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Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. 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; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. 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; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published March 7, 2023
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December 16, 2022
Lots of disparate thoughts here (much like this book), but I will try to capture them all:
Thought number one: Jenny Odell seems more interested/able to keep her head in a place of existentialism (including existential dread) than I really care to for my own mental well-being. Particularly in the early sections, in which she describes the complexity and intentionality behind the late stage capitalism in which we find ourselves, as well as her deep dives on climate anxiety—which are numerous—I just found myself getting overwhelmed with the level of loss presented here, and the lack of grounding in imagination/envisioning other worlds (although she does reference that she thinks this could be a solution).
Thought number two: this book basically covers a lot of topics that I have been thinking deeply about for at least the past 6 months (or arguably longer) and I have come to a lot of the same conclusions as Odell, but feel like I have taken a more pragmatic/imaginative/solutions-based approach. This meant I was often frustrated by her lack of imagination/inspiration in those areas.
Thought number three: Compared to How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the structure both across and within chapters felt a lot more stream of consciousness, which makes it difficult to synthesize concrete conclusions about her thinking; but then again, I think that is part of the goal (in that some of her conclusions are that ideas are iterative and evolving).
Thought number four: The way that she incorporates intersectionality also felt a bit off to me—almost kind of jerking the reader with these very explicit and abrupt reminders that a lot of this book doesn’t actually apply to many people who are more deeply impacted by capitalism/climate change/the prison industrial complex/etc, which is a good point, but I feel like is also obvious? To any reader of this book.
All in all, I think this gave me a lot of food for thought, and I think readers of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy will like this follow-up, but there were some very specific personal things that meant it was not fully a success. Thanks to Random House (also excited that a big publishing house is taking on these topics in its primary imprint, that’s exciting) for the early review copy of this— Saving Time comes out March 7, 2023.
Thought number one: Jenny Odell seems more interested/able to keep her head in a place of existentialism (including existential dread) than I really care to for my own mental well-being. Particularly in the early sections, in which she describes the complexity and intentionality behind the late stage capitalism in which we find ourselves, as well as her deep dives on climate anxiety—which are numerous—I just found myself getting overwhelmed with the level of loss presented here, and the lack of grounding in imagination/envisioning other worlds (although she does reference that she thinks this could be a solution).
Thought number two: this book basically covers a lot of topics that I have been thinking deeply about for at least the past 6 months (or arguably longer) and I have come to a lot of the same conclusions as Odell, but feel like I have taken a more pragmatic/imaginative/solutions-based approach. This meant I was often frustrated by her lack of imagination/inspiration in those areas.
Thought number three: Compared to How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the structure both across and within chapters felt a lot more stream of consciousness, which makes it difficult to synthesize concrete conclusions about her thinking; but then again, I think that is part of the goal (in that some of her conclusions are that ideas are iterative and evolving).
Thought number four: The way that she incorporates intersectionality also felt a bit off to me—almost kind of jerking the reader with these very explicit and abrupt reminders that a lot of this book doesn’t actually apply to many people who are more deeply impacted by capitalism/climate change/the prison industrial complex/etc, which is a good point, but I feel like is also obvious? To any reader of this book.
All in all, I think this gave me a lot of food for thought, and I think readers of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy will like this follow-up, but there were some very specific personal things that meant it was not fully a success. Thanks to Random House (also excited that a big publishing house is taking on these topics in its primary imprint, that’s exciting) for the early review copy of this— Saving Time comes out March 7, 2023.
March 26, 2023
This is not a good book. It's essentially a collage of quotes. The quotes themselves are almost entirely good and useful. But it turns out that skimming the cream off the top of six trillion books, articles, essays, movies, etc. produces a too-rich experience. Reading this upset my psychic stomach.
My impression of this book: "As X said in their review of Y; capitalism is bad; PLEASE don't cancel me...and if you could actually retroactively de-cancel me for the issues you took with my previous book, that would be great."
I feel kind of mean-spirited here but this just clashes so intensely with my concept of a book as a place to experience someone completing a thought (or set of related thoughts). This felt more like scrolling the Twitter of someone I basically agree with and admire. i.e. not completely useless but nowhere near as satisfying as reading a good book. Plus, speaking of Twitter, I gotta say that most of the sources and points here will likely feel a bit tired to anyone who has been on it in the past five years.
Final remark is that this is a good time capsule of please-don't-cancel-me-itis. She really lost me with this:
It's okay to feel sad when you see a dead bird!!!!! No privilege checking required!!!!
My impression of this book: "As X said in their review of Y; capitalism is bad; PLEASE don't cancel me...and if you could actually retroactively de-cancel me for the issues you took with my previous book, that would be great."
I feel kind of mean-spirited here but this just clashes so intensely with my concept of a book as a place to experience someone completing a thought (or set of related thoughts). This felt more like scrolling the Twitter of someone I basically agree with and admire. i.e. not completely useless but nowhere near as satisfying as reading a good book. Plus, speaking of Twitter, I gotta say that most of the sources and points here will likely feel a bit tired to anyone who has been on it in the past five years.
Final remark is that this is a good time capsule of please-don't-cancel-me-itis. She really lost me with this:
Right at the beginning of my leisurely walk along the rocks, I saw a strange shape in the sand. It was a dead grebe, and it was not the only washed-up seabird I would see that day. Though I know people see far worse things on a regular basis, it was a stinging sight.
It's okay to feel sad when you see a dead bird!!!!! No privilege checking required!!!!
March 15, 2023
A big letdown. Saving Time is tedious, meandering, and impersonal. It feels like a response to critiques of How to Do Nothing, but lacks the spark of originality and introspection of her previous. Instead she largely settles for quoting and summarizing the works of others, with the result feeling unoriginal and dull (unfortunately). I wanted to like this book (and am a mark for the book’s premise about time), but was ultimately disappointed that I couldn’t.
February 13, 2023
I love the way Jenny Odell's mind works, combining close attention to the world around us (including pop culture) with deep research. I always walk away from her books with new knowledge, fortified to live more fully. Her books are titled and marketed like self-help books, but they're really philosophy, asking readers to really examine how we live -- and how we maybe would be better off living -- in modern times.
This is dense and thoughtful and absolutely worth the time.
Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.
This is dense and thoughtful and absolutely worth the time.
Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.
April 9, 2023
Much like Odell's first book, How to Do Nothing, the title makes this book sound like a self-help, but it is not. It’s a sprawling intellectual exercise, the kind of book that has 50 pages of notes, a bibliography, and an index. While I enjoyed aspects of the intellectual exercise, tapping away quotes and thoughts for later on the notes app of my phone, my complaint with this book is exactly the same as her first: there's no clear thesis, the book lacks cohesiveness, and the most salient points are lost in a sea of references to pop culture, documentaries, research, philosophy, history, ecology, art, etc, etc.
However, I can acknowledge that the topic is a slippery one. Literally, time is slipping through my fingers as I write this. Her thirteen ways of looking at the blackbird (here I mean time, though she also does also talk a lot about birds) is evocative of the abstraction of time itself, which I think she is trying to do.
If I had to summarize the thesis of this book, I would say something like this: We live in a culture that works on clock-time, therefore we understand the world via clock time, our economy revolves around clock time (i.e. time = money), and an underlying assumption that time is the same for everyone. But it is not -- time is different for everyone. It's different for people with disabilities ("crip time"), it's different for the worker vs the employer (for if we logic time = money, and the worker earns less than the employer, then time is valued differently), it was (still is?) different for indigenous or aboriginal peoples, for the incarcerated, for the stay-at-home mom, and on, and on, and on.
Furthermore, there is time that exists outside the realm of humans that is happening on scales we can't perceive; there's moss time, and rock time, and the time of the seasons -- "things that happen both quickly and slowly, at both tiny and inconceivably epic scales."
She then ties in that clock time/economic time for which our entire society is organized and contrasts it with these other ways of understanding time leading to an overarching sense of climate dread and existential crisis of the nihilistic flavor. As in, we are a culture obsessed with ever-increasing productivity & time optimization & striving for numerical longevity -- but for what? Being more productive = more product & more money & buying more things & buying experiences = ??? Why does it matter when it increasingly feels like we are on the edge of climate crisis, an actual apocalypse? (Note: this book was written in the pandemic and it's aftermath, giving a certain edge to these feelings.)
The author argues that by acknowledging (societally) that there are other ways to conceive of time, also means that there are other possible futures -- that neither our lives, nor the fate of the environment has to be deterministic.
She asks us to see leisure is not refreshment for work, but something in it's own sake, and something precious. That for a more equitable society where everyone has the ability to have leisure time, and for a world that is not determined to be destroyed by the hedonistic treadmill of capitalism, there needs to be society-level change. She suggests that the achievement-obsessed individual, while helping move that societal dial forward through socialistic measures, should also step down from the ambition ladder to experiment with mediocrity: "then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre."
Again, there were some great quotes and some poignant things to think about (though I can't see this landing well with anyone who isn't at least a little open to socialism). However, the best parts are lost in a mess of intellectual fodder that can be hard to sift through, even for those willing (e.g. me). I wish it were more accessible, because I think this is important stuff.
