How to Do Nothing Paperback – 29 December 2020

This is a beautiful book.There has been a lot of discussion in recent times of the fragmentation of our attention, a destruction of our attention spans, by the internet and smartphones. The effect of these technologies on children and knowledge workers has been well-documented. But it is more wide-spread than that. Walk anywhere in India and you will find everyone with their faces stuck in their smartphones. I have seen shopkeepers service me without even turning to face me, while watching videos on their phone. I have been in taxies in which the driver had a smartphone on their car’s dashboard. I have witnessed carpenters do their work semi-distracted by their phones.The default response to this situation has been things like the digital detox or digital minimalism. Proponents of these ideas say that you should move away from your phone in order to do what matters: develop your careers, produce meaningful results, live a productive life. Jenny Odell, the author of “How to Do Nothing”, and an American artist, takes this a few steps farther and a few fathoms deeper. She argues, very compellingly, we should save our attention not because that would save our productivity, but because it doing so is the only way to live a good life.Odell discusses the impossibility of renouncing our smartphones, and then comes up with the refreshing idea of a “third space”. She then talks about how attentive communication brings in a spatial and temporal context to conversation. These two ideas she presents in a breathtakingly poetic language. (Read the last two paragraphs of chapter 6 to see what I mean.)My only quibble is that Odell’s rants against capitalism and the Western civilisation are unnecessary. These are often couched in typical leftist gobbledygook. It seems to me that it would have been so much nicer if Odell’s case were presented with in a spiritual language. Instead of poor, oppressed people needing to protect their attention from devious capitalists, we are all humans trying to pull our attention from a mad world and our unruly senses to our real, peaceful, inner selves. After all, attention management has been a topic of discussion in a India millennia before the arrival of capitalism (see Arjuna’s question to Krishna in Gita 6.33 and 6.34, and Krishna’s response). Odell also seems unaware of Gandhi’s experiments with slow reading. Buddha does feature in her story, but she is ignorant of other important Indian thinkers in this field. This limits her work.Still, there is much that is positive in Odell. And we are in need of thinkers like her. This book is therefore strongly recommended.

Too expensive but not worth enough to read... Felt disorganised... It's more like a review journal paper than a book...and most times felt like monotonous ramblings..An uncomfortable read where I lost my concentration numerous times as I could not connect with the book...Waste of money..