Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

The story of Enlightenment Man teaches me an all-too-common truth: that the people who stand to gain the most from determinism (in others) are typically the people doing the determining. This strategy is detectable not just in the long historical sense, but also in the current maneuvers of those energy companies now driving climate change.

Shell “has a constitutive block that keeps it from being an ally in the climate fight: an inability to envision a future without Shell. The company’s overriding mission is to ensure an indefinite life for itself and its profits.”

Having shifted from funding58 climate change–denial ads in the 1970s to “painting [themselves] green” in the 2000s, those same companies who faced down “self-defeating determinism” are selling the public their own strain of determinism. Energy companies have every incentive to make their future be the future. In a sweeping 2021 study of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications since the mid-2000s, Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran find language that portrays extraction and consumer demand as inevitable: [A] 2008 ExxonMobil Corp advertorial stat[es]: “By 2030, global energy demand will be about 30 percent higher than it is today … oil and natural gas will be called upon to meet … the world’s energy requirements.” Another, in 2007, says that “increasing prosperity in the developing world [will be] the main driver of greater energy demand (and consequently rising CO2 emissions).” A 1999 Mobil advertorial is even blunter: “[G]rowing demand will boost CO2 emissions.” In other words, they present growing energy demand as inevitable, and imply that it can only be met with fossil fuels.59

This rhetoric echoes Big Tobacco’s effort63 to portray itself as a neutral purveyor of what consumers just can’t seem to help but demand. In other words, We just sell the cigarettes; you’re the ones smoking them. A framing like this one portrays climate change as solely “our” fault, where the “our” is an aggregate of consumers who should attend to their carbon footprint calculators.

Just as the industry of individual time management resells the idea of time as money to the isolated bootstrapper, energy companies sell the idea of the carbon footprint to conceal larger and more significant avenues of change.

“In positing all of human existence as an endless striving toward market society, neoliberals had to erase not just the possibility of a future but all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways. The kinds of tools needed to navigate out of the climate crisis—things like public ownership, full employment, or even just tough regulations—have receded into memory.”

But things were already so bad that a resident told Davies the air some days was “so full with gas you can hardly breathe.” For Davies, what happens in Cancer Alley illustrates the concept of slow violence, a term coined by Rob Nixon, of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, for harms that remain below the level of public perception because they’re too gradual and lack a spectacle.

the last thing I would describe these spaces as, is lacking in spectacle,” Davies writes. “Communities who are exposed to the slow violence of toxic pollution are replete with testimonies, experiences, and bereavements that bear witness to the brutality of gradual environmental destruction.”

Rather, to the nihilist who cannot imagine the future, I am highlighting a perspective that has survived, and continues to survive, the long-ago end of the world. There are many people and places that could accept neither Enlightenment Man’s march of progress nor the billiard ball declinism of the Anthropocene—because that narrative was inherently premised upon their destruction, commodification, and relegation to a state of nonbeing. For those people and places, the historical past can never be an object of nostalgia, and the future has always been in jeopardy. If you don’t want to kick the can down the road, look to those who never recognized the road in the first place.

‘Mother Nature is patient,’ he said. ‘Mother Nature has more time than we do.’ Rabelais said, ‘She has nothing but time.’”

I think of the sign I sometimes see on Northern California beaches, which have rip tides, sleeper waves, and no lifeguards, and where unsuspecting people are sometimes swept away. It says NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN. That sign always puts me in my place. It reminds me that the beach is not an amenity for humans—that I can be there, but I’d better learn the laws of the ocean if I want to stay alive.

WHEN WE ALLOW the climate crisis a moral dimension, certain things lost in the haze become clearer, including its relationship to other fundamental injustices. For example, the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apologists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. Only by viewing enslaved people as nonsubjects could someone like Henry Lascelles, Second Earl of Harewood, have spoken plausibly of a “progressive state” of “improvement in the slave population”95 at an 1823 meeting about his West Indian plantations. Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject. Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object. Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects. This connection is more than an analogy: Multiple scholars have emphasized, for example, the role of plantation cotton in the textile factories that drove the Industrial Revolution.

Grief on this scale can kill the lone mourner—if not physically, then in other ways. It’s just another curse of an isolated Homo economicus: What consumers do is buy green, not hold each other and cry. If we’ve been robbed of “all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways,” that must extend to our emotional lives as well: Your problems are personal and pathological, their solutions circumscribed to your own life choices and a couple of self-help titles.