However, I can acknowledge that the topic is a slippery one. Literally, time is slipping through my fingers as I write this. Her thirteen ways of looking at the blackbird (here I mean time, though she also does also talk a lot about birds) is evocative of the abstraction of time itself, which I think she is trying to do.
If I had to summarize the thesis of this book, I would say something like this: We live in a culture that works on clock-time, therefore we understand the world via clock time, our economy revolves around clock time (i.e. time = money), and an underlying assumption that time is the same for everyone. But it is not -- time is different for everyone. It's different for people with disabilities ("crip time"), it's different for the worker vs the employer (for if we logic time = money, and the worker earns less than the employer, then time is valued differently), it was (still is?) different for indigenous or aboriginal peoples, for the incarcerated, for the stay-at-home mom, and on, and on, and on.
Furthermore, there is time that exists outside the realm of humans that is happening on scales we can't perceive; there's moss time, and rock time, and the time of the seasons -- "things that happen both quickly and slowly, at both tiny and inconceivably epic scales."
She then ties in that clock time/economic time for which our entire society is organized and contrasts it with these other ways of understanding time leading to an overarching sense of climate dread and existential crisis of the nihilistic flavor. As in, we are a culture obsessed with ever-increasing productivity & time optimization & striving for numerical longevity -- but for what? Being more productive = more product & more money & buying more things & buying experiences = ??? Why does it matter when it increasingly feels like we are on the edge of climate crisis, an actual apocalypse? (Note: this book was written in the pandemic and it's aftermath, giving a certain edge to these feelings.)
The author argues that by acknowledging (societally) that there are other ways to conceive of time, also means that there are other possible futures -- that neither our lives, nor the fate of the environment has to be deterministic.
She asks us to see leisure is not refreshment for work, but something in it's own sake, and something precious. That for a more equitable society where everyone has the ability to have leisure time, and for a world that is not determined to be destroyed by the hedonistic treadmill of capitalism, there needs to be society-level change. She suggests that the achievement-obsessed individual, while helping move that societal dial forward through socialistic measures, should also step down from the ambition ladder to experiment with mediocrity: "then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre."
Again, there were some great quotes and some poignant things to think about (though I can't see this landing well with anyone who isn't at least a little open to socialism). However, the best parts are lost in a mess of intellectual fodder that can be hard to sift through, even for those willing (e.g. me). I wish it were more accessible, because I think this is important stuff.
April 24, 2023
I loved How to Do Nothing, but Saving Time was a letdown, lacking in what made HTDN special. It would’ve been fine if this book were half its length, but it clearly could have benefited from better editing.
The crisp, incisive observational perspective of How to Do Nothing made Odell’s debut a pleasure to read. However, most of Saving Time overshadows Odell’s own voice with an excessive litany of quotations cobbled together from other sources. It’s hard to overstate how much of this book is made of references to other writers. To the extent that I enjoyed the book, it was through some of these references that were more interesting in themselves than what Odell had to say about them. It’s a throughly researched book, but it is over-reliant on citation to a fault.
Insofar as Odell allows herself to speak, she comes off as self-conscious and a bit woo-woo at times. For whatever reason she felt the need to, a significant part of this is spent retroactively addressing criticisms of How to Do Nothing, which felt unnecessary and out of place in what is supposed to be its own independent book.
Odell’s perceptive, wandering stream of consciousness narration is a key element to her style, but it isn’t given the proper space to shine this time around. Her all italics Bay Area road trip travelogue asides felt like gratuitous interruptions with no clear connection to the main text. While these meandering strolls through nature were a highlight of HTDN, these felt spliced in as if from a separate work rather than seamlessly woven into the narrative.
There is plenty of food for thought that comes up, but I suspect that if you are already inclined to read this book, it doesn’t lead to any surprising conclusions about our relationship with time as lived under capitalism and climate collapse. If you’ve ever attended a vaguely evangelical church, you’ve no doubt heard the sermon about chronos versus kairos time. Saving Time felt like a secularized version of that sermon, for those who can relate. In the place of youth pastor energy though, what you end up getting feels more like a tour through Odell’s Zotero library.
The crisp, incisive observational perspective of How to Do Nothing made Odell’s debut a pleasure to read. However, most of Saving Time overshadows Odell’s own voice with an excessive litany of quotations cobbled together from other sources. It’s hard to overstate how much of this book is made of references to other writers. To the extent that I enjoyed the book, it was through some of these references that were more interesting in themselves than what Odell had to say about them. It’s a throughly researched book, but it is over-reliant on citation to a fault.
Insofar as Odell allows herself to speak, she comes off as self-conscious and a bit woo-woo at times. For whatever reason she felt the need to, a significant part of this is spent retroactively addressing criticisms of How to Do Nothing, which felt unnecessary and out of place in what is supposed to be its own independent book.
Odell’s perceptive, wandering stream of consciousness narration is a key element to her style, but it isn’t given the proper space to shine this time around. Her all italics Bay Area road trip travelogue asides felt like gratuitous interruptions with no clear connection to the main text. While these meandering strolls through nature were a highlight of HTDN, these felt spliced in as if from a separate work rather than seamlessly woven into the narrative.
There is plenty of food for thought that comes up, but I suspect that if you are already inclined to read this book, it doesn’t lead to any surprising conclusions about our relationship with time as lived under capitalism and climate collapse. If you’ve ever attended a vaguely evangelical church, you’ve no doubt heard the sermon about chronos versus kairos time. Saving Time felt like a secularized version of that sermon, for those who can relate. In the place of youth pastor energy though, what you end up getting feels more like a tour through Odell’s Zotero library.
December 5, 2022
I feel completely cracked open by this. Odell explores time not only in its form as we know it [the clock], but in its existence within nature, in carceral spaces, in public spaces, in our minds, in public, in recording, in spoken language, and most especially as it relates to labor. How it seems no matter how much effort we put in to 'beat the clock', the only true form of leisure can be found not in our bodily experience, but in the expansion of our minds. And that's not just it! It's more than that. And I think what I have really taken away is that my anger is justified; I am chronically tired, in pain, upset or disrupted and all of that can be traced back to colonization and capitalism and white supremacy and the fact that we are all "rise and grind" in benefit of people who are not us. Odell hits on identity intersections of race, queerness, disability, and her sharp observance of the world has peeled me wide and ready for my own expansion. Who can reject time? Who can reject the grind? Who gets to survive this wretched mess of a system?
April 18, 2023
I really like Jenny Odell's ideas, but I struggle so much with her writing
January 21, 2024
Absolutely wonderful book illustrating the ways in which our conception of time was imposed on us by forces that do not value us, and how other conceptions of time have been stolen along the way. It's a terrific sort of follow up to How To Do Nothing , one of the best books of the last decade.
I read this at the same time as DO / PAUSE, by Robert Poynton, and think of them as sister books. Saving Time is about the problem, and how things got the way they are. DO / PAUSE is a strikingly simple, personal solution.
They work so well together it's unreal. Read both.
I read this at the same time as DO / PAUSE, by Robert Poynton, and think of them as sister books. Saving Time is about the problem, and how things got the way they are. DO / PAUSE is a strikingly simple, personal solution.
They work so well together it's unreal. Read both.
March 17, 2023
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this book.
I'm ~70% through this and tapping out. I enjoyed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, but this feels deeply aware of some of the criticism that book got and seems like it's constantly trying to outrun and respond to that, which gets irritating at times. There are meandering narrative sections between the reflections in each chapter that I absolutely was skimming over towards the end of my time with this book, and though it keeps asking "whose time is being wasted", I felt like it was mine. Maybe I'll return to this in a few years, but right now this was the wrong book at the wrong time.
I'm ~70% through this and tapping out. I enjoyed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, but this feels deeply aware of some of the criticism that book got and seems like it's constantly trying to outrun and respond to that, which gets irritating at times. There are meandering narrative sections between the reflections in each chapter that I absolutely was skimming over towards the end of my time with this book, and though it keeps asking "whose time is being wasted", I felt like it was mine. Maybe I'll return to this in a few years, but right now this was the wrong book at the wrong time.
June 23, 2023
READING VLOG
Major thanks to NetGalley for offering an ARC for this book in exchange for my honest review:
Time is not money.
Time is beans.
Rocks are alive.
See time as fungal.
Odell writes with a voice that hums with Oakland heat, you know, those long lazy walks round Lake Merritt that remind you again how wonderful life is. Because you’re looking at the people. You’re looking at the families and the kids running and the lovers and the old folks and you think, I could be any one of these people.
Because time is shared.
“..𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦. 𝘛𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘪𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘩𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨.”
“𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘦..𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦.”
Time moves like lava. It moves in all directions at difference paces. Time covers ground like moss. Time goes beyond start to finish. Time is the rest the tortoise takes to race the hare.
But it’s because time is eurocentric, systematic, and labor-intensive do we fail to realize that time is non-linear. It’s hard to see beyond the capitalistic chokehold America is under. This is why people fail. This is why people die.
“𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳, 𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘢 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘯. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥-𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘵."
We do not all have the same amount of time. 24 hours for a coal miner is much different for the influencer in Bali.
But how do we see time as fungal but without hope?
Odell is hopeful. And she is most encouraging for those that see so much doom in the future.
“𝘐𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥—𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥, 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘬𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦—𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭."
