Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

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.

Fuck.

For a few minutes, a sunrise collects all that ineffable bittersweetness into a single burning point. People (including my mom) can be forgiven for wanting to hold on to it in a photo. Outside the camera, though, sunrises escape. They show us that time is passing and the earth is turning, one of two times in the day at most latitudes when the light changes fast enough for us to perceive the shift. To watch it is to understand that while the sun rises every day, no individual sunrise will ever happen again. Each one gives us an image of renewal, return, creation, and a “new day,” and it fleetingly repairs that Western rift between time and space—especially at Haleakalā, from which some people claim to be able to see the curvature of the earth.

In How We Show Up, Birdsong writes that the American Dream exploits our fears, creating real and imagined scarcity, and she calls for “accessible, celebrated models of what happiness, purpose, connection and love look like” that are different from what we are ordinarily taught.