Grief, too, can teach you new forms of subjecthood. I think of a kind of double-ness, a mutuality with the power to witness and not turn away.

It helps to remember that you’re not alone. Look around. Is it really true that everyone sees time as money? Or is it true that everyone spends all their time wishing it didn’t seem like money?

time management often sees units of time in individual time banks: I have mine, and you have yours. In this world, when I give some of my time to you, I have less. Our interactions can be nothing other than transactional. If that is not true—if you and I exist in a field of mutual influence where time is neither fungible nor commodified—then what could “time management” mean? I think it would have to mean, at least in part, some kind of mutually beneficial agreement between you and me about when and how we want to do things.

In March 2021, deep into the pandemic, Kathryn Hymes wrote a story for The Atlantic about “familects,” dialects and shorthand11 that develop between those who spend a lot of time in a shared space, speculating that the pandemic lockdowns may have accelerated the process. One person gives Hymes the example of hog, meaning less than a full cup of coffee: “She explained that this comes from ‘a smaller-than-the-others coffee mug with a little hedgehog on it that my roommates and I found one day.’ Hog has become an established unit of measurement in her house: ‘I’ve now also asked for and been offered half a hog.’”

But in Xinjiang, temporal noncompliance is no joke. A former Uyghur political prisoner31 told Human Rights Watch about a man who had been detained for setting his wristwatch two hours back to Xinjiang Time. It was evidence, Chinese authorities said, that he was a terrorist.

—“The capital has its order, the village its customs.” In one part of Malaysia, someone asking how long it will take to get somewhere might be answered not in minutes but with “three rice cookings”—everyone simply knows how long it takes to cook rice—the rice itself being a local variety.

Fred Moten’s articulation of “study.” In an interview at the end of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, he defines study thus: Study is what you do52 with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice …. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, “oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to have been studying.” To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important to recognize is that that has been the case—because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.

Oli Mould would call an actually creative activity,70 as distinct from “creativity” under capitalism. In Against Creativity, Mould observes that jobs of all sorts now encourage their employees to be “creative,” which often translates to competitive flexibility, self-management, and individual assumption of risk. Meanwhile, even nominally anti-capitalist creative work, whether art, music, or slogans, is handily appropriated by the market. Mould writes that, in either case, creativity is not actually creative, because it merely “produces more of the same form of society.” If it makes progress, it is the progress of capitalist logic into ever-more-minute corners of our daily lives, making what Braverman calls “the universal market”71 even more universal.fn8

On the other hand, you could also ask the old question: Why are individuals expected to be “resilient” when corporations are not?

As Carole McGranahan writes, “To refuse is to say no. But, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions.”76 Refusal may start in you but cannot end with you. It must be spoken, in messages, in magazines, on forums, and off-hours, in an ongoing “rehearsal.” In summoning a world, it’s the most creative thing you could possibly do.

a lecture in Montreal in the 1990s, she gives the example of Cathy, one of her constituents: Cathy, a young, middle-class housewife, spends her days preparing food, setting the table, serving meals, clearing food and dishes from the table, washing dishes, ironing, keeping an eye on and playing with the children, dressing her children, disciplining children, taking the children to daycare or to school, disposing of garbage, dusting, gathering clothes for the washing, doing the laundry, going to the gas station and the supermarket, repairing household items, making beds, paying bills, sewing or mending or knitting, talking with the door-to-door salespeople, cutting the grass, weeding, answering the telephone, vacuuming, sweeping and washing the floors, shoveling snow, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, and putting her children to bed. Then the punch line: “Cathy has to face the fact that she fills her time in a totally unproductive manner. She too is economically inactive, and economists record her as unoccupied.” The joke is about a mistranslation, a clash of languages, and the values assigned (or not) by those languages.

Gloria Steinem, who appears briefly in the Waring documentary to say that most economists “seem to value their work in inverse ratio to their ability to be understood,” praises Waring for reminding readers of what economics actually is: “the way we impute value to that which we consider valuable.”

Daily desires, intuition, and even quiet despair so often have the feeling of an undercurrent, an under-language, or an undercommons—under the zeitgebers of the workday, the workweek, the productivity spreadsheet, and the earnings report.

there are many forms of frustration beyond what is trivially referred to as burnout. Some of those frustrations, whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, include the following: having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing in another, having to build yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, and having to ignore everything and everyone whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore. There is wanting more for yourself, and then there is simply wanting more.

“innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed,”98 leaving a barren social landscape of “huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both.” In that moment, I felt not dissimilar to the young gig worker who told sociologists, in a study of why precarious workers didn’t claim unemployment benefits during the pandemic in New York City, “You just sign up, say ‘I don’t have a job,’ and the government gives you money? What is that about? If it was that easy, wouldn’t everybody do it? I don’t get it.”99 Taking the lettuce was good for both me and my friend. I didn’t get it.

An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. Ehrenreich subjects the wellness and anti-aging industries to withering critique, questioning the monomaniacal project of trying to become a lean, mean, living machine. For her, the product offered7 by a capitalist version of wellness is “the means to remake oneself into an ever more perfect self-correcting machine capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination.” Citing a long list of books on “successful aging,”8 she observes a cruel dynamic related to the bootstrapper ethos of individual time management: All the books in the successful-aging literature insist that a long and healthy life is within the reach of anyone who will submit to the required discipline. It’s up to you and you alone, never mind what scars—from overexertion, genetic defects, or poverty—may be left from your prior existence. Nor is there much or any concern for the material factors that influence the health of an older person, such as personal wealth or access to transportation and social support. Except for your fitness trainer or successful-aging guru, you’re on your own.

“The economic tempo of the clock shapes our every conversation,”13 while schools and workplaces assume “a form of able-bodied productivity, an ideal of speed and efficiency.”14 Cast adrift from this time line, Hendren sees not a clock but an economic instrument appropriate to a world in which “economic productivity—a life performed in normative, regulated time—is still the unquestioned and overwhelmingly dominant metric for human worth.”

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

In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han finds something similar in a piece by Peter Handke called “Essay on Tiredness.” Handke compares “divisive tiredness,”22 the isolating exhaustion of burnout, with a more resigned “tiredness that trusts in the world” (or surrenders to a lake). Too worn out to grasp, and forced to sit back, the tired and resigned person finds that something else floods in: the world, in all its detail, its constantly acting and infinitely dispersed agents, and its minute-by-minute changes. Handke writes, “My tiredness articulated the muddle of crude perception … and with the help of rhythms endowed it with form—form as far as the eye could see.” Like Josef Pieper’s leisure, this “tiredness” is an inherently destabilizing experience, a loss of individual power that helps us find a home in something larger. Han adds to Handke’s observation that “deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges.”

Handke describes a certain kind of tiredness as enabling “more of less of me,” the reality that expands when the ego recedes. Quoting Handke, Han writes, “The trusting tiredness ‘opens’ the I and ‘makes room’ for the world …. One sees, and one is seen. One touches, and one is touched …. Less I means more world: ‘Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again.’”

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

An arborist in Royal Oak,14 Michigan, received the usual calls from people worried about their trees suddenly dropping huge numbers of acorns and had to inform them about mast years, a temporal phenomenon in which trees coordinate to drop their fruit all at once. (Describing masting in pecan trees, Robin Wall Kimmerer points to studies that suggest the trees may be using underground mycorrhizal networks—in other words, talking to one another—in order to enact such a “unity of purpose.”)

Because skyscrapers tend to be built19 where hard rock is close to the surface, the shape of the Manhattan skyline can be read as a translation of the underground presence of Manhattan schist. Like serpentinite, schist has a composition inseparable from its history: The reason it’s so hard is that it was compressed over three hundred million years ago under a mountain range with heights similar to those of the Himalayas today. That range formed when two landmasses collided in the formation of Pangaea.

“if there is to be62 such a thing as a low-carbon society, it will be the government’s job to build it.” Of course, personal choice within the structures we have is still important.

Douglas Rushkoff, in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, has this suggestion: “Instead of debating whether to buy electric, gas or hybrid, just keep the car you have. Better yet, start carpooling, walking to work, working from home, or working less. Like Jimmy Carter tried to tell us during his much-ridiculed fireside chats, turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater. It’s better for your sinuses, and better for everyone.” Toward the end of her book, considering the possibility of doing less, Aronoff ties her arguments to the proposed benefits of a shortened workweek. In some ways, these recommendations evoke the end of chapter 2 of this book: the idea of giving certain things up, as well as Butt-Head’s request: “Could you, like, get less stuff?”

Specifically, the “universal market” refers to the market created when individual and community relations are replaced by transactions between consumers.