She ends with hope:
"𝘛𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘱 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.."
Major thanks to NetGalley for offering an ARC for this book in exchange for my honest review:
Time is not money.
Time is beans.
Rocks are alive.
See time as fungal.
Odell writes with a voice that hums with Oakland heat, you know, those long lazy walks round Lake Merritt that remind you again how wonderful life is. Because you’re looking at the people. You’re looking at the families and the kids running and the lovers and the old folks and you think, I could be any one of these people.
Because time is shared.
“..𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦. 𝘛𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘪𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘩𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨.”
“𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘦..𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦.”
Time moves like lava. It moves in all directions at difference paces. Time covers ground like moss. Time goes beyond start to finish. Time is the rest the tortoise takes to race the hare.
But it’s because time is eurocentric, systematic, and labor-intensive do we fail to realize that time is non-linear. It’s hard to see beyond the capitalistic chokehold America is under. This is why people fail. This is why people die.
“𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳, 𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘢 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘯. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥-𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘵."
We do not all have the same amount of time. 24 hours for a coal miner is much different for the influencer in Bali.
But how do we see time as fungal but without hope?
Odell is hopeful. And she is most encouraging for those that see so much doom in the future.
“𝘐𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥—𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥, 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘬𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦—𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭."
She ends with hope:
"𝘛𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘱 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.."
May 12, 2023
[This piece originally appeared in The Cardiff Review ]
During the spring of 2019—just a year shy of when the coronavirus pandemic rendered being online as one of the only feasible ways to “step out” for a while—I was habitually sprawled in a corner of my room, scrolling through an assemblage of other “rooms” on Instagram in order to momentarily escape my own nondescript life, and wondering why it was always only by sundown that I could muster the time and energy to go out and be amongst nature—when it was already too late to do so, or at least safely. Very often I found myself tangled up in the sticky webs of social media, pressed against the grain of other lives that seemed more put together, more leisurely, and more productive than mine. I felt burnt out by just the thought of keeping up and tried to disappear from the Internet every now and then. Each time, I came back feeling sheepish and a little defeated by the incredible hold it had on my attention, something I seemed no longer able to give—much less devote—to anything meaningful or “worthy.”
There was no way to make sense of the guilt, fracture, and pressure I felt leaking from the online world into the one more immediately around me until I read How to Do Nothing , Jenny Odell’s brilliant book about resisting what she termed the “attention economy” by spending time in quiet contemplation. This book—a powerful blend of personal memoir, art criticism, and socio-cultural critique—allowed me to name our era’s obsession with self-optimisation and measuring every action by the yardstick of its marketability, and offered a refreshing perspective on tuning back into our own rhythms by indulging the generative states of “solitude, observation, and simple conviviality”. But though it changed my thinking and freed me from wanting to spend my time in the ways I “ought” to, I closed the covers on How to Do Nothing awash with feeling like I didn’t have the time to do what was prescribed. Time, to me, was scarce—and it seemed incorrigibly linked with money. How, then, could I do “nothing” with it?
It seems that Odell felt this way, too, for her new book attempts to address this very gap and question. In Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock , she moves to exploring the question of time itself: its slipperiness, its sinuousness, its commodification. “What we think time is, how we think it is shaped, affects how we are able to move through it,” she reflects towards the beginning of the book, which she admits to having started working on a few months into the pandemic, disturbed—as we all were—by the “temporal weirdness” that came from how static time felt during the lockdown even as the seasons continued to change outside. For Odell, her experience of time during the pandemic was quite like the growth of moss in one of her planters: still on the surface, but also elastic, rhizomatic, and revealing of the cracks around which it established itself. Like the moss, time in that period took on its own rhythms against which the regimentation of clocks was rendered meaningless, calling the author to question what the clocks were for in the first place.
These questions, guided by the moss, slowly grew into the central thesis of Saving Time: that the clock we obey was built to serve profit rather than the betterment of human ecology, and from that dynamic has sprung the rule of efficiency, which now guides all else, including our concept of leisure. Indeed, insofar as leisure is defined within the constricting realms of a capitalist culture that divides time into periods of “work and refreshment-for-more-work”, any invocations of slowness—including those made in How to Do Nothing—risk being but an aesthetic fix, for “now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labour time, it’s what you see when you look in the mirror.” It is this deep entrenchment of time with productivity that allows time to be appropriated as a non-renewable resource at the risk of running out, and leads us to a state of “frenetic doing,” one that results in leisure no longer acting as a space in which we pay attention but rather a space that exists for acquiring valuable experiences, marking a departure from the need to unpack the “attention economy” in favour of a more expansive, more substantial “experience economy.”
Mixing the author’s signature candour and sincere, memoiristic writing from the pandemic with a robust structural analysis of the world as it stands today, this new book is less a correction of the previous one, and more an exercise in thinking otherwise—about time, our time, and its relationship with the extractive machinations of the system of efficiency-driven capitalism within which it unfolds. Odell thus starts this project by tracing the historical development of time management, whereby clocks became “tools of domination.” She reveals the direct link between plantation slavery and accounting spreadsheets, between church bells and the standardisation of time, between colonial projects and the deployment of labour as a “civilising” force which led to the emergence of a “protestant work ethic” enshrining morality, hard work, and a commitment to constant self-improvement, and how these have mutated, over time, into modern, gamified, technological forms of surveillance and the bootstrapper culture that is firmly ingrained into our collective consciousness this side of the 21st century. Saving Time attempts to open readers up to recognising our current understanding of time as “a structuring relation of power” that is inextricably connected not just with race, class, and colonial inequities and how these debilitate us in different ways, but also with the climate crisis and the growing existential dread that is increasingly becoming a defining characteristic of our age.
I should add, however, that Odell here is not merely acting to diagnose our fatalism and time-bound discontent. For her, Saving Time is a “panoramic assault on nihilism” also committed to dwelling in the nature of time beyond its capitalist externalisation as the clock, something that reveals how “neither our lives nor the lives of the planet are a foregone conclusion.” Like How to Do Nothing, this book is outwardly presented as part of the burgeoning self-help genre, and may even be shelved as such in bookstores. But rather than “teaching” us to make time in the more immediate sense where “one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up”, it urges looking at time—and at leisure—as something that is shared, social, and related to our political imagination.
Here, to indulge in “self”-care and “self”-help is to see how closely our individual trajectories are connected with each other and with those of the material and non-material world, to see how far the clock and its abstraction and intensification of labour hours removes us from the way many societies organise and continue to organise their activities based on “different ecological and cultural cues”. This reminds me of Odell’s earlier invocation of moss: that it does in fact manage to grow in the cracks between the pavement, but also that the pavement itself was laid down at some point in time and was not “always there”.
Certainly, even as individuals shaped by the rigidity of the clock and timetable, Odell says that:
In thus rethinking the future of time, Odell also asks us all to reconceptualise our expectations of the time we are purposing in the present. For her, time is something to “garden” rather than to “hoard”; “the point” of which is not “to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, be more alive in any given moment”; to truly experience the present with its bubbles and dissonance, and its “feeling of an undercurrent, an underlanguage, or an undercommons”, rather than moving through it as hurried participants of a race where every movement is timed and assessed for impact and efficiency, or the potential thereof.
All this considered, Saving Time is a rigorously researched and deeply hopeful work that fuses Odell’s personal and anecdotal experience with the ideas of a variety of thinkers, artists, activists, and workers in order to bring readers to head with controlling time—not just “our” time, but all of it. Though elliptical in structure and not as straightforwardly accessible as Odell’s first book, it is a refreshing primer against the tyranny of time that makes way for thinking of more concrete strategies towards organising against it.
Having walked the expanse of this book, I feel a sense of shift in the way I see time: scrolling through Instagram in the confines of my room or working on the clock of the company that pays my wage, it does continue to feel scarce, something I need to mine and make the most of in order, eventually, to make the most of myself. But in the interstices between this present and that future which Odell has now opened me up to—a future that is recovered from the contingencies of past and present, where time is not a commodity and the urge to optimise does not dictate my life and identity—things do not seem quite as bleak as they did only moments ago. There seems to be a time beyond that which we kill in the name of work, and trying to “save” it—to iterate and inhabit its irreducibility—could well mean that the world no longer buries us alive, that time may, indeed, save us.
During the spring of 2019—just a year shy of when the coronavirus pandemic rendered being online as one of the only feasible ways to “step out” for a while—I was habitually sprawled in a corner of my room, scrolling through an assemblage of other “rooms” on Instagram in order to momentarily escape my own nondescript life, and wondering why it was always only by sundown that I could muster the time and energy to go out and be amongst nature—when it was already too late to do so, or at least safely. Very often I found myself tangled up in the sticky webs of social media, pressed against the grain of other lives that seemed more put together, more leisurely, and more productive than mine. I felt burnt out by just the thought of keeping up and tried to disappear from the Internet every now and then. Each time, I came back feeling sheepish and a little defeated by the incredible hold it had on my attention, something I seemed no longer able to give—much less devote—to anything meaningful or “worthy.”
There was no way to make sense of the guilt, fracture, and pressure I felt leaking from the online world into the one more immediately around me until I read How to Do Nothing , Jenny Odell’s brilliant book about resisting what she termed the “attention economy” by spending time in quiet contemplation. This book—a powerful blend of personal memoir, art criticism, and socio-cultural critique—allowed me to name our era’s obsession with self-optimisation and measuring every action by the yardstick of its marketability, and offered a refreshing perspective on tuning back into our own rhythms by indulging the generative states of “solitude, observation, and simple conviviality”. But though it changed my thinking and freed me from wanting to spend my time in the ways I “ought” to, I closed the covers on How to Do Nothing awash with feeling like I didn’t have the time to do what was prescribed. Time, to me, was scarce—and it seemed incorrigibly linked with money. How, then, could I do “nothing” with it?
It seems that Odell felt this way, too, for her new book attempts to address this very gap and question. In Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock , she moves to exploring the question of time itself: its slipperiness, its sinuousness, its commodification. “What we think time is, how we think it is shaped, affects how we are able to move through it,” she reflects towards the beginning of the book, which she admits to having started working on a few months into the pandemic, disturbed—as we all were—by the “temporal weirdness” that came from how static time felt during the lockdown even as the seasons continued to change outside. For Odell, her experience of time during the pandemic was quite like the growth of moss in one of her planters: still on the surface, but also elastic, rhizomatic, and revealing of the cracks around which it established itself. Like the moss, time in that period took on its own rhythms against which the regimentation of clocks was rendered meaningless, calling the author to question what the clocks were for in the first place.
These questions, guided by the moss, slowly grew into the central thesis of Saving Time: that the clock we obey was built to serve profit rather than the betterment of human ecology, and from that dynamic has sprung the rule of efficiency, which now guides all else, including our concept of leisure. Indeed, insofar as leisure is defined within the constricting realms of a capitalist culture that divides time into periods of “work and refreshment-for-more-work”, any invocations of slowness—including those made in How to Do Nothing—risk being but an aesthetic fix, for “now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labour time, it’s what you see when you look in the mirror.” It is this deep entrenchment of time with productivity that allows time to be appropriated as a non-renewable resource at the risk of running out, and leads us to a state of “frenetic doing,” one that results in leisure no longer acting as a space in which we pay attention but rather a space that exists for acquiring valuable experiences, marking a departure from the need to unpack the “attention economy” in favour of a more expansive, more substantial “experience economy.”
Mixing the author’s signature candour and sincere, memoiristic writing from the pandemic with a robust structural analysis of the world as it stands today, this new book is less a correction of the previous one, and more an exercise in thinking otherwise—about time, our time, and its relationship with the extractive machinations of the system of efficiency-driven capitalism within which it unfolds. Odell thus starts this project by tracing the historical development of time management, whereby clocks became “tools of domination.” She reveals the direct link between plantation slavery and accounting spreadsheets, between church bells and the standardisation of time, between colonial projects and the deployment of labour as a “civilising” force which led to the emergence of a “protestant work ethic” enshrining morality, hard work, and a commitment to constant self-improvement, and how these have mutated, over time, into modern, gamified, technological forms of surveillance and the bootstrapper culture that is firmly ingrained into our collective consciousness this side of the 21st century. Saving Time attempts to open readers up to recognising our current understanding of time as “a structuring relation of power” that is inextricably connected not just with race, class, and colonial inequities and how these debilitate us in different ways, but also with the climate crisis and the growing existential dread that is increasingly becoming a defining characteristic of our age.
I should add, however, that Odell here is not merely acting to diagnose our fatalism and time-bound discontent. For her, Saving Time is a “panoramic assault on nihilism” also committed to dwelling in the nature of time beyond its capitalist externalisation as the clock, something that reveals how “neither our lives nor the lives of the planet are a foregone conclusion.” Like How to Do Nothing, this book is outwardly presented as part of the burgeoning self-help genre, and may even be shelved as such in bookstores. But rather than “teaching” us to make time in the more immediate sense where “one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up”, it urges looking at time—and at leisure—as something that is shared, social, and related to our political imagination.
Here, to indulge in “self”-care and “self”-help is to see how closely our individual trajectories are connected with each other and with those of the material and non-material world, to see how far the clock and its abstraction and intensification of labour hours removes us from the way many societies organise and continue to organise their activities based on “different ecological and cultural cues”. This reminds me of Odell’s earlier invocation of moss: that it does in fact manage to grow in the cracks between the pavement, but also that the pavement itself was laid down at some point in time and was not “always there”.
Certainly, even as individuals shaped by the rigidity of the clock and timetable, Odell says that:
[w]e each know many other varieties of time: 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. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.Odell’s subversive reclaiming of experience in Saving Time borrows from pre-industrial, indigenous, and marginalised cultures, as well as from natural and geological timescales, and urges us to see time, “not as happening to objects in the world, but as being co-created with the actors of the world”—something that involves agency as well as instinct, requires being attuned to the larger “body” we all—humans and nature—are part of. Here, history, which is made up of time , is not “a unidirectional and inevitable march of progress” that can only be “sped up or slowed down”, but rather something that can be questioned, redirected, and remade; against the directives of the labour clock, against the pressure to label meaningful rest as stagnation or mediocrity, against a grating future being moulded per the fortunes of Amazon, Google, and powerful energy companies.
In thus rethinking the future of time, Odell also asks us all to reconceptualise our expectations of the time we are purposing in the present. For her, time is something to “garden” rather than to “hoard”; “the point” of which is not “to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, be more alive in any given moment”; to truly experience the present with its bubbles and dissonance, and its “feeling of an undercurrent, an underlanguage, or an undercommons”, rather than moving through it as hurried participants of a race where every movement is timed and assessed for impact and efficiency, or the potential thereof.
All this considered, Saving Time is a rigorously researched and deeply hopeful work that fuses Odell’s personal and anecdotal experience with the ideas of a variety of thinkers, artists, activists, and workers in order to bring readers to head with controlling time—not just “our” time, but all of it. Though elliptical in structure and not as straightforwardly accessible as Odell’s first book, it is a refreshing primer against the tyranny of time that makes way for thinking of more concrete strategies towards organising against it.
Having walked the expanse of this book, I feel a sense of shift in the way I see time: scrolling through Instagram in the confines of my room or working on the clock of the company that pays my wage, it does continue to feel scarce, something I need to mine and make the most of in order, eventually, to make the most of myself. But in the interstices between this present and that future which Odell has now opened me up to—a future that is recovered from the contingencies of past and present, where time is not a commodity and the urge to optimise does not dictate my life and identity—things do not seem quite as bleak as they did only moments ago. There seems to be a time beyond that which we kill in the name of work, and trying to “save” it—to iterate and inhabit its irreducibility—could well mean that the world no longer buries us alive, that time may, indeed, save us.
April 5, 2023
Another excellently researched book from the author. Saving Time is about the history of time - who defines it, who controls time? - with conclusions about resisting conventional temporal ideas about time = profit and seeking meaning both individually and especially collectively. Unfortunately it has the same pitfalls that How to Do Nothing portrayed, feeling alienating to audiences outside of the middle class this feels written for.
Some anecdotes or tangents throughout the chapters, while relevant, could stray too far, which made individual chapters and the book overall feel less cohesive for me. The stream of consciousness that pervades the structure can be difficult to follow, making the reading denser than necessary.
The author explored different 'temporal realities' in some parts but the section in the book about COVID lockdown really lacked a working class perspective; this kind of blind spot extends throughout - marginalized perspectives brought up could and should have been more well-incorporated. The book is very well researched and incorporates many quotes, but to the extent I felt that exploring these references themselves would be preferable.
I felt similarly about the author's previous work, but I wish beyond the existential that the book delved into specific, practical actions for addressing the questions the book raises. The book presents lot of thoughtful ideas but ultimately runs the risk of leaving behind the people most affected by the constraints of capitalist time and the climate crisis.
Some anecdotes or tangents throughout the chapters, while relevant, could stray too far, which made individual chapters and the book overall feel less cohesive for me. The stream of consciousness that pervades the structure can be difficult to follow, making the reading denser than necessary.
The author explored different 'temporal realities' in some parts but the section in the book about COVID lockdown really lacked a working class perspective; this kind of blind spot extends throughout - marginalized perspectives brought up could and should have been more well-incorporated. The book is very well researched and incorporates many quotes, but to the extent I felt that exploring these references themselves would be preferable.
I felt similarly about the author's previous work, but I wish beyond the existential that the book delved into specific, practical actions for addressing the questions the book raises. The book presents lot of thoughtful ideas but ultimately runs the risk of leaving behind the people most affected by the constraints of capitalist time and the climate crisis.
April 24, 2023
Jenny Odell lucidly explains how every minute we’re on the clock we are steeped in Capitalism, Colonialism, and methods of control rooted in chattel slavery. She explores time in the Western industrial creation, scientific and geologic sense, and the indigenous and natural rhythms of her environments. Namely the birds and trees.
🍃
She writes in the introduction to Saving Time “Sometimes the best muse is the thing you’re so afraid of you almost cannot speak it. For me, that is nihilism… This book is my panoramic assault on nihilism. I wrote it in an effort to be helpful, but toward the end, I felt I was writing it to save my life. As the largest gesture of hope I could muster, the following is intended as a future shelter for any reader who feels the same heartbreak as I.”
