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Ironically, there never seems to be enough time to do something as idle as contemplate the very nature of time.
without exploring the social and material roots of the idea that “time is money,” we risk entrenching a language about time that is itself part of the problem.
German-Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his 1948 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. In work, he writes, time is horizontal, a pattern of forward-leaning labor time punctuated by little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work. For Pieper, those little gaps are not leisure. True leisure, instead, exists on a “vertical” axis of time, one whose totality cuts through or negates the entire dimension of workaday time, “run[ning] at right angles to work.” If such moments happen to refresh us for work, that is merely secondary. “Leisure does not exist for the sake of work,” Pieper
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Pieper’s distinction strikes an intuitive chord for me, as it probably does for anyone else who suspects that productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time. To imagine a different “point” means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.
As long as slowness is invoked merely to make the machine of capitalism run faster, it risks being a cosmetic fix, another little gap on the horizontal plane of work time.
What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose. Even when external circumstance or internal compulsion forces you to live entirely on Pieper’s horizontal axis—work and refreshment-for-more-work—it remains possible to harbor desire for the vertical realm, that place for the parts of our selves and our lives that are not for sale.
headline by the parody site Reductress: “Woman Waiting for Evidence That World Will Still Exist in 2050 Before She Starts Working Toward Goals.”
I have had this exact thought
Dr. Michelle Bastian puts it, “the clock can tell me whether I am late for work, [but] it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.”
question was posed was part of the problem, since it upheld the idea that everyday cultural time and ecological time are unrelated. If we merely saw self-care as “stealing little moments in which we can prioritize the self,” imagining that self-care and climate justice would vie for our hours and days in a zero-sum game, we’d be furthering the problem by speaking that old lingua franca.
In Ancient Greek, there are two different words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos, which appears as part of words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like “crisis,” but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or “seizing the time.” At the climate event, Salami described kairos as qualitative rather than quantitative time, given that, in kairos, all moments are different and that “the right thing happens at the right point.” Because of what it suggests about action and
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It is kairos more than chronos that can admit the unpredictability of action, in the sense that Hannah Arendt describes it: “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” In that sense, the issue of time is also inextricable from the issue of free will.
To (re)learn to see action and decision outside such a narrow realm—to admit that everything and everyone previously left out of the picture is equally real, in kairos together—is to see time not as happening to objects in the world, but as being co-created with the actors of the world.
There was something difficult and self-defying about these processes of shedding, I thought. And this quality was also mine to claim, given that I, too, had desires to follow, a will to express, and a container to supersede. Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today, and in it, I’d be different.
While labor time is disembodied and uniform for the buyer, who can always buy more, this is not the case for the laboring person, who gets only one life and one body.
Now you can shop for life itself in a virtual mall where posts about self-care and retreat come across as ads for self-care and retreat. Tap to add this to your life.
In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote, “I believe that we are at the end of nature.” Then he clarified: “By this I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall, and the sun will still shine. When I say ‘nature,’ I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.” An active volcano provides as good an opportunity as any to consider “our place” and what it means to see “Nature” not as an object but as a subject, as something (someone) acting in time. The lava moves, and it’s not because of us.
The future is always over the horizon, and to be alive is to be in transit. For a few minutes, a sunrise collects all that ineffable bittersweetness into a single burning point.
I started thinking about this book before the pandemic, only to watch those years render time strange for so many people by upending its usual social and economic contours.
In turn, looking for kairos while living largely in chronos puts you in that difficult gray area between personal agency and structural limits,
the personal and collective project of thinking about time differently has to go hand in hand with structural changes that would help to pry open space and time where now there are only cracks.
My deepest hope is that it can combine with the work of activists and those who do write expressly about policy—like Annie Lowrey, who has written on topics like universal basic income and the “time tax” imposed on the poor;
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.
idea that we could “save” time—by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.
And the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in with cutting sarcasm: “Maybe they will chain you to your desks and benches next, so you do not go out after you come in, or better yet, install brain monitors to make sure you are thinking physics and not other thoughts while you are at your desks.”
It’s also about what an employer buys when they pay you money. For Anderberg, it’s a package deal including not only work but also life minutes, bodily presence, and humiliation.
