Finished reading: How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell 📚

This was a reread for me! And, not actually a read: I listened to it on audiobook.

Liz and I have greatly pared down our library over the last few years, but this is one book we’ve kept on our shelf. Partly because the cover is so darn pretty, and partly because this book is part of a spiritual trilogy we read in 2020, alongside The Longing for Less by Kyle Chayka and The Grace of Enough by Haley Stewart.

I wanted to do a reread of this book now, since Jenny Odell is coming out with a new book in 2023. Second time around, I can re-affirm that the book is well worth a read. Maybe because I had already read or maybe because I was listening to it, but I found myself a little less engaged than I was last time. But it was still nice to revisit the topics that the author covers.

The book orbits around the question of how to resist capitalist co-opting of the self. ”How To Do Nothing” might be more verbosely put “How To Fill Your Life With Joy Outside of What is Valued by Algorithms, Advertisers, and Economists”. The chapters examine the who’s-who of social ills: corporate work culture, social media, ecological devastation.I admire the author’s expansive view when analyzing these cultural phenomena, and resisting the urge to suggested quick technological or pop-psychology fixes for our societal dilemmas.

I listened to the book mostly while running, and enjoyed that experience - the broad scope of the conversations in the book are conducive to expansive thinking, so it was nice to be out in the open, and exercising, while I did my thinking.