“Then as I’m writing about these horribly exploitative systems and relationships of power in which things have worked out for me, I felt there was also this moral interrogation that was going on that I think was necessary. And then knowing about those informed me going into Saving Time,” she says. “I just felt like there were some blind spots in How to Do Nothing. (The approach has earned Saving Time an early detractor.) The above chapter also covers fire deficit, Shell and BP, Smokey Bear, author Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” the Anthropocene, 19th-century slave plantation owner Henry Lascelles, the work of feminist poet Hélène Cixous, Maori writer Nadine Anne Hura, climate writer Kate Aronoff, and the hot dog guy from I Think You Should Leave. In fact, I’m having trouble summarizing it here.

Her nonfiction work is too knotty a thing to smooth out into some 10-step program for changing your life. Much more often, she’s neither of those things. Odell can read at times like a therapist or self-help author. It is the kind of hypothetical reframing away from unhelpful nostalgia and nihilism that a therapist might pose or one might read in a self-help book. But it makes it feel more like a field of possibility in which many paths are possible.

“Like, it doesn’t make the future less scary. “How would that change how you felt about ?” she asks when our conversation goes toward a chapter in which she challenges readers to imagine being born in the exactly right time. It is a kind of compendium on time itself, one that attempts to take a less depressing and deterministic view of the climate future. Where How to Do Nothing was a treatise on redirecting one’s time away from the productivity-industrial complex and toward some stronger stuff, Odell’s latest goes even wider. It was just days before the publication of her new book, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock, her follow up to her 2019 bestseller How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the accidental book of the pandemic. “What if you imagined that, actually, you were born at the exact right time?” Jenny Odell, artist and author, poses on a video call from her home in Oakland, California, pausing briefly to smile.

How to do nothing by jenny o dell