Jenny Odell

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing. Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn’t built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible. In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, “saving” time—recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Saving Time

Karolina

I think the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, but that they have to. This modern view of time can't be extricated from the wage relationship, the necessity of selling your time, which as common and unquestionable as it seems now, is as historically specific as any other method of valuing work and existence.

Time is the punitive dimension in which the wage worker is both measured and squeezed. But beyond that, an overemphasis on fungible time upholds an impoverished view of what time and labor are in the first place. The industrial view of time as money can see time only as work, the masculinized work of a machine with an On/Off button.

For an individual, time is not the measurement of something real but, rather, a "structuring relation of power."

Images and experiences are the leisure time counterpart of time management self-help. The same individual who is encouraged to buy time from others instead of having a mutual support network is also encouraged to consume periodic experiences of slowness instead of acting in ways that might reclaim her time—or help others reclaim theirs.

If the concept of leisure has any utility for me it has to be this: an interruption, an apprehension, a glimpse both of the truth and of something completely different from what we normally see. This leisure is alien not just to the world of work, but also to the habitual, everyday world. Given the opportunity to slow down, what I find is not slowness per se, but simply what has been happening all along, just outside my perception.

Whether on the level of minutes or of life stages and benchmarks, the more you stare at time, the more cruelly it seems to slip through your fingers.

To try to reduce the rich topography of experience to a means of maximal output is part of the same philosophy that would turn its back on the ocean or to one's inner landscape, where something new is always coming in on the tide.

Maybe "the point" isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.

Katy Watkins

Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: Say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they're still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What's more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all.

I was not aware of how closely the local ecology had co-evolved with periodic fire, nor the extent to which indigenous people worldwide had used fire, nor how or when such practices were banned. In other words, I thought I was looking at natural history, not political or cultural history—as if the two could even be separated.

Saving Time quotes

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