Idling Towards Nothingness: Radical Acts of Refusal

The politics of reclaiming your time

Right before the pandemic forced much of the world to press pause, I read Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” at the end of 2019, the same year it was published. Her deeply cerebral, systemic critique of that uniquely pernicious form of capitalism—the attention economy—is a text I’ve returned to many times since then. As our bodies, minds, and indeed our democracy have become increasingly sick since then, I am still startled by how deftly she connects our digital immersion and its peculiar economics of extraction with political and ecological decay.

My own copy is now a rainbow of highlighted passages; each time I read it something new tickles my brain that hadn’t resonated as deeply before. Perhaps that is the greatest compliment to Odell that I am applying her thesis to her own text; that I am paying close attention to her work and over time am able to see it ever more holistically.

Photo by Nadiye Odabaşı

Much more recently I read Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to Be Idle,” a playful romp through one man’s practices of a life well-spent, with plenty of time for simple leisure, joy, and unpretentious social rituals. The structural conceit of the book is that each hour of the day is the “right time” for particular activities such as “The Ramble,” “The Pub,” and (provocatively) “Riot.” Though there are some activities I can’t abide, such as “The Hangover” (being middle aged is enough to put you off hangovers for the rest of your life), Hodgkinson makes many a cheeky pronouncement that I interpret to be more about the sensibility of the thing than its specific substance. For example, he makes being sick sound like a leisurely couch rotting session, though I’m sure he means the cough-and-cold kind of illness and not the more devastating forms.

Hodgkinson (who has published The Idler since 1993) wrote this book in 2004; 15 years prior to Odell’s work and well before the iPhone, centralized social media platforms, Slack, and marketing automation wormed their way into our lives. But his work is prescient in many ways, and especially in his critiques on the primacy of work and digital technology in modern life, how it distracts us from connecting with each other and with nature, and how lifestyle marketing is part of a parasitic flywheel that creates the psychological and tangible need for more work.

Though the similarities between the two titles caught my attention immediately, aside from a thorough rejection of unfettered capitalism and various proposals for detachment, there seemed little to connect the two books initially. That is until, a few short chapters in, Hodgkinson makes the same literary reference that also underpins Odell’s message.

“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” is a short story by Herman Melville published in 1853. Bartleby is a clerk in a law firm who one day, quite suddenly, just stops doing his job. His polite refrain is “I would prefer not to” in response to questions that are demands disguised as requests.

Bartleby’s quiet subversion of hierarchy and workplace expectations but dissonant adherence to politesse confounds and neuters his boss. Odell writes, “The lawyer, who is often in a rush going about his business, is stopped dead in his tracks, grasping for sense and meaning like Wile E. Coyote having run off a cliff.”

Eventually Bartleby is sent to prison, refuses to eat, and dies. The story includes themes about existential loneliness, the alienation of capitalism, and the politics of refusal. “Bartleby” represents “a refusal in place” as Odell describes it. It is a refrain from participating in a system that demands constant compliance and productivity and robs one of their independence and creativity.

While the parable is central to both authors’ messages: trying to jump off the work-consume-repeat doomloop is nothing less than self and societal preservation, the two authors approach that resistance very differently.

Hodgkinson seems to believe that escape is aspirational and even attainable, “Be fearless, quit your job!” he implores. And while some might roll their eyes or wonder if Hodgkinson has inherited wealth to fall back on to even suggest such a reckless thing, pushing the boundaries of the imagination is essential to discerning the horizon of the possible.

Odell, on the other hand, believes it is more practical to make your rejections of the system from within it, “The counter-cultural communes of the 1960s in particular have much to teach us about the challenges inherent in trying to extricate oneself completely from the fabric of a capitalist reality, as well as what was sometimes an ill-fated attempt to escape politics altogether.”

She illustrates her perspective by pointing towards Old Survivor, the last remaining old-growth redwood in the Oakland, California Hills. Odell writes, “we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. And that way the tree provides me with an image of resistance in place. To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be so easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.”

This message of “refusal as resistance” is just one of many parallel threads I discovered between the two authors’ works. Perhaps the most evident is their critiques of productivity culture, the reduction of leisure time, and the disconnection of work from value.

Much of Hodgkinson’s work is about reassessing the ways of being of the past as a foil against our present pains. Describing work patterns of the pre-Industrial era, he writes, “Work and life were intertwined. A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days…he might weave just two yards before he did ‘sundry jobs about the lathe & in the yard.’”

This description has unmistakable echoes of the current, ongoing debate about “work from home” today. Is productivity measured by time spent, output produced, or the quality and necessity of that output? Is it reasonable—or even desirable—to expect a uniform level of production every day, when external forces (otherwise known as living on earth) inevitably affect our capacity to work? Why can’t the work of maintenance (e.g. laundry, cooking, care) coexist alongside wage labor if physically possible?

Odell takes this critique to a macro level, arguing that our economy has become completely detached from real value and human well-being.

She writes, “I begin to identify some of my most serious grievances with the attention economy, namely its reliance on fear and anxiety and its concomitant logic that disruption is more productive than the work of maintenance—of keeping ourselves and others alive and well.”

This captures one of the fundamental distortions of modern work culture: we do not value what sustains us, only what generates surplus profit or feeds the cycle of endless growth for someone else who is already wealthy beyond imagination.

Productivity culture does not exist to benefit the worker, but to extract the maximum amount of labor while keeping people too overworked, too distracted, and too exhausted to question its premises. Modern work culture is not a neutral evolution of labor—it is the endgame of a system that, for 500 years, has prioritized the accumulation of wealth for the few over human flourishing for the many. It has severed work from meaning, turning time into a commodity to be bought, sold, and optimized.