🍃
As in How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell draws from one of my favorite writers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, specifically from Gathering Moss. The final anecdote in Kimmerer’s book is a tale of a billionaire attempting to fabricate his own mossy haven while destroying a natural outcrop of moss and rocks. Both Kimmerer and Odell tell this story of ownership well. And I highly recommend both books, though Gathering Moss is a bit more specific and brief 😉.
🍃
Reading Jenny Odell is this meditative, informative, impassioned, yet calm experience. I highly recommend bringing her works into your life. 💖
Review first on IG @irismessenger_
🍃
She writes in the introduction to Saving Time “Sometimes the best muse is the thing you’re so afraid of you almost cannot speak it. For me, that is nihilism… This book is my panoramic assault on nihilism. I wrote it in an effort to be helpful, but toward the end, I felt I was writing it to save my life. As the largest gesture of hope I could muster, the following is intended as a future shelter for any reader who feels the same heartbreak as I.”
🍃
As in How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell draws from one of my favorite writers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, specifically from Gathering Moss. The final anecdote in Kimmerer’s book is a tale of a billionaire attempting to fabricate his own mossy haven while destroying a natural outcrop of moss and rocks. Both Kimmerer and Odell tell this story of ownership well. And I highly recommend both books, though Gathering Moss is a bit more specific and brief 😉.
🍃
Reading Jenny Odell is this meditative, informative, impassioned, yet calm experience. I highly recommend bringing her works into your life. 💖
Review first on IG @irismessenger_
March 20, 2023
All right. I guess it's official. This is the second book of Jenny Odell's I've read and I didn't like either one of them. I couldn't keep track of the narrational thread in this disjointed account. There were excerpts of a journey through the bay area without apparent bearing on the rest of the account, pictures that had little to do with anything, and I even found myself questioning why she was quoting certain passages. One chapter was so disconnected from the rest of the account that she simply called it a change in subject, which seemed like a copout. The topic had a lot of potential, but I came away with little new gleanings.
Read
April 8, 2023Listen any book that references the Tim Robinson hot dog sketch and the Ted chiang neopets short story in order to convince me how our western colonial understanding of time has slowly evolved into our all encompassing productivity culture and paralyzing climate dread, and then provides a look into marginalized communities and their alternative perceptions of time to show how we can combat our nihilism and hopefully restore this apocalyptic hellscape into something livable and that we can be proud of, I mean come on it was always going to be extremely my shit
January 1, 2024
Não esperava começar o ano tão mexido com um livro de não ficção! "Em defesa do tempo" me ajudou a encontrar as respostas para muitas angústias relacionadas a trabalho, obsessão por produtividade, dificuldade de descanso e controle do tempo. É uma obra complexa e inteligente que examina como o tempo do relógio nos foi imposto, por mais que para nosso corpo e psique não faça sentido dividir o tempo tão rigida e minuciosamente.
Partindo de um mosaico de referências que englobam questionamentos filosóficos, pesquisas científicas, conhecimentos ancestrais e eventos históricos, Jenny Odell desconstrói a ideia de que "tempo é dinheiro" e mostra a que interesses esse preceito serve. É uma análise profunda do sistema capitalista, que mostra como chegamos a compreender o tempo dessa forma e os malefícios que isso traz. Abrangente, Odell fala sobre trabalhadores autônomos (e seu potencial de esgotamento mental), mães, população carente, prisioneiros e outros grupos a quem os parâmetros modernos de tempo falham.
Se todo mundo tem as mesmas 24h, nem todos têm o direito de escolha sobre o que fazer com elas. Nosso tempo é controlado por fatores externos, muitas vezes por um empregador ou pelas necessidades sociais. Entender isso é útil inclusive para lutar contra o colapso climático, porque só entendendo o tempo da natureza é que conseguiremos reverter a situação — esse é um tópico presente no livro inteiro.
Otimista, perspicaz e profundo, "Em defesa do tempo" é um livro para quem deseja parar de seguir cronos e passar a olhar para kairós.
Partindo de um mosaico de referências que englobam questionamentos filosóficos, pesquisas científicas, conhecimentos ancestrais e eventos históricos, Jenny Odell desconstrói a ideia de que "tempo é dinheiro" e mostra a que interesses esse preceito serve. É uma análise profunda do sistema capitalista, que mostra como chegamos a compreender o tempo dessa forma e os malefícios que isso traz. Abrangente, Odell fala sobre trabalhadores autônomos (e seu potencial de esgotamento mental), mães, população carente, prisioneiros e outros grupos a quem os parâmetros modernos de tempo falham.
Se todo mundo tem as mesmas 24h, nem todos têm o direito de escolha sobre o que fazer com elas. Nosso tempo é controlado por fatores externos, muitas vezes por um empregador ou pelas necessidades sociais. Entender isso é útil inclusive para lutar contra o colapso climático, porque só entendendo o tempo da natureza é que conseguiremos reverter a situação — esse é um tópico presente no livro inteiro.
Otimista, perspicaz e profundo, "Em defesa do tempo" é um livro para quem deseja parar de seguir cronos e passar a olhar para kairós.
February 22, 2024
Was erwartet man von einem Sachbuch mit dem Titel „Zeit finden“? Etwas über die Schnelllebigkeit unserer heutigen Zeit? Über Kapitalismus? Oder vielleicht über Aussteiger, die sich dem durchgetakteten Leben entziehen? Meine Erwartungshaltung an die neue Veröffentlichung von Jenny Odell, die mit „Nichts tun“ einen durchschlagenden Erfolg landen konnte, war durchaus diffus. Allerdings stellte sich auch „Zeit finden“ als durchaus diffus heraus, was zu keiner sonderlich erhellenden Leseerfahrung führte.
Ganz erwartbar geht es am Anfang um Arbeit. Es geht um die „Erfindung“ der Zeit, um Arbeit messen, quantifizieren und einteilen zu können. Das gilt sowohl für Sklaven- als auch für Lohnarbeit. Einiges in diesen Kapiteln ist leidlich interessant – wie zum Beispiel die Einführung einer einheitlichen Zeit oder der Zeitverschiebungen. Wie lange zum Beispiel in den USA verschiedene Zeiten vorherrschten und zu regelmäßigem Chaos führten (unter anderem beim Zugverkehr) ist überraschend, zumindest für die hier rezensierende Europäerin. Doch geht es leider viel zu lange zum selben Thema weiter: Schlagworte sind Kapitalismus, Sklavenarbeit, Lohnarbeit, Produktivität, Selbstoptimierung, Produktivitätstracker, Ratgeber und Apps zur Verbesserung der eigenen Leistungsfähigkeit.
Zumindest ist hier noch ein Zusammenhang zum übergeordneten Thema „Zeit“ erkennbar. Das wird mit fortschreitender Lektüre immer schwieriger. Mal geht es um eine Bibliothek, mal um Überschwemmungen, mal um Corona und dann wieder um Waldbrände. Oft, leider viel zu oft, geht es um irgendwelche Instagram-Influencer, deren halbgares und oberflächliches Leben Odell vermutlich bloßzustellen versucht. Allerdings stellt sie nur ihre eigene Fixierung auf Apps und Online-Inhalte bloß – sie folgt nicht nur abstrusen Reisebloggern, sondern beobachtet auch stundenlang Vögel beim Ausbrüten ihrer Eier über Webcams auf YouTube. Diesen „Lastern“ lässt sie einen gesellschaftskritischen bzw. philosophischen Überbau angedeihen, um sie irgendwie mit Bedeutung aufzuladen. Das zündet nur leider recht selten, zeigt aber ein anderes Problem dieses Buchs: Es hat kein Sujet, kein Thema, das das Narrativ zusammenhalten würde.
Letztlich geht es in „Zeit finden“ immer nur um Jenny Odell. Wäre dieses Buch ein persönlicher Weblog der Autorin, in dem sie Texte zu allen möglichen Themen verfasst, die sie zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt beschäftigen, so wäre dies völlig legitim. Man könnte den Blog lesen oder es lassen, man könnte in einzelne Texte tiefer einsteigen und andere völlig ignorieren. Man würde diesen Blog auf jeden Fall nur besuchen, wenn man die Autorin interessant und sympathisch fände. All dies sind jedoch völlig andere Voraussetzungen als die, die für ein Buch gelten. Und das macht die Lektüre leider sehr zäh. Man watet hier durch seitenlange Zitate aus Jenny Odells eigenen (Teenager)Tagebüchern, die genauso klingen, wie man sich Tagebücher von Teenagern eben so vorstellt (Hallo, Weltschmerz!). Man klickt sich mit ihr durchs Internet und das gesamte Buch ist gespickt mit kursiven Einschüben, in denen sie mit ihrem Partner wandert bzw. durch Kalifornien fährt. Was diese Einschübe genau bezwecken sollen, wird nie wirklich klar. Meistens haben sie absolut keinen Bezug zum Thema, das im jeweiligen Kapitel behandelt wird.
