More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jenny Odell
Read between
July 26 - August 9, 2023
“Leisure does not exist for the sake of work,” Pieper wrote, “however much strength it may give a man to work; the point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up, whether mental or physical; and though it give new strength, mentally and physically, and spiritually too, that is not the point.”
To imagine a different “point” means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.
Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose, and whose time is considered disposable? These are not individual questions, but cultural, historical ones, and there are few ways to liberate your time or anyone else’s without considering them.
I doubt burnout has ever been solely about not having enough hours in the day. 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.
Indeed, it’s this very awareness of overlapping temporalities that invites a deep suspicion that we are living on the wrong clock. Nothing in the horizontal realm can answer that more spiritual form of burnout: the simultaneous experience of time pressure and a growing awareness of just how out of joint the climate is. 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
...more
European commercial activity and colonialism that occasioned our current system for measuring and keeping time and, with it, the valuing of time as interchangeable “stuff” that can be stacked up, traded, and moved around.
For Salami, it couldn’t be a question of either-or. Instead, learning to speak a different language about time would bring climate justice and self-care together into the same effort.
It also affects whether we see the world and its inhabitants as living or dead-alive. This is perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the idea that (European) Man is the sole mover and shaker in a natural world that lives by predictable, mechanistic laws. When it emerged, this distinction relegated colonized people to a kind of permanent stasis within chronos, the same agency-less category as their lands and all the other life within them. This conception not only justified colonists’ exploitation of these “resources” but also set the stage for both the climate crisis and the racial
...more
This phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability. How much someone’s time is valued is not measured simply by a wage, but by who does what kind of work and whose temporality has to line up with whose, whether that means rushing or waiting or both. Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.
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.”
WHEN LOOKING AT the history of how productivity has been measured, it is always illuminating to ask: Who is timing whom?
the roots of modern management can readily be found on West Indian and southern U.S. plantations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Plantation owners were some of the earliest users of what we would now call spreadsheets,
Even after a dramatic rise in wage labor after the Civil War, it was compared to prostitution or slavery, sometimes by white workers wanting to maintain distance from sex workers and enslaved Black people. But Black freedpeople, too, noted the similarity of a hireling to a slave.
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.”
Time discipline was and is a tool used both inside and outside the factory to render a more docile and productive workforce, whether by directing and intensifying work or generally instilling a pious “habit of industry” in would-be workers.
While industrial capitalism spawned many machines that saved time and labor, it seemed only to take up more and more of workers’ time.
“The only reward for working faster is more work.”
As Taylor’s years-long battled showed, workers would have some control over the pace of work as long as they held knowledge about the work process. As much as it was about intensification, Taylorism was also about breaking apart and codifying this process in a way that concentrated knowledge in the hands of employers rather than employees. “Under our system the workman is told minutely just what he is to do and how he is to do it,”
The tragedy of fungible labor time lies first in its historical association with coercion, exploitation, and the imagining of people as machines. Time is the punitive dimension in which the wage worker is both measured and squeezed.
According to the Protestant work ethic, you weren’t supposed to get rich in order to spend your money; work and the accumulation of wealth were inherently good, a way to serve God. And if you did manage to get rich, those weren’t your riches to spend; they were God’s, and they signaled your eternal salvation. Rich (but ascetic) was the way to go, the “business” of life a moral affair.
Among productivity bros and many others, the Taylorist obsession with routines has morphed into an unhealthy fixation on morning routines.
Among people for whom the idea of twenty-four unstealable hours makes little sense, working parents would have to be at the top of the list. May Anderson, an admin for a Facebook Group for working moms, told me that she had given up on mainstream time management books, comparing them to the common financial advice “Just don’t buy the damn latte.”
While slavery has been (officially) abolished, it’s still the case that the majority of people “rent their time to employers simply in order to survive.” Until the necessity to do that is addressed—for example with universal basic income—“gross inequality” in temporal autonomy will persist.
unless you are some kind of celebrity or high-powered consultant, the price for which you sell your time is liable to reflect aspects over which you have no control, like gender, race, and the current economic situation.
For example, one study showed that both men and women expect women to offer help and respond to requests for help; in the study, men would wait to volunteer for favors when there were women in the group, but would raise their hand earlier if the group contained only men.
Becoming more man-shaped in order not to die in the car was my unwitting description of a Lean In type of feminism, and of time management aimed specifically at women.
I’m reminded of a saying that a Spanish journalist shared with me, regarding the phenomenon of burnout: “Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?”
I wasn’t surprised when May told me that she’d thought about getting together a group of seven other moms in which one would make dinner for everyone else one night a week. “I think a support system has got to be, like, the number one way to help with our time management,” she said, citing informal networks of in-laws and friends. Taking this further, we might imagine, as Angela Y. Davis did in 1981, that “child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.” If
...more
The idea that a safe leisure space is a white space continues to resurface in ever-new ways, including online.
“I can’t really think of anything more wholesome than standing under a tree and watching a hummingbird build her nest, but I think if our activities fall outside of the framework of possibility that’s established for us by the white imagination, then we’re at risk.”[*7] But when #blackbirdersweek content (including the Washington Post article) was posted to online birding groups, it was sometimes reported or removed, or the person who posted it was banned altogether—a modern-day version of the buried swimming pool.
“Rest is not some cute lil luxury item you grant to yourself as an extra treat after you’ve worked like a machine and are now burned out,” Hersey tweeted in October 2020. “Rest is our path to liberation. A portal for healing. A right.”
Hersey responded, “Yes. You know, I love to reimagine rest outside of a capitalist and colonized system. So I love to think of resting as something that’s subversive and inventive—closing your eyes for 10 minutes, taking a longer time in the shower, daydreaming, meditating, praying. So we can find rest wherever we are because wherever our bodies are, we can find liberation because our body is a site of liberation. So the time to rest is now.
Together, we wondered how something like leisure could be possible in a world saturated by patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialisms old and new.
Something has happened for me to be able to step back and feel the magnitude of our existence and also how small we are. Like coming back to our humanity…and that sounds kind of dramatic, but that’s how it feels. And, you know, just realizing that my existence is not just bound to my job, social media, and whatever in between—these things that happen—it’s like, Oh, wow, I’m a living human in this moment in time. And wow, even with all the bullshit, I’m actually deeply grateful to be alive.
Whether on the level of minutes or of life stages and benchmarks, the more you stare at time, the more cruelly it seems to slip through your fingers.
A natural partner to time management, wellness is invoked both as a means to “perform” better and as a way to increase your overall years of life, as though you were a car or a watch.
the socially dead create a social life, often through the connections to others that incarceration seeks to destroy.[*6] Describing the growth of mutual and self-regard within a brutal space of disregard, Price calls this grace.
It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
Codified or not, forms of disregard can be felt in any social hierarchy: race, gender, ability, class. And shifts between the two can happen in a relative blink of an eye