I consider the corn cob malfunction one of the funniest movie moments I have ever seen. On the one hand, the scene is a joke about the capitalist’s desire to scrimp and save on the labor time for which he has paid—to squeeze more work from the worker in the same amount of time. (If humans could just eat corn faster, the crazily spinning cob might not be a problem at all.) On the other hand, it’s a joke about the human assimilated to a disciplinary pacing: Just as he must keep up with the assembly line and minimize bathroom breaks, he must also comply with the feeding machine’s rate of food
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Time, in this world, is an input just like water, electricity, or corn cobs.
In her 2019 book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Emily Guendelsberger describes this reality: Working in an Amazon warehouse outside Louisville, Kentucky, I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task. Working at a call center in western North Carolina, I was lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company and had the minutes I spent
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Describing the meticulously oppressive design of the Amazon workplace, she refers to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the mechanical engineer who, in the early twentieth century, spurred the mania for breaking down industrial tasks into minutely timed segments: “My scanner gun is [Taylor’s] vision incarnate—my own personal stopwatch and pitiless robo-manager rolled into one….Would Taylor be horrified that his fears about the abuse of his ideas had come true? Or would he jizz in his pants?”
productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin.
TIME AS MONEY (in the most literal sense) represents what Allen C. Bluedorn calls fungible time, meaning that, like currency, it is consistent and can be endlessly subdivided. Measuring fungible time is like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work; in fact, there is a strong incentive to fill these units of time with as much work as possible.
Yet, for most of human history, there has been no need to divide the day into equal numerical units, much less to know the hour at any particular moment.
The clocks not only helped them conduct trade, but also marked the outer bounds of the day’s worth of labor bought from workers with nothing but labor time to sell.
While capitalism did not itself create standard time units, they proved useful for imposing uniformity on workers, seasonal activities, and latitudes.
Observing clock time signaled a supposed domination over the natural world that was similar to other rationalist ideals, like the imposition of an abstract grid onto a decidedly diverse landscape. A clock hour was meant to be an hour, no matter where or what the season, just as a man-hour would be expected to be an hour, no matter who the man.
Nanni quotes an 1861 letter by Emily Moffat, the daughter-in-law of Robert Moffat, British missionary to what is now known as South Africa: “You must know that today we have unpacked our clock and we seem a little more civilized. For some months we have lived without a timepiece. John’s chronometer and my watch have failed, and we have left time and been launched onto eternity. However, it is very pleasing to hear ‘tic tic tic’ and ‘ding ding.’ ”
In short, the colonists were not able to perceive it at all, because the native sense of time and space did not exhibit the same abstraction and independence from natural cues as their own. On a larger scale, they graded native populations as being more or less “progressed” into modernity based on how removed their systems of time seemed from nature—a
One reverend at a mission in South Africa carefully counted the number of inhabitants “living within the sound of the station-bell,” while another was dismayed to find populations outside the mission’s influence willfully ignorant of the Sabbath. Likewise, in the Philippines and Mexico, Spanish colonists would convert natives into Spanish subjects by placing them bajo las campanas (“under the bells”).
The boundary of this audible range was not one between time and timelessness, but between two fully formed understandings of time, ritual observances, and age.
This view of abstract labor hours could not have been more alien to task-oriented communities who organized their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues—such as the flowering or fruiting of a certain plant—and where things took however much time they took. These communities, for whom work was not profit but part of a social economy, did not make the same distinctions between what was called “work time” and “nonwork time.”
As E. P. Thompson observed, Puritanism entered a “marriage of convenience” with capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming “the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men’s minds with the equation, time is money.”
It was a short step from seeing people as the embodiment of work to turning the units of time they spent working into money.
In a 1789 letter to one of his overseers, General George Washington emphasized that slaves should “[do] as much in the 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health, or constitution will allow of.” Anything less would be bad business sense, amounting to “throw[ing]…labour away.”
As would be the case in many different contexts going forward, the science of recording labor days was inextricable from the project of intensifying them.
Planters did not see them as people but as labor embodied, and that labor could be optimized.
Richard L. Davis, a Black miner, maintained that “none of us who toil for our daily bread are free. At one time…we were chattel slaves; today we are, one and all, white and black, wage slaves.”
Leaders of commerce urged northern cities to build armories in urban industrial areas where strikes were imminent. Labor historian Philip Dray writes that although “Americans have come to think of these dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil…their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check.”
It is telling, for example, that owners of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, tried to argue that longer hours were actually good for the women. Without the “wholesome discipline of factory life,” the women would be left to their own dangerous whims, “without a warrant that this time will be well employed.”
Ironic thing to do on their sabbath
panopticon.
