Reddit reviews How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
We found 2 Reddit comments about How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention—and our personal information—that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.
I just started reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. It looks like it's going to be an artsy political manifesto for dealing with some of the issues raised in this podcast: getting your capacity for outrage hijacked by companies competing for your attention, and doing stupid busywork because that seems more "productive" than going on a cruise and looking at animals on an island.
She starts with this Giorgio de Chirico quote from about a hundred years ago, in which he predicts that in the future we won't value dilettantes like Darwin anymore:
>In the face of the increasingly materialistic and pragmatic orientation of our age ... it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer ... he who tries to solve a riddle or pass a judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.
As someone who has always aspired to live a useless life but has never had the funds to pull it off, I'm curious to see what advice she has for ordinary people like me.
Might check out How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell