Who needs a book to know how to do nothing? As a title, How to Do Nothing sounds parodic – I felt a bit self-conscious reading it on the train. This “crisis” forms the basis of Odell’s new book, described as both a “critique of the forces vying for our attention” and an action plan for how to resist them. “What we are left with,” Odell writes, with no small sadness, “ 24 potentially monetizeable hours … that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. Technology, coupled with economic insecurity, has dissolved boundaries between work, rest and leisure. If that was hard in 1985, when Deleuze was writing, it is next to impossible now. felt compelled to seek refuge in her rose garden after Trump’s election victory She eventually understood the impulse in the words of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: when we are “riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images”, the challenge is to search for “little gaps of solitude and silence in which find … the rare, and even rarer thing that might be worth saying”. Odell writes of feeling compelled to seek refuge in her local rose garden in the days after Donald Trump became president, “like a deer going to a salt lick”: “It really did feel necessary, like a survival tactic.” That a lengthy online treatise about shattered attention spans should manage to hold so many of them is ironic, it reflects wider concern. “I’ve gotten a lot of responses from people saying things like, ‘you’ve put words to a feeling that I’ve had for a long time’.” “It was really a surprise that it resonated with people outside of that pretty specific context, and that people would have the patience to read something that’s 45 minutes long, online,” says Odell, by phone from her home in Oakland, California.

Odell how to do nothing