Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

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.

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.

changing how we think about time is more than a means for confronting personal despair in a catastrophic meantime. It can also be a call to action in a world whose current state can’t be taken for granted any more than its actors can remain unnamed, exploited, or abandoned.

A feeling of time pressure can result from constantly having to switch tasks or coordinate with external factors. Here, the German word zeitgeber, which translates roughly to “time giver,” is useful.

To follow a zeitgeber is to become entrained; your activities become entrained to patterns outside you; or others must become entrained to yours.

If you don’t know what’s coming down the line, preparing for the future becomes an infinite task.

the capitalist “logic of increase” infiltrates cultural notions of the good life, meaning that to stand still in the realm not just of work but also of money, health, knowledge, relationships, or fashions, registers as sliding backward or falling down in the social order.

experimenting with what looks like mediocrity in some parts of your life. Then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre.

accepting a life with less of a certain type of ambition is not the same as settling for a life with less meaning.

The post touched off the “lying flat” movement, which at the time of this writing is still going strong.

advice for winning the rat race assumes that you’re running in it, rather than peeling away from a vanishing dream.

One day, while standing under red vinyl umbrellas, my co-worker and I discovered that the pavement was so hot that you could nudge parts of it around with your shoe, exposing boiling water underneath.

I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending.

In marked contrast to an experience to be consumed or a goal to be met, Pieper’s leisure is something closer to a state of mind or an emotional posture—one that, like falling asleep, can be achieved only by letting go. It involves a mixture of awe and gratitude that “springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe.” It opens onto, and finds peace in, chaos and things larger than the self, the way you might feel when looking at an enormous cliff face—or a sunrise, for that matter. As “a form of silence…which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality,” true leisure requires the kind of emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.

Given the opportunity to slow down, what I find is not slowness per se, but simply what has been happening all along, just outside my perception.

some people’s time is not only valued less, but also understood as existing for the sake of others’ time.

But, just as in the pandemic memes, the time I experienced was repetitive, constant, and seemed to take place in a vacuum. Crucially, at that moment, there was no end to the pandemic in sight. It was just going to be this: boxes of time to be filled in my box of a room forever and ever.

THE TERM SOCIAL DEATH was first coined by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 survey of slavery throughout world history. It has since been taken up by scholars to describe myriad conditions in which an individual or a group is deprived of their status as human, existing in a liminal state between recognition and annihilation.