1.

When you are a person, like myself, who subsists largely on the bullshit artistry of grant applications, spends fully half the year on vacation from an MFA program where "working" basically means reading and writing whatever the hell you want, and whose only dependent is a lonely little succulent that still somehow seems to be dying despite repeated assurances from the florist that it "thrives on neglect," the last book you should be reading is one that encourages you to imagine a world in which you somehow do even less. More appropriate, instead, would be a book like How to Seize the Day, or Why You Should Stop Feeling Sorry for Yourself You Miserable Blob of Human Entitlement, or Now Is the Time to Go Watch that Jim Carrey Movie Where He Decides to Say Yes to Everything and Lo and Behold His Life Suddenly Becomes Very Rich and Fulfilling. The immediate problem, of course, is that upon doing some halfhearted research into the viability of these other options, it turns out that the real-life Jim Carrey is actually a pretty depressing figure that spent much of the last few years obsessively anger-painting Trump over and over again—as the Wicked Witch of the West, as a swastika-emblazoned comet, as what appears to be a Roman legionary crucifying Jesus—and that all of the books that do have this fish-or-cut-bait mentality are written by retired sea captains or lobster fetishists who seem mainly interested in getting you off your Candy Ass so you can Be A Man. All of which just makes you want to take testosterone blockers. And none of which even begins to approach the biggest and most annoying problem of all. Which is that as much as your life could stand to be improved with even the slightest bump in self-discipline, the truth of the matter is that Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is, in fact, actually perfect for someone just like yourself, with just your kinds of non-worries and non-responsibilities and non-problems, having very clearly been written for the same slender segment of the population wallowing through mostly comfortable lives just like your own. Or, rather, mine.

I know because I have been avoiding How to Do Nothing for as long as it has existed. Partly because I felt I didn't need the encouragement, but mostly because sitting down to read a book about doing nothing seemed like it would impede the nothing I was already doing. Or so I thought then. As the book's notoriety spread throughout the liberal echo chamber that I inhabit, racking up ever more glowing reviews across our benighted kingdom's various nodes of physical and digital exchange, my resistance became increasingly futile. First came scattered but urgent endorsements from the people I know already prone to griping about the absurdities of modern life or already prone to being taken hostage for my own griping about modern life. Then came a big text from my father, a tenured professor that has a long track record of being seduced by arguments that allow him to recast the life he already leads as an act of radical resistance, who gushed that, as promised on the cover, Odell truly had "changed how he saw the world." He advised me to procure a copy at once. Then he offered to send me one free of charge. Feeling slightly embarrassed that my absences from Quality Family Time had been interpreted by my parents as evidence that I must be very busy, I politely demurred, citing a lack of free time. I promptly dove headfirst into the couch. It was glorious. It was stultifying. It was business as usual. Then I was a required to read the book for a class, thereby transforming it, through the alchemy of academe, into "work." Here we are.

I want to say I approached How to Do Nothing with an open mind. I did not. At least not after reading the first seven words—"Nothing is harder to do than nothing."—which, sure, has the sort of splashy symmetry my undergraduate students would all agree makes for a gangbusters topic sentence, but nonetheless still reads like it would be better parked next to a dictionary definition of "hyperbole." Nothing is harder? Nothing? What about Quality Family Time? What about painting a beatific cartoon Trump bathing in the "Sewage [of] Contaminated Politics"? What about grieving the demise of your only dependent even after several emergency trips to the florist? These are jokes. Except they're also kind of not. When you are as similar on paper as I am to Odell—i.e., Trump-terrified-MFA-toting-bird-liking-social-media-skeptical-university-lecturer-slash-writer-from-California—reading How to Do Nothing represents such a spectacular leap into preacher-choir territory you can practically hear the hymns. And if you've lost someone like me by sentence one, that's an issue. Also, speaking as a congenital nothing-doer: the problem with doing nothing is not that it is hard but rather that it is so breathtakingly easy. Making yourself get out of bed is hard. Making yourself do pretty much anything is hard. This is why bosses exist. This is why personal trainers exists. This is why books are increasingly struggling to exist. Squandering whole days and weeks in a state of near-total inertia will leave you listless and wimpy and sad. But doing so also doesn't take any willpower—really, the exact opposite—which is why, in spite of everything, it still remains my default setting.

