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A special mix of genres, both an easy read and a challenging essay in terms of its resources. And a very necessary postface on the Europeanness of it all..

And the first clear explanation on why existentialism just doesn't do it these days (!):

''If I cannot sleep, it is because I have been transformed into a weird monstrosity of a species that I do not particularly like, that my mind hectically tries to grasp, but I lack the words and expressions to understand. The insight from the existentialist tradition I was fond of as a teenager no longer hit the spot. [...] Existence probably still precedes essence, but this new existence is definitely another sort of being, one that is constantly fleeing home. It is not just that I exist for myself, [..] it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. [....] The nausea that keeps me from falling asleep is due not to the eternal inescapable depths of my freedom or endless corridors of my own subjectivity, but to its recurrent, external traces in the world. Here lies my bad faith, not in social conformity or subjective inauthenticity, but in the immeasurable, destructive social and natural vestiges that my actions entail. This is what seems impossible to escape - not freedom as such, but the material cost of it.''

A mix of genres, the title of this book is slightly misleading (on purpose). It will attract people trying to get out of social media/news/online addictions, and they will find a plea for bioregionalism. The book attempts well to demonstrate what writing locally looks like, with tons of references to Oakland and the Bay area. The references are diverse, although the philosophy references leave something to desire for (for this topic there are more fruitful and more interesting contemporary thinkers to include than the tiresome Plato, Epicurus and Diogenes). In her plea for locality, Oddell proposes ways to (re-)render your reality by offering more of a choice what to pay attention to. She stresses the deep attention that thought and meaningful dialogue need, and the ways it is undermined by current social media. She does well in nuancing her message and showing that a complete abandonment of the (online) socio-political sphere might not be the point; rather, to be able to choose and resist the ways in which we use and give our attention, to develop the stamina for deep focus and to become more interested and reacquainted with the places we actually share, and importantly, with other beings than humans.