It isn't that I don't believe she isn't living her brand: it's that her brand comes at a cost that is really not affordable for a very large number of people.įirst, a caveat: on Goodreads this is shelved as self-help and psychology- it is neither. Jenny Odell doesn't do anything so deceptive in her book, HOW TO DO NOTHING, but the message rings similarly false for a wide variety of reasons. Her life was her brand and she went off-brand, and people felt duped. But when you are manufacturing your entire brand around the idea that eating meat is bad, and raw vegan is better, the message starts to ring a little false if you don't walk the walk (or veg the veg). And yes, you might say that she had every right to eat that meat- it is her life. Needless to say, it was the internet and people were MAD. In one of many social media influencer scandals, a raw vegan lifestyle influencer was coming under fire because she was caught eating a meat dish while out at a restaurant with friends. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this audiobook is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.While reading this book, I kept thinking about this article I read once while crammed onto the packed and sweaty train. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.įar from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Odell sees our attention as the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity.doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. 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.

Jenny odell how to do nothing review