This book isn’t quite what I expected it to be, and I understand why people would lose patience with it (it’s rather dense and at times somewhat esoteric, and even I started skimming by the time I reached the end), but I still found a lot to appreciate here.

I picked up it mainly because I realized I was sometimes berating myself for not “making the most of” my time especially over the weekend - so Odell’s description of how we view time as “an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’” resonated with me. The book’s jumping off point is the drive to resist the lure of being sucked into for-profit online spaces like Facebook rather than attending to the physical world around us. This leads her to analyses of public spaces (specifically public gardens) as well as “scripted spaces,” an interesting term for the “faux public” spaces managed by corporations.

There’s a good deal in the book about maintenance versus productivity, or the value in nurturing and preserving what we already have rather than constantly trying to “disrupt” things or produce something new. This aligns a lot with my own thinking on the value of mending, fixing and tending - whether that’s clothes, a garden, or your own body and soul.

Odell also argues forcefully against the algorithms that shape our online lives without leaving us space to discover and explore unfamiliar things for ourselves. I was particularly struck by this line: “…at its most successful, an algorithmic ‘honing in’ would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why.” She constrasts this with, say, listening to the radio, which not only presents you with songs an algorithm would never pick for you, but can also connect you to other people in a way: “Especially when I’m driving home late on Interstate 880, feeling anonymous in the dark, flat expanse, I’m comforted by the fact that some other people are hearing the same thing I am.”

Mostly she argues not for doing nothing, but for doing something different - specifically, for shifting our attention to the world around us, to nature and to other people, neighbors and strangers alike. She writes that “when the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently,” meaning that you start to notice the life teeming all around you, human and otherwise, helping you to realize that you’re part of a vast and thriving ecosytem, and that you’re never really alone.

Further reading…