There is this cycle of being caught in this state of really shallow attention. I don't disagree, but I guess I would ask how much responsibility should fall on us to be self-aware enough not to fall into those traps, and how much responsibility should fall on the people making the social media to not design apps in a way that encourages hysteria and anxiety? I don't think it should be our responsibility, ideally. There's one moment where you write that we are being “guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions” by clickbait and social media. Those are the more nebulous things that I think arise from the design of social media. The feeling that if you don't express yourself online every single day, you cease to exist. the culture that design enables: the really, insanely short news cycle, or this general feeling something might have happened in the five minutes you were gone. She’s far more interested in trying to unpack the causes behind 2019’s particular type of existential dread-and, in so doing, presents a way forward that's more thoughtful, compelling, and practical than your standard self-help fare. Odell is not interested in telling you how to hack your way to happiness. The uptick in the personal growth market is telling: In our current moment, people feel anxious and unmoored, and seem to be desperately seeking the cure-all that self-help books so often promise to deliver.

'Also, although I’m not super interested in self-help books-especially digital detox self-help books-I do think it’s interesting how many of them are coming out right now.” “By the time you figure out that it's not, it's too late,' she says. But with a title like How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (out April 9), the artist and writer understands (and doesn’t necessarily hate) why it might seem like one. Jenny Odell’s new book is not a self-help book.

How to do nothing by jenny odell