Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

Even for a very privileged person who is isolated from the effects of climate change, toggling between a Slack window and headlines about a soon-to-be-uninhabitable earth produces, at the very least, a sense of dissonance and, at the very worst, a kind of spiritual nausea and nihilism.

On this topic, the sociologist Richard Seymour has called social media a “chronophage,” something that “eats time.”

Asked to choose between “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference” and “state guarantees nobody is in need,” the former won out in the United States 58 percent to 35 percent, with those numbers essentially reversed in the other four countries.

“To thrive in a world where someone else is always cheaper, you have to be distinctive at what you do,” she advises. “In some cases, just to survive, you have to be world class.”

“The really striking thing is that the most popular forms are still the same as five, six, seven centuries ago: playing certain games, drinking, dancing, simply chatting idly in the shade or by the fire.

The difference between work and leisure often meant two different tabs in my browser.