How To Do Nothing
This book came out in 2019, Pre-Pandemic, as we must now categorize everything. I remember seeing the bright splashy cover and being intrigued. I even checked it out from the library at one point, but just couldn’t get into it. I honestly don’t remember what was happening in my life at that point that made it hard for me to be able to sink my attention into reading it…but that’s an exploration for another day. Fast forward three (fill in the blank adjective of choice here) years and I’ve come back around to this book.
The first thing I noticed was how many writers and thinkers Odell references that were influential for me during my college years as a geography major, or were in conversation with those writers. I was an undergrad in the era of Anthony Giddens’ and Thomas Friedman’s explorations of globalization—the polarization of our collective experience of local vs global as the internet made the global accessible to anyone with an internet modem…and thus the local increasingly irrelevant, at least according to the neoliberal optimism of the thinkers at that time.
I deeply resonated with the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s conceptualization of space and place (which are inherently physical, embodied experiences) as distance and intimacy. There’s only so much we can pay attention to, despite our desire to consume it all. Globalization promised us a new paradigm of infinite growth and borderless community. The scale and scope of what to pay attention to has expanded beyond comprehension (unless you’re an AI)—there is no possible way to map it out—we are limited by the perceptual capacity of our human bodies. Social media, which was just on the horizon as I was graduating from college—seems the ultimate digital attempt to alchemize the spectrum of intimacy and distance as a singular, all-consuming experience.
Looking back on it now, I think I was attracted to geography (and by extension, environmental history) as an academic discipline because it is essentially a framework for how to pay attention to the flow of human interaction through time and space. It helped me figure out how to ask the questions that are important to me: what do I want to pay attention to during my limited, embodied time on this earth? It’s as big as you can get without going cosmic (which, sadly, is mathematically beyond my ability). I didn’t want to box myself into a narrow, singular discipline, I wanted to pay attention not to everything, but to the relationships between everything. I wanted (and still want) to map the Big Picture as a way to make meaning and sense of my own tiny life.
In my environmental studies classes I read Donna J. Haraway, Wendell Berry, John Muir, Rachael Carson, Terry Tempest Williams…all writers who essentially grapple with the ways in which we pay attention to and thus shape the world we live in—both the intimacies and the distances. At one point in the first chapter of Odell’s book, my mind suddenly remembered the magnificent, book “The Spell of the Sensuous,” by ecologist and philosopher David Abram, whose luminous explorations of phenomenology highlight how we co-create the world through how we pay attention to it, our language, and our embodied experience. A page later, she quotes Abram (albeit from a different book that is now on my reading list).
These little moments of synchronicity have made reading this book a pleasurable experience. The threads woven intersect with so many other formative thinkers I’ve connected with over the years, it feels a bit like a homecoming. I find it interesting that while Odell is a visual artist, she chose to explore the idea and experience of attention economy through narrative. I am experiencing this book as a map in written form. As I read and underline passages, I sometimes pause to draw little maps or diagrams in the margins to connect ideas with my own experience of the attention economy.
This book is inextricably a product of its time and place (which, she acknowledges, includes a reckoning with the interactions of class and privilege as locations of different access and experiences of this attention economy). Although the questions are timeless, this book could not have been written in 2005 when I was college. And yet, there is a sense of the familiar about it…really, haven’t we been grappling with the question of what to pay attention to since the beginning of time? I feel like Mary Oliver would have something to say about this…and not surprisingly, her poetry also fit neatly into the collection of writers that I had imaginary conversations with in that period of my life.
As I was falling asleep, I found myself wondering how Odell’s experience of the pandemic has shifted or clarified her understanding of the attention economy. And then in another moment of synchronicity, this morning in the NYT I caught a headline with her name in it: she’s written another book, called “Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock,” which explores the ways in which our relationship with time were fundamentally altered during the pandemic. I’ll be curious to read this new book and put it in conversation with Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” which I also really enjoyed.
