need to do nothing. But what doing nothing entails is the second part of her aim. Odell personally does this by birdwatching. By spending time in the presence of birds, she not only formed a recognition of them, but the birds (particularly crows) developed a recognition of her. While this may seem unimportant, Odell shared that this connection sparked a changed appreciation and “alien animal perspective” of the “animateness of the world” in which she shares with the birds, and you, and me (21). She is not encouraging us to all go birdwatching, but she is encouraging us to form our own “removal,” because once we return, we have a “fundamentally changed” attitude of the world (9). This attitude helps us combat against the attention economy and resist its unappreciation for things that aren’t financially beneficial. 

This changed attitude and the escape we need prior to it is our “doing nothing,” and this is our activism against the attention valued society we live in. Odell understands how our perspectives are damaged by the attention economy, so she calls us to resist by “doing nothing.” Ultimately, this is a call to reevaluate what we understand as successful, focus on what is really real, and maybe redefine what our “best” really is. In a nutshell, we are called both figuratively and literally, to “stop and smell the roses.”