Auf die Natur kommt Jenny Odell allerdings immer wieder zurück, zum Beispiel wenn es darum geht, dass unsere (Uhr)Zeit mit dem Kommen, Gehen, Werden und Vergehen in der Natur nichts zu tun hat. Jahreszeiten, Tageslängen, Tiden – die Natur hat einen anderen Zeitmesser. Das „Learning“ hierbei soll wohl sein, dass die Natur größer ist als wir selbst, dass wir in ihr als unbedeutend verschwinden. Wir stehen ihr sprachlos und beeindruckt gegenüber und sie überschattet alles, was unsere menschliche Entwicklung an Fortschritt gebracht haben mag. Ist das eine neue Erkenntnis? Nein. Nähert sich Odell diesem Thema auf irgendwie originelle Weise? Nein. Ihr Nature Writing ist banal, deskriptiv und flach. Nie schafft sie es, die Begeisterung für ihre Umwelt, die sie offenbar im Leser erwecken will, auch wirklich greifbar aufs Papier zu bringen. Meistens hat man den Eindruck, ein schöner Spaziergang hätte mehr gebracht als die Lektüre dieses Buchs.
Das soll nicht heißen, dass dieses Sachbuch nicht seine Leser finden wird. Sie sollten nur möglichst einige Voraussetzungen mitbringen: Am besten kennt man die Autorin bereits von „Nichts tun“ und findet sie sympathisch. Man hat kein Problem damit, sich auf ihre teilweise zusammenhanglosen Kapitel einzulassen, die thematisch von hier nach da mäandern, ohne jemals auf ein abgestecktes Ziel zuzuarbeiten. Amerikanische, neurosengeplagte Mittdreißiger, die aufgrund der Schlechtigkeit der Welt in Depressionen verfallen, schrecken einen nicht bzw. man ist gerade an einem ähnlichen Punkt im Leben. Menschen, die mit sich im Reinen sind und nicht an jeder Ecke den drohenden Weltuntergang befürchten, werden wahrscheinlich entweder von diesem Buch genervt sein oder Mitleid mit der Autorin empfinden.
Auch wenn „Zeit finden“ seine Momente und interessanten Einblicke hatte, herrschte für mich doch das Gefühl vor, meine investierte (Lektüre)Zeit eher verschwendet zu haben. Viel hängen blieb vom Gesagten nicht.
Ganz erwartbar geht es am Anfang um Arbeit. Es geht um die „Erfindung“ der Zeit, um Arbeit messen, quantifizieren und einteilen zu können. Das gilt sowohl für Sklaven- als auch für Lohnarbeit. Einiges in diesen Kapiteln ist leidlich interessant – wie zum Beispiel die Einführung einer einheitlichen Zeit oder der Zeitverschiebungen. Wie lange zum Beispiel in den USA verschiedene Zeiten vorherrschten und zu regelmäßigem Chaos führten (unter anderem beim Zugverkehr) ist überraschend, zumindest für die hier rezensierende Europäerin. Doch geht es leider viel zu lange zum selben Thema weiter: Schlagworte sind Kapitalismus, Sklavenarbeit, Lohnarbeit, Produktivität, Selbstoptimierung, Produktivitätstracker, Ratgeber und Apps zur Verbesserung der eigenen Leistungsfähigkeit.
Zumindest ist hier noch ein Zusammenhang zum übergeordneten Thema „Zeit“ erkennbar. Das wird mit fortschreitender Lektüre immer schwieriger. Mal geht es um eine Bibliothek, mal um Überschwemmungen, mal um Corona und dann wieder um Waldbrände. Oft, leider viel zu oft, geht es um irgendwelche Instagram-Influencer, deren halbgares und oberflächliches Leben Odell vermutlich bloßzustellen versucht. Allerdings stellt sie nur ihre eigene Fixierung auf Apps und Online-Inhalte bloß – sie folgt nicht nur abstrusen Reisebloggern, sondern beobachtet auch stundenlang Vögel beim Ausbrüten ihrer Eier über Webcams auf YouTube. Diesen „Lastern“ lässt sie einen gesellschaftskritischen bzw. philosophischen Überbau angedeihen, um sie irgendwie mit Bedeutung aufzuladen. Das zündet nur leider recht selten, zeigt aber ein anderes Problem dieses Buchs: Es hat kein Sujet, kein Thema, das das Narrativ zusammenhalten würde.
Letztlich geht es in „Zeit finden“ immer nur um Jenny Odell. Wäre dieses Buch ein persönlicher Weblog der Autorin, in dem sie Texte zu allen möglichen Themen verfasst, die sie zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt beschäftigen, so wäre dies völlig legitim. Man könnte den Blog lesen oder es lassen, man könnte in einzelne Texte tiefer einsteigen und andere völlig ignorieren. Man würde diesen Blog auf jeden Fall nur besuchen, wenn man die Autorin interessant und sympathisch fände. All dies sind jedoch völlig andere Voraussetzungen als die, die für ein Buch gelten. Und das macht die Lektüre leider sehr zäh. Man watet hier durch seitenlange Zitate aus Jenny Odells eigenen (Teenager)Tagebüchern, die genauso klingen, wie man sich Tagebücher von Teenagern eben so vorstellt (Hallo, Weltschmerz!). Man klickt sich mit ihr durchs Internet und das gesamte Buch ist gespickt mit kursiven Einschüben, in denen sie mit ihrem Partner wandert bzw. durch Kalifornien fährt. Was diese Einschübe genau bezwecken sollen, wird nie wirklich klar. Meistens haben sie absolut keinen Bezug zum Thema, das im jeweiligen Kapitel behandelt wird.
Auf die Natur kommt Jenny Odell allerdings immer wieder zurück, zum Beispiel wenn es darum geht, dass unsere (Uhr)Zeit mit dem Kommen, Gehen, Werden und Vergehen in der Natur nichts zu tun hat. Jahreszeiten, Tageslängen, Tiden – die Natur hat einen anderen Zeitmesser. Das „Learning“ hierbei soll wohl sein, dass die Natur größer ist als wir selbst, dass wir in ihr als unbedeutend verschwinden. Wir stehen ihr sprachlos und beeindruckt gegenüber und sie überschattet alles, was unsere menschliche Entwicklung an Fortschritt gebracht haben mag. Ist das eine neue Erkenntnis? Nein. Nähert sich Odell diesem Thema auf irgendwie originelle Weise? Nein. Ihr Nature Writing ist banal, deskriptiv und flach. Nie schafft sie es, die Begeisterung für ihre Umwelt, die sie offenbar im Leser erwecken will, auch wirklich greifbar aufs Papier zu bringen. Meistens hat man den Eindruck, ein schöner Spaziergang hätte mehr gebracht als die Lektüre dieses Buchs.
Das soll nicht heißen, dass dieses Sachbuch nicht seine Leser finden wird. Sie sollten nur möglichst einige Voraussetzungen mitbringen: Am besten kennt man die Autorin bereits von „Nichts tun“ und findet sie sympathisch. Man hat kein Problem damit, sich auf ihre teilweise zusammenhanglosen Kapitel einzulassen, die thematisch von hier nach da mäandern, ohne jemals auf ein abgestecktes Ziel zuzuarbeiten. Amerikanische, neurosengeplagte Mittdreißiger, die aufgrund der Schlechtigkeit der Welt in Depressionen verfallen, schrecken einen nicht bzw. man ist gerade an einem ähnlichen Punkt im Leben. Menschen, die mit sich im Reinen sind und nicht an jeder Ecke den drohenden Weltuntergang befürchten, werden wahrscheinlich entweder von diesem Buch genervt sein oder Mitleid mit der Autorin empfinden.
Auch wenn „Zeit finden“ seine Momente und interessanten Einblicke hatte, herrschte für mich doch das Gefühl vor, meine investierte (Lektüre)Zeit eher verschwendet zu haben. Viel hängen blieb vom Gesagten nicht.
March 15, 2023
Jenny Odell's first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was my favorite book of the past several years, taking both fiction and nonfiction into consideration. I have found nothing else quite like it. So when I discovered that she was publishing this follow-up book about time, I pre-ordered it and read it as quickly as I could.
I could not read it very quickly.
This is a deep dive into dense waters. It covers a wide range of topics, some of which I wouldn't have even considered to be related to time (though in the end I was convinced). But what slowed me down the most was the writing style. Odell sounds like an ordinary millennial Californian when she speaks, but her writing is extremely academic and precise, confusingly conceptual, and at times even poetic. I found myself re-reading sentences often, and translating ideas into my own words in order to understand them.
It's a hard book to sum up. Odell first identifies problematic ways in which we as a society think of time: that we see things in terms of “clock time,” which is rigid, unrelenting, and marching us all into the future at a rhythm that seems too fast; that some people’s time is considered more valuable than others’; and the lack of time that we as a species have left to mitigate the damage we are doing to our planet. These concepts established, she takes us out into an exploration of the world, searching for another way to think about time. “Time” often felt like a loose theme as the book discussed the history of work, the modern obsession with productivity, social justice issues in public places, various indigenous peoples’ ways of thinking about and using time and allowing nature to have subjectivity, the myriad ways that the natural world is changing due to climate change, the time theft that is mass incarceration, death and aging, geology, and dozens of other subjects in between.
Odell says that thinking about time differently changes what you believe is possible. She’s looking for time within time; infinities within infinity. And by god, she actually manages to find new dimensions to squeak into. She has expounded upon what we all knew on some level: that time has not merely quantity, but also quality, and the quality of it can change our perception of it. Sometimes time flies and sometimes it crawls, and there’s something very true and important and empowering about that fact.