All to say: I was inclined to chalk the line up to what Odell later calls her "literal flights of fancy"—made possible, she tells us, by watching the similarly literal flights of two neighborhood crows introduced to readers as Crow and Crowson—until I encountered another line so deeply galling, so truly uncalled for, that it very nearly compelled me to do something useful or productive. There it was on the inside book jacket. Then again several pages later, as if I had somehow forgotten its existence or not taken sufficient time to marvel at its manifest genius. "This book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent," it read. I stared at the page. I stared at the open bottle of Soylent by my side. I got up, strode the six paces that separate my couch from my pantry, and beheld the twenty-seven bottles of Soylent then in my possession, all standing by to provide me with life-giving sustenance at a moment's notice.

2.

At first you could only get Soylent in powder form. It came packaged in space-agey silver pouches, which arrived in the mail with instructions for exactly how much to stir into a glass of water so you could forego a meal without getting so violently full that you vomited all over the kitchen counter. Now it's available in pre-mixed meal-replacement bottles. This is great because some people (i.e., the kind of people who buy Soylent) struggle to read written directions and then just end up with sludgy cups of almost-food chunks, but also because going through the motions of preparing Soylent seemed sort of anathema to the point of Soylent. Can you guess where this miracle of self-optimization was invented? If not, stop reading immediately and go watch every season of Silicon Valley—a far better use of your limited time and attention. Then go watch that Jim Carrey movie for good measure. Everyone else: let's proceed.

The year was 2013. Anthony "Carlos Danger" Weiner's namesake was again front-page news, the words "selfie" and "jorts" had recently been added to the dictionary, and a nice-if-somewhat-ET-like twenty-four-year-old named Rob was feeling very down in the dumps. Having taken the middle road of so many aspiring Silicon Valley bros—staying in college long enough to finish a degree in engineering, but not so long to finish another one in computer science—Rob had secured a rather large stack of cash from the startup incubator Y Combinator to develop a newfangled cell phone tower. He quickly spent $100K on the project. It did not work out. Reduced to the life of a pauper with $70K in the bank, it was not long before Rob decided, in Silicon Valley parlance, that he would need to "pivot." Since developing an entirely new project would take serious time and money––both of which Rob (sort of) did not have––he shortly concluded that the most responsible thing to do would be to subject his remaining personal finances to the kind of withering austerity measures normally reserved for disobedient EU member states.

The only problem, as he later told The New Yorker, was that Rob already ran a pretty lean operation. "Rent was a sunk cost." He had "no social life." No matter how many ways Rob ran the numbers, the only budget line item that seemed even vaguely elastic was, apparently, food.

Luckily, this conclusion did not particularly bother Rob. "Food is very complicated," he later conceded. Mostly it was a "hassle." And so, at first, Rob decided that he would use his engineering know-how to calculate which readily available foodstuff provided the best dollar-to-nutrient value, and then eat only that one thing all of the time. As it turned out, that one thing was Little Caesar's Hot-N-Ready® Pizzas. He did this for a full week. It made Rob feel like he was "dying." Next up was kale, which appealed to Rob because it was dirt cheap, already very popular among healthy-looking people in his neighborhood, and nothing like Little Caesar's Hot-N-Ready® Pizzas. Unfortunately, eating only kale made Rob feel like he was "starving." Which was still technically an improvement, but not what Rob would call "optimal."

It was at this point, now in great gastric distress, that Rob began to wonder if optimizing his food was really such a good idea after all. Mostly because of the "food" part. "You need amino acids and lipids, not milk itself," he later told anyone that would listen. "You need carbohydrates, not bread." The problem, he eventually decided, was not with which foods he should eat, but with the very notion of eating food at all.

