Highlights from How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

See also: Read (2025) and my reading log entry for this book (feel free to leave comments there if you want!).

Locations come from an ebook version and aren't proper page numbers, just fyi.

Loc 72:

Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

Loc 85:

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

Loc 1712:

A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.

Loc 2462:

Now, as you read it, this book forms a conversation with you as well.

Loc 3051:

This is where I think the idea of “doing nothing” can be of the most help. For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.

Gathered from references made within the book; these are the ones I particularly want to read:

1. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
2. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
3. Peter Rabbit, Drop City
4. Michael Weiss, Living Together: A Year in the Life of a City Commune
5. Stephen Diamond, What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm
6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
7. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
8. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
9. Masanobu Fukuoka, One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming
10. Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene