I mentioned a couple of years ago that a friend recommended I read Digital Minimalism, which came with the caveat that the book's idea of an "extreme" example was living without a smart phone - in other words, my life (1). This speaks to a broader idea - there are certain books that initially seem right down my alley, yet a blunt assessment of the subject matter suggests that, at the very least, I'm going to be hard to impress. It was with this unique arrogance that I opened How To Do Nothing, a book loosely organized around the idea of finding meaningful connection in a world increasingly distracted by the attention economy.
How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (March 2021)
It's important to note that living without a smartphone by no means precludes me from distraction. To revise a clumsy analogy from back in the summer, it's not adequate protection to keep the air conditioner going while the rest of the building is on fire. The bulk of the blame for the attention economy is perhaps rightfully aimed at the major social media companies, but I still find myself in the mess of distraction anytime I try to read an article online while scrolling past the endless ads, videos, and hyperlinks that surround, bisect, or pop-up into my field of vision; the experience of reading a newspaper online is comparable to having a librarian throw a pie in your face as you turn the pages of an overdue checkout.
I'll step back from my chaotic comparisons to highlight one of Odell's comments - the past few years have locked us into a near-permanent condition of anxiety, and it's this feeling that enables the success of social media. I have written on TOA that I see our current condition as a natural result of the internet, to which social media is only a small though crucial contributor. My broader concern is reflected in yet another of Odell's observations - our attention thrives on novelty, which means we can either willfully seek it out or leave to others the task of introducing it. The problematic aspect of the internet is the way we depend on it as a novelty machine, and over time us internet users become incapable of finding our own novelty in the unobtrusive nature of the real world.
The idea that has remained with me in the weeks after reading this book is how an erosion of attention eventually means we become unable to live up to a certain ideal for life, which I believe Odell summarized as "wanting what we want to want". This is a massively familiar feeling to me, but I could not articulate it until I saw it phrased in those exact words - there are the things that I want, and then there are the things that I want to want, and it's possible that some of the obstacles standing between the two are directly related to the way I use the internet. "What do I want?" is perhaps life's most daunting question, and I felt that way before considering the possibility that my lifestyle choices have hampered my ability to want what I want.
So, what do I want now? What do I want to want? I've read How To Do Nothing, and now I don't know what to do. My experience of living without a constant connection to the internet tempts me to wave away certain earnest calls to action. The situation is like trying to stay dry in the rain, which often requires a shift in mentality rather than concrete action; the reality is that some things about life must be accepted rather than changed. But maybe I have this wrong, my imagination dulled away by a pandemic year spent at the screen, leaving me incapable of envisioning a novel response to the question of the digital age. Modern technology is draining away certain qualities that we once considered invaluable, and if this happens to bother you then doing nothing isn't an option.
TOA Rating: Three smartphones out of four.
Footnotes
1) By the way, I did read Newport's book, and I intend to write about it at some point in 2021. This may surprise some readers - why read a book that seems to be about me? The flip side is, why not read such a book? Don't we all love to read about ourselves? Isn't that the most interesting kind of reading?