So Rob hit the books. Or, rather, Google, eventually compiling a list of thirty-five "raw ingredients"—from fat and protein to copper and molybdenum—Rob deemed necessary for human life. Then he acquired most in powder or pill form and blended them together into a "thick, odorless, beige liquid." He called his concoction Soylent after the Soylent Green of film and literary fame, clarifying in a later interview, "I want to be really transparent that we don't use human body parts."

And then, as Rob tells it, "I started living off it."

Immediately, his monthly food costs dropped by a factor of ten. "After a week... advertisements for fast food looked repulsive," he wrote. "All I crave is Soylent." A series of triumphant blog posts soon followed—"How I Stopped Eating Food" first among them—which not only featured a complete rundown of Rob's secret blend of herbs and spices but color commentary from the disrupter himself. "Interesting fact," Rob mused, "a shortage of molybdenum held back eukaryote evolution for 2 billion years. Make sure you get your molybdenum and continue evolving." Rob did not need the encouragement. He convinced a doctor to prescribe him a glucose monitor used by diabetics. He had a neodymium magnet implanted in his finger so he could feel electromagnetic fields. He began overdosing and underdosing on select nutrients just to see how his body would react. As he later told The New Yorker, low sodium made Rob feel "foggy." Extra magnesium was "probably the worst." ("I just felt sharp pains throughout my entire body and couldn't really move.") Rob was ebullient. Others less so. "Be very sceptical," read one blog comment. "Dude," read another, "you are utterly full of shit."

Except Rob was not utterly full of shit. At least, not quite. Rather, as Rob tells it, he had been reborn, effectively Christ-like, charged with sharing the gospel of his glorious elixir with his rapidly burgeoning flock. He stopped pivoting. Crowned himself CEO. Watched the money pour in from venture capitalists and crowd funders alike. "I feel like the six million dollar man," he crowed, divining Icarus in real time. Standard food was now "recreational food." Water, like Soylent, "[did not] have a lot of taste or flavor" but was still "the world's most popular beverage." He began speaking in aphorisms ("How many people still spend their lives just surviving, living to eat, and it's killing them? The food is eating us."). He began making pronouncements on the natural state of man ("People have this belief that just because something is natural it's good. The natural state of man is ignorant, and starving, and cold."). He began to make his feelings about grocery stores known ("I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears."). It was the height of hubris. It was the height of lunacy. It was all, somehow, still extremely coherent. Because for as much as his salesmanship would always ring hollow ("My skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone") and his appeals to emancipatory politics somehow even hollower ("I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen... How wasteful society has been with its women!") it was, in the end, still always easy to trace his overarching ambition—his worldview, really—back to a single plaintive line in the blog post that started it all: "I just want to be in good health and spend as little time and money on food as possible."

3.

I reached out to Odell to ask why Soylent epitomized everything she stood against. I did not receive a reply, for obvious reasons. I reached out to Rob to ask about the relationship between Soylent and what Odell refers to as "the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny." He replied in under ten minutes. "I think people should be free to structure their lives in their own way," he wrote. "People should be able to eat when they are hungry, sleep when they are tired, and work when they feel inspired. I believe in the value of giving people their own time and tools to be creative." I did not ask him to respond to the notion of a book serving as a four-course meal in an age of his own invention. I did not have to. The longer I read, the more it made sense. If you are a person with enough time and means to feel (rightly) uncomfortable about it, so much so that you are "desperate for something (anything!) to latch onto," this book might be satiating indeed. For everyone else, it's still a four-course meal, but more in the sense that it takes a long time to get through, feels more like theatre than actual sustenance, and leaves you fully sedentary afterwards.

