Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I witnessed several processes of shedding: on a local webcam, where baby falcons, still mostly gray and fluffy, were growing individual feathers on the very tips of their wings, like fingers; on an Oakland hillside, where I found a snakeskin, its owner having disappeared into the brambles; on my desk in my apartment, where the leading edge of a plant stem peeled itself back to allow a new section to stretch toward the window. 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. All of us would.