Opportunistically this pernicious system creates a problem and then sells us the solution. Rest and self-care become things you buy, like silk eye masks (which I happen to love) and expensive vacations.

Basic bodily functions like sleeping and eating become sites of performance optimization. A nap isn’t just a nap; it’s a “power nap” and its purpose is not rest but to enable more work. Or maybe you buy a frothy nap dress so that you can perform the luxury of rest correctly.

Hodgkinson, who dismisses foods meant to be consumed while in motion (like breakfast bars) with the quip “it’s not eating, it’s lonely refueling” must be thoroughly horrified by the concept of Huel. As he so succinctly summarizes the demands of capitalism, “Problem: Anxiety. Solution: Money. Method: Work.”

Even what leisure time we have is monetized and repurposed as “productive” time. According to Odell:

“We submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance. Like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of a personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on nothing. It provides no return on investment. It is simply too expensive.”

In Hodgkinson’s chapter on tea he says that “tea injects idleness into the working day,” a statement that seems scandalous. No one today would admit to downtime during working hours. And even if you do have three minutes in between meetings, many white collar workers end up scrolling Slack or Teams, the home of the workplace doomscroll.

But it wasn’t so very long ago that taking breaks was seen as healthy and normal and worthwhile on their own merits. At one of my very first jobs (circa 2005 or so) a group of us would have a standing date in the lunch room everyday around 3pm for coffee. Not that every person could be present every day, but I really can’t imagine a group of lower level employees having that kind of time and freedom to stop and refresh themselves and be human with each other today.

Yet both Odell and Hodgkinson insist that periods of unfocused and seemingly “unproductive” time are absolutely necessary to creativity and human flourishing. Hodgkinson writes, “Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies… Long periods of languor, indolence, and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.” In his personal hierarchy, the slacker is held in high regard.

It’s why going for a walk can help clear your head or why you get your best ideas in the shower. I believe this easing of the mind combined with the movement of the body that allows these ideas to float to the top of our prefrontal cortex. In a soft way, it allows our bodies and minds to notice something.

Which is exactly what Odell means with her concept of “doing nothing.” Doing nothing is really about noticing. It’s about having the capacity to pay attention, ideally in similar places over time. In our current context where your attention is currency, it is a radical act to purposefully extract it from commoditization. It only looks like nothing from the outside. We are so used to being harried that when something feels easy or natural we are suspicious of it. To Odell, attention calls into question what is and isn’t a creative act:

“Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation…I am interested in manifest dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation. Something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly.”

This concept of dismantling harm and “re-remembering” the past harmonizes with Hodgkinson’s general call to resurrect approaches and frameworks from history that would be beneficial for us to restore to public consciousness.

This act of gentle noticing—that is, being idle or doing “nothing”—certainly requires time. But it often requires spaces outside of home and work to truly allow the mind to observe and wander. For example, places as mundane as the library, or as grand as a national park, or even the quiet observation of birds chirping in a public garden—are all spaces of resistance because they are uncommodified and egalitarian. “The most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don't have to buy anything or pretend to want to buy something to be there,” Odell writes.

Hodgkinson points out how doing nothing—especially not shopping or spending money—is perceived as suspicious. Even walking can be transgressive, “the act of rambling is an act of revolt.” So it should come as no surprise, that all of these places (and others like them) are increasingly endangered refuges. Capitalism and destruction of the commons—and in particular the ecological commons—go hand in hand.

As does the the corrosive effects of lifestyle creep and gentrification. Many third places, such as the cafe, bar, and movie theater traditionally have been community gathering places as well as places of commerce. One of Hodgkinson’s favorites is the traditional English pub: “Since the essence of the pub has been in its public nature, it is democratic. Anyone can go. It is the Common Man's Members Club.”

But many of these places have been scooped up by private equity and flattened into context-less, corporatized spaces that have algorithmically smoothed experiences designed for maximum profit, not connection. They are expensive to patronize, often treat their workers abysmally, and most of the profits are sucked out of your local economy and deposited into some distant rich guy’s bank account.

These places feel uncanny because they offer the facade of the community you can no longer feel but that you desperately want to be there. You want to feel it enough you can almost delude yourself into thinking that it’s really there.

Odell’s variation of resistance is birthed through deep engagement. “Doing nothing” is first detaching—from your devices, from commoditized spaces, from sterile environments—and then observing deeply within the context of time and history.

Hodgkinson offers resistance through joyful rebellion. He invites the reader to join his secret society of joyful idlers to take naps, drink in pubs, and to take leisurely teas with friends.

One of the biggest differences between these two works is that Odell specifically says she will not distill her ethos into a tidy creed, “It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live, but I refuse to do that. That's because the pitfalls of the attention economy can't just be avoided by logging off.”

At it’s heart, “How to Do Nothing” is a systemic, political call to action that centers community, including the non-human community of our environment. Her book is about creating awareness and offering frameworks to see and think differently, but without dictating a specific path.

Whereas recommendations about how to live is explicitly what Hodgkinson is doing. “How to Be Idle” is a personal manifesto of how to best enjoy yourself on earth in a pro-social context. I might describe it as “gentle hedonism.”

Odell does not reference “How to Be Idle” in her book so I don’t have any evidence she read it or was even aware of it at the time she wrote her own. It was initially published in the UK, and as far as I can tell, extant copies are not all that common in the US. My copy is an old library book bought from an online, second hand bookshop.

I think I serendipitously stumbled upon this unlikely yet lovely companion set. And I recommend reading them in the order I did: Odell’s first to give you the macro philosophical context followed up by Hodgkinson which is admittedly a lighter read, especially with his delightfully snarky, overtly British tone.