And what we believe, of course, affects how we act. To give in to despair at this point would be to relinquish our last hope and to squander the beauty that still exists all around us, and so Jenny Odell has offered us this odyssey of a book to help us fight against one of the most ingrained beliefs that we all share: that time is running out, and we must use the time we have in service to capitalism.
Yet, like HTDN, it is still not a practical guide. Large portions of the population are not in control of their own time, for many different reasons. And so this book is aimed at a certain elite population who have the means to act differently, to give time back to others, and to adjust their priorities and what they pay attention to. The final page left me in tears, so I can't give it less than five stars. It's not an easy book to read, but if you read HTDN and loved it, you'll appreciate this one as well.
I could not read it very quickly.
This is a deep dive into dense waters. It covers a wide range of topics, some of which I wouldn't have even considered to be related to time (though in the end I was convinced). But what slowed me down the most was the writing style. Odell sounds like an ordinary millennial Californian when she speaks, but her writing is extremely academic and precise, confusingly conceptual, and at times even poetic. I found myself re-reading sentences often, and translating ideas into my own words in order to understand them.
It's a hard book to sum up. Odell first identifies problematic ways in which we as a society think of time: that we see things in terms of “clock time,” which is rigid, unrelenting, and marching us all into the future at a rhythm that seems too fast; that some people’s time is considered more valuable than others’; and the lack of time that we as a species have left to mitigate the damage we are doing to our planet. These concepts established, she takes us out into an exploration of the world, searching for another way to think about time. “Time” often felt like a loose theme as the book discussed the history of work, the modern obsession with productivity, social justice issues in public places, various indigenous peoples’ ways of thinking about and using time and allowing nature to have subjectivity, the myriad ways that the natural world is changing due to climate change, the time theft that is mass incarceration, death and aging, geology, and dozens of other subjects in between.
Odell says that thinking about time differently changes what you believe is possible. She’s looking for time within time; infinities within infinity. And by god, she actually manages to find new dimensions to squeak into. She has expounded upon what we all knew on some level: that time has not merely quantity, but also quality, and the quality of it can change our perception of it. Sometimes time flies and sometimes it crawls, and there’s something very true and important and empowering about that fact.
And what we believe, of course, affects how we act. To give in to despair at this point would be to relinquish our last hope and to squander the beauty that still exists all around us, and so Jenny Odell has offered us this odyssey of a book to help us fight against one of the most ingrained beliefs that we all share: that time is running out, and we must use the time we have in service to capitalism.
Yet, like HTDN, it is still not a practical guide. Large portions of the population are not in control of their own time, for many different reasons. And so this book is aimed at a certain elite population who have the means to act differently, to give time back to others, and to adjust their priorities and what they pay attention to. The final page left me in tears, so I can't give it less than five stars. It's not an easy book to read, but if you read HTDN and loved it, you'll appreciate this one as well.
April 22, 2023
i am grateful to be present at the same time as thinkers who draw on one another and the natural world for ways to navigate the big questions, instead of shying away from their scope. i’m thinking of jenny odell here, along the thinkers she engages on climate, anticapitalism, and optimism: naomi klein and astra taylor. im thinking too of public intellectuals who illustrate how generational and longstanding patterns in nature can help us grapple with complexity: adrienne maree brown, robin wall kimmermer, anna tsing. and i look to leftists engaged in projects of radical hope and joyful revolutions: keeanga yamahtta-taylor and rebecca solnit. through the conversations these thinkers engage between organizers, collectivities, animals, bioregions, fiction, and visual culture, we can look and act generationally to take action against forces that can seem predetermined, rigid, and out of our scope. it is a gift to be alive in the same gap between past and future as jenny odell.
this book is far reaching, and there’s so much i could say about it. but above all i’m moved by its principle of solidarity and collective action. to be in kairos time is to be paying attention, to exist in doubt, to attend to present pleasure, and to refuse to fortify oneself against the other. positivism leads to cold individualism, and a hardening of the status quo as already determined.
looking at an ochre sea star, odell writes: “writing from this gap between the past and future, i have to acknowledge the very real possibility that this animal — like so many things — is rare or gone in your world. at the same time, i can’t take that outcome for granted, because if i do, there is less of a chance that you will ever see one. that’s the irony of determinism: it involves something of a choice.”
in doing so, odell offers one of the most persuasive arguments of climate optimism i’ve seen. optimism not as looking away from disaster, but as seizing the openings in time to look and act as if we’re really free, and practice it.
in its critique of flat, fungible time, of our time as a commodity to be optimized, as an ongoing crush against wish we push to be ahead of the curve, i found myself thinking about the term “progressive.” this buzzword is used increasingly for anyone from prison abolitionist to corporate democrat. odell would ask us what the fuss is about progress. doesn’t that imply a false linearity, a settler-colonial perspective, a false hierarchy of time, an erasure of doubt and new futures? instead, i’m excited about times in the here and now where people are already working in collaboration with one another and the natural world to practice freedom and seizing an unforseen plane of possibility.
this book is far reaching, and there’s so much i could say about it. but above all i’m moved by its principle of solidarity and collective action. to be in kairos time is to be paying attention, to exist in doubt, to attend to present pleasure, and to refuse to fortify oneself against the other. positivism leads to cold individualism, and a hardening of the status quo as already determined.
looking at an ochre sea star, odell writes: “writing from this gap between the past and future, i have to acknowledge the very real possibility that this animal — like so many things — is rare or gone in your world. at the same time, i can’t take that outcome for granted, because if i do, there is less of a chance that you will ever see one. that’s the irony of determinism: it involves something of a choice.”
in doing so, odell offers one of the most persuasive arguments of climate optimism i’ve seen. optimism not as looking away from disaster, but as seizing the openings in time to look and act as if we’re really free, and practice it.
in its critique of flat, fungible time, of our time as a commodity to be optimized, as an ongoing crush against wish we push to be ahead of the curve, i found myself thinking about the term “progressive.” this buzzword is used increasingly for anyone from prison abolitionist to corporate democrat. odell would ask us what the fuss is about progress. doesn’t that imply a false linearity, a settler-colonial perspective, a false hierarchy of time, an erasure of doubt and new futures? instead, i’m excited about times in the here and now where people are already working in collaboration with one another and the natural world to practice freedom and seizing an unforseen plane of possibility.
May 7, 2023
Two stars because Jenny Odell has great taste in literature; she reads the best, in a far-ranging and curious way, and quotes from authors extensively. The rest of the book, unfortunately, is an exhausting and ultimately meaningless parade of woke truisms and empty pieties. I think I would really like Odell personally and I am sure we would be good friends. But this book was so tedious. It also made me regret picking the Bay Area as the place to go for our thirteenth anniversary at the end of this month; it sounds like a hellscape.
May 17, 2024
Yet another Jenny Odell book where I really want to like it, but the meandering observations are a bit too unfocused for my taste. I find it interesting that this is now her second book billed as a readable thesis on productivity culture that ends up diverging into reflections on ecological timescales and photos of the Bay Area. Lots of "huh, interesting" moments, but I never really feel like I learn anything? Or even get what was described on the tin?? But also, maybe this is a really smart way to get your book about climate change published and read by a lot of people, maybe I'm the idiot
April 29, 2023
Not as advertised. Instead of dealing with her own insecurities and wrestling with the feeling that she always has to be busy and productive to have meaning, she launches into this attacking, criminalizing, rant based on her own deep prejudices against systems of organizing time. She labels them as slave drivers. She maintains this embarrassingly narrow minded view of diversity as superficially based on the color of one's skin. The first 1/2 of the book is a flagrantly racist, sexist, woke, venting rant. She cherry-picks and uses quotes out of context (even those based on objective fact - 24 hours in a day) to further her new shame-and-honor culture which assigns greater honor and virtue the more a person is victimized and subjegated by society. Every protagonist that is opporessed is given a female pronoun, every antagonist is given a male pronoun. Different groups of people have different relative amounts of time available to them, this is not hard to understand. What is hard to understand is where she is going in this book. It's paragarph after paragraph of anti-Christian, anti-masculine, anti-white, Marxist, determinism. This book is so far from what I was hoping it would be. She spends a large portion of the beginning of the book criminalizing the Christian church and Europeans for developing a schedule based on the clock because in a capitalist system time equals money so maximizing time is very important. She falsely presuposes to know personally the motives for historical events that led to the shaping of the place "time" has in our lives, and when it comes from a white man it must be evil and oppressive. It appears she has deep and personal animosity towards capitalism as it perpetuates her feelings of inadeqaucy unless she is constantly busy, or rather, overbusy. She seems unable to describe a misguided, naive, longing for the hunter/gatherer and pastoral ideal apart from contrasting it against the "evils" caused by capitalism. She hasn't ever lived in a place where she can garden yet she presupposes to criminalize others who have tried to make natue safer in her condescending "paradise-lost" tone. She ignorantly and ironically longs for a more natural and wild "wilderness", lamenting the way man (of course a white man) has modified nature while she sits in her temperature controlled, hyper-planned and safe urban Oakland apartment typing on her technologically advanced computer as she watches birds from remote webcams and flying robots. It was painful to continue listening to this embarrassingly narrow minded, inconsistent, and drowningly repetitive anti-establishment rant. This book may be a combination of a mid-life crisis and COVID hobby of amateur philosophizing. All mature adults I know dealt with these thoughts and ideas in their late teens or early twenties but perhaps due to her tremendous privilege she is now lashing out against these ideas in her mid life. Instead of pausing for some mature introspection like all other adults I know, she lashes out at a system because she has juvenilely refused to deal with her own limitations, similar to a toddler throwing a tantrum because they're too short to go on a ride. The only lesson from this book on saving time would have been to never start it at all. Spare yourself the time.