By now it's far too late for phrases like "to be fair" or "on the other hand" or "that said." That said, let's get them out of the way anyway. Is Odell really arguing that her readers should do nothing? No. Obviously. As she writes, "I would be surprised if anyone who bought this book actually wants to do nothing. Only the most nihilist and coldhearted of us feels that there is nothing to be done." Rather, Odell is preoccupied with the same societal bugaboos of every card-carrying Millennial liberal. You've heard the tune: capitalism has led to a "colonization of the self." The "libertarian tech elite" are ascendant. We have, both as a culture and as individuals, allowed our time to be "captured, optimized, or appropriated" to such an extent that that we have not only forfeited our agency but accepted the "hijacking [of] our most innate desires." The prominence of the word "resist" in the title is no accident. As Odell notes, her book was conceived and begun as a direct consequence of Trump's election. "At some point," she elaborates, "I began to think of this as an activist book disguised as a self-help book."

As far as disguises go, this is not a winner. But sure. I'm down. Sort of. Because the problem here and throughout How to Do Nothing is not that Odell is wrong about the exploitative nature of capitalism, or the general niceness of sitting in the Rose Garden where her book begins and ends, it's that watching a self-described "quintessential California atheist" lament the declining stock of the Redwoods is about as surprising or imaginative as Kid Rock playing a Trump rally. Because yes, Odell's heart is certainly in the right place. And yes, she performs the Millennial high-wire act of point-making and privilege-checking to perfection. But for a book that promises to "change how you see the world," that's also not enough. When all is said and done there is, ultimately, really only one question that matters here: if we shouldn't do nothing—if it is, in fact, imperative that we do something—what is it?

This question—the question­—±turns out to be surprisingly elusive even after 200+ pages in Odell's company, even according to her most laudatory reviewers. "How to Quit Facebook Without Quitting Facebook," reads the title of one such rundown from Vox. "A complex, smart, and ambitious... political manifesto," writes The New York Times, "[that is] least convincing when [Odell] suggests that meaningful political change would follow if [her] strategies... were taken up en masse." Not that Odell is unaware of these paradoxes. Far from it. In fact, in her telling, they actually constitute their very own act of resistance. "It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live," she writes. "But I refuse to do that."

Like decrying the crimes of capitalism, this sounds, at least at first glance, borderline valiant. Except that when you stop to think about "[refusing to make] a single recommendation about how to live" for even half a second, it's difficult to come up with much of anything more fabulously uncontroversial than taking a stand against myopia. What's more, anyone looking for The One and Only Way to Live—and certainly the kinds of people Odell envisions on the receiving end of her writing—would never crack How to Do Nothing expecting to find it. Perhaps some guiding strategies, sure, or general terms of engagement, but if there's one thing that every book reader can agree upon it is that the panacea for our times is not going to be found in the pages of a single book. Still, that doesn't mean we can't expect something approaching the promise of "an activist book disguised as a self-help book," the evidence of which, it turns out, is nowhere to be found. Instead, what we do get is a long but basically circuitous journey that ends where it ostensibly begins. "The answer," to quote Odell's final lines—in which she contemplates how to express her gratitude for a very beautiful flock of pelicans—"was nothing. Just watch." Go take a hike. Go look at birds. Go sit through "a three-movement piece in which a pianist plays nothing" that "often gets written off as a conceptual art stunt." Essentially: give Zen Buddhism a shot, kind of, but keep posting photos of Crow and Crowson on Twitter every day because that is something you do for yourself and not your 20,000+ followers.

I'm not trying to be a dick here. Okay, that's a lie, but here's the point: if Jenny Odell has managed to carve out her very own slice of atheist heaven in the cold, cyborg heart of Silicon Valley, I am thrilled for her. Over the moon. Who am I, after all, in my stupendous indolence, to deny her the pleasures of a more self-aware life, or to impugn the integrity of a person who clearly cares very deeply for her fellow Earth dwellers, certainly more so than me.

But let's stop pretending that performing distress is the same as making a call to action, or that acknowledging that your book is built on contradiction somehow makes it any more useful. Just ask Jenny Odell. "At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought," she writes in a retrospective for The Paris Review. "Oh," I wanted to respond. Instead, I returned to How to Do Nothing, to another line that did immediately ring true. "After all," writes Odell, "if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down."

Sounds good.