July 24, 2023
I much prefer Odell's first book, which was more interesting, more genuine and just much more pleasurable to read. This one feels unfocused and unoriginal and reads like a checklist of themes an intelligent woman needs to think about these days - capitalism, colonialism, racism, climate change, feminism, privilege. I agree with her on most things, but this relies so heavily on other people's writing without providing an interesting synthesis, that I recommend you just read the sources, not this.
May 30, 2023
I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. This book was all over the place, going into the history of marking time and the labor movement and climate change and bird migration, among many, many more subjects. It’s enough to make your head spin, wondering how the hell we made the leap from one topic to the next. Parts of it were interesting, yes, but not enough to override the discombobulation and boredom I felt 90% of the time.
May 21, 2023
Wish I liked this more, but it was mostly a collection of vague ideas about time, surrounded by an assortment of arguments for, essentially, democratic socialism. I basically agree with Odell on everything here, but there wasn't much new, and not much was cohesive.
September 1, 2023
Jenny Odell’s work has saved my life a hundred times over. Her intellectual optimism is a breath of fresh air and makes me feel so much more at home in myself and in the world
October 5, 2023
Oh man. I think I got very lucky to have picked up this book when I did, because I can easily imagine a world where my capacity and patience are lower and I pass over this book entirely. It is so dense and required my brains to be at full steam to follow the connections as they happen. Reminds me a lot more of how John Berger guides through a piece of art than a non fiction book.
You can definitely tell she took the criticisms from her previous book to heart. There is an admirable effort to include marginalized perspectives, especially Native American concepts and how they view time and nature. But overall showing how these conversations about leisure, time as a commodity, and climate anxiety have all been discussed at length by marginalized communities, and the rest of the world is just now catching up. I liked the tidbits about disability justice a lot, I hadn’t encountered much about the topic before now.
Very important and challenging topics. But man, you really had to pay attention. The writing style is tough to follow, and I felt the same about How to Do Nothing- the dense writing actually prevented me from picking it up for a long while.
It doesn’t make sense to feel disappointed that this book doesn’t offer concrete solutions. Because there really isn’t a concrete solution and there’s no natural place to artificially inject hope into the conversation where feeling better about your life isn’t the point at all. I personally saw a lot of hope in the section about “declinism” and how thinking of the world just automatically sliding down into inevitable chaos is a very, very linear way of thinking that doesn’t take into account agency. Again, not as a solution to my feelings of climate anxiety but something else to think about when it comes up.
Odell definitely reads widely and thoughtfully, and it totally shows. It was really exciting to see a lot of the things I’ve encountered before come together in this unexpected way. She talks about some concepts from An Immense World, quoted a poem by Chen Chen, lots of stuff from the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, going against the “natural progression” argument like in Dawn of Everything, the idea of time in relationships like in A Woman Destroyed, consciousness, labor unions, trains etc etc etc. I was super impressed by the range. My favorite non fiction book I’ve read this year.
You can definitely tell she took the criticisms from her previous book to heart. There is an admirable effort to include marginalized perspectives, especially Native American concepts and how they view time and nature. But overall showing how these conversations about leisure, time as a commodity, and climate anxiety have all been discussed at length by marginalized communities, and the rest of the world is just now catching up. I liked the tidbits about disability justice a lot, I hadn’t encountered much about the topic before now.
Very important and challenging topics. But man, you really had to pay attention. The writing style is tough to follow, and I felt the same about How to Do Nothing- the dense writing actually prevented me from picking it up for a long while.
It doesn’t make sense to feel disappointed that this book doesn’t offer concrete solutions. Because there really isn’t a concrete solution and there’s no natural place to artificially inject hope into the conversation where feeling better about your life isn’t the point at all. I personally saw a lot of hope in the section about “declinism” and how thinking of the world just automatically sliding down into inevitable chaos is a very, very linear way of thinking that doesn’t take into account agency. Again, not as a solution to my feelings of climate anxiety but something else to think about when it comes up.
Odell definitely reads widely and thoughtfully, and it totally shows. It was really exciting to see a lot of the things I’ve encountered before come together in this unexpected way. She talks about some concepts from An Immense World, quoted a poem by Chen Chen, lots of stuff from the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, going against the “natural progression” argument like in Dawn of Everything, the idea of time in relationships like in A Woman Destroyed, consciousness, labor unions, trains etc etc etc. I was super impressed by the range. My favorite non fiction book I’ve read this year.
January 3, 2024
Jenny Odell has really interest thoughts and perspectives on things that can be really eye-opening for sure. I really enjoyed her previous book, How to Do Nothing, and I can definitely see that this book is a continuation of that one.
One thing that Jenny Odell does fantastically is rather than explicitly making statements like "X is bad and Y is harmful," she makes her (anti-capitalist) point in a much more subtle way. She brings up ideas and references that make you realize that the way we think about things is not the only way to think about things, nor has it always been that way. She calls this defamiliarizing (I think), and it's genius. For example, I think wage labor is now so ingrained in our society that it's hard to imagine what else making a living means. But actually, she brings to attention that it didn't used to be that way, and in fact this is a really recent phenomenon that people, especially blue-collar workers, essentially trade their time in for money, and that their time is worth so little compared to people whose livelihoods are tied to who they are.
I thought the first half of the book was quite cohesive and made me think about different ways of thinking about time, not just in the regular gridded way we usually do. There are ways to think about time in terms of the natural world, like seasonal changes, or about our bodies. The way we think about time is so closely tied into the industrial world and I think it's quite freeing to realize that some people need to take different amounts of time to do things - not only work that needs to be done, but also taking care of yourself and your community, and leisure (which isn't just resting time to prepare you for more productivity).
However, I thought the second half of the book didn't make much sense. It wasn't really related to the theme of time, which didn't bother me too much, but I just felt that I didn't really see what her point was in any of the chapters. It was really hard to get through because it was pretty disorganized and her thoughts and references were kind of all over the place.
One thing that Jenny Odell does fantastically is rather than explicitly making statements like "X is bad and Y is harmful," she makes her (anti-capitalist) point in a much more subtle way. She brings up ideas and references that make you realize that the way we think about things is not the only way to think about things, nor has it always been that way. She calls this defamiliarizing (I think), and it's genius. For example, I think wage labor is now so ingrained in our society that it's hard to imagine what else making a living means. But actually, she brings to attention that it didn't used to be that way, and in fact this is a really recent phenomenon that people, especially blue-collar workers, essentially trade their time in for money, and that their time is worth so little compared to people whose livelihoods are tied to who they are.
I thought the first half of the book was quite cohesive and made me think about different ways of thinking about time, not just in the regular gridded way we usually do. There are ways to think about time in terms of the natural world, like seasonal changes, or about our bodies. The way we think about time is so closely tied into the industrial world and I think it's quite freeing to realize that some people need to take different amounts of time to do things - not only work that needs to be done, but also taking care of yourself and your community, and leisure (which isn't just resting time to prepare you for more productivity).
However, I thought the second half of the book didn't make much sense. It wasn't really related to the theme of time, which didn't bother me too much, but I just felt that I didn't really see what her point was in any of the chapters. It was really hard to get through because it was pretty disorganized and her thoughts and references were kind of all over the place.
March 21, 2023
This book is a meditation on human’s construction of and relationship with time, both with the environment (natural and built) and with each other. Part anthropological survey, part nature writing, and part cultural critique, Odell weaves together a narrative about how our capitalistic society manipulates time and how the inevitabilities of human nature and our planet (and it’s approaching destruction) shape it.
I found the premise of this book compelling, and I found a lot of the examples she cited interesting and I am excited to look into them. Despite this, I found the overall synthesis in this book pretty underwhelming - outside of some run-of-the mill climate doomerism, I did not think she drew any meaningful conclusions that are different from those she shared in her previous book, which I also felt somewhat lukewarm about. I also thought some of her nods towards intersectionality felt a bit cursory, as if they were added to the end instead of blended into her argument. Overall, I did think this was a nice read, and I am glad to have learned about many of the authors and topics she referenced, but I would not recommend this book outright.
I found the premise of this book compelling, and I found a lot of the examples she cited interesting and I am excited to look into them. Despite this, I found the overall synthesis in this book pretty underwhelming - outside of some run-of-the mill climate doomerism, I did not think she drew any meaningful conclusions that are different from those she shared in her previous book, which I also felt somewhat lukewarm about. I also thought some of her nods towards intersectionality felt a bit cursory, as if they were added to the end instead of blended into her argument. Overall, I did think this was a nice read, and I am glad to have learned about many of the authors and topics she referenced, but I would not recommend this book outright.
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