Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

As if in direct rebuke to Bennett’s unstealable twenty-four hours, Cooper quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race [is] the inescapable robbery of time.”

Rather than be disciplined by something or someone external to them, achievement-subjects are “entrepreneurs of themselves,” DIY bosses propelled from within. Although it answers to no one (else), an achievement-subject nonetheless “wears down in a rat race it runs against itself”: “The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.”

Rosa writes that 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.

In a kind of editor’s letter in the February 1921 issue of Physical Culture, Macfadden stressed that mental vitality was as important as—and inseparable from—superior health, which, in turn, was inseparable from financial success. He reflected all these ideas through the lens of social Darwinism, writing that anyone who did not “completely develop his or her physical organism” was “not a real man nor a complete woman.”

Where a non-Linda is controlled and surveilled directly by external circumstances, Linda perceives herself to be controlled and surveilled by the cultural “logic of expansion.” If Linda does not participate, she will be judged and have to pay a cost, whether it is social or financial. The difference between the Linda and the precarious person is that the Linda can afford to pay that social cost. The similarity between the Linda and the non-Linda is that her “timer” (the culture of busyness) and the non-Linda’s “timer” (wage labor and structural disadvantage) have common roots. They uphold the same system, one in which time can be only a means for profit and where someone else can appear only as your competition.

In a conversation transcribed in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten models a useful way of thinking about such recognition. “The ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain’t my primary concern,” he says. “I don’t worry about them first. But I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk.”

The hustle means different things to different people. But if you are truly an achievement-subject who is only wearing yourself down, then I suggest an adjustment of discretion: 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.

A recognition of that relationship—“this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly”—is important for several reasons. Most fundamentally, it opens up the possibility of solidarity, in the genuine sense of sharing a common cause (“this shit”). But it is also a safeguard against the reaction that privileged people sometimes have to their own burnout: fortifying walled gardens of slowness, minimalism, and authenticity. At best, such a reaction makes it easier for people to forsake the world and leave the status quo untouched. At worst, it actually deepens the status quo, creating a scenario in which slowness becomes a product that you buy off the backs of others.

In this world, slowness is not so much enacted as consumed: “Slow living is now ‘for sale’ and approaches a consumerist lifestyle mostly for middle-class metropolitan dwellers—the majority of whom are probably far from holding transformative, progressivist or even socialist agendas. Arguably, many would admit that ‘it all needs to slow down,’ but such slowness would then be, more often than not, consumed, and consumed privately.”

Landscapes, people, historical moments, and movements have all provided raw material for the experience economy.

This experience further soured the idea of “fun” being sold back to me in a carefully contrived package.

It is this old skepticism that informs my reading of the experience economy. I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t an art to designing and acting in experiences, nor that there is some uncomplicatedly “authentic” experience hiding behind the screen of its commercial counterpart—if only I could grab it—nor that people can’t have a genuinely good time at a place like a theme park. It’s just that, as the experience economy expands to include commodified notions of things like slowness, community, authenticity, and “nature”—all while income inequality yawns wider and the signs of climate change intensify—I feel the panic of watching possible exits blocked. 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.

I can’t think of a better description of commercial social media, where the “stuff” is a sense of belonging. I have no problem with the idea of an online social network; I just don’t want to buy a sense of community with my attention to ads, on a platform that implicitly encourages me to advertise myself, all while my data gets collected. It feels nefarious to me, like Nestlé selling us the public water supply in private bottles.[*5]

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.

Zooming out from Pieper’s definition is hard, because even a state of mind is subject to the forces of a historical and political playing field. The difficulty of trying to account for this is not just the difficulty of reconciling individual agency with structural forces. It also means trying to see the vertical within the horizontal, the free within the unfree, and even peace of mind within a world marked by violence. Pulling on this thread leads me into what feels like an open field—where the entire concept of leisure, even “free” leisure, threatens to become a mirage. What does leisure mean in a world like this one?

With a sensibility similar to the social efficiency movement that codified school grades, early-twentieth-century reformers saw leisure time as both a risk and an opportunity to make citizens healthier and more useful. The National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life went so far as to suggest in 1932 that “what the American people do in their spare time henceforth will largely determine the character of our civilization.”

Any consideration of leisure as a mindset—its definition, conditions, and purpose—is complicated by the history in the United States of the active destruction of anything and everything that many people have needed for wholeness, a sense of agency, and peace of mind. There are many people who, simply by walking down a street, whether public or private, are seen as “a threat to the design of the place” and for whom simply appearing in public at all is interpreted in some places as an invitation to violence. In 2021, a year that saw increased anti-Asian hate crimes, a Filipina American woman my mother’s age was brutally attacked in New York City by a man who said she didn’t belong here. I remember starting to see my mother’s movements through public space as newly restricted by potential threats.

The 1930s concept of leisure didn’t just exist within a field of social hierarchy; it also actively reproduced and entrenched that hierarchy. It had to, when the offer of safety and “freedom from care” to one group was composed of the tacit and violent exclusion of other groups. Safety and purity meant white and abled; improvement meant more white and more abled. Indeed, it was precisely because leisure spaces both public and private were associated with freedom that they invited anxiety over the specter of interracial mixing.

The words peace, sanctity, and sanctuary prompt the question: Sanctuary for whom? This is to say nothing of the ahistorical vision of a place “as it was meant to be,” as though it had always looked that way and did not contain histories of violence, plundering, and murder. Writers like Mark David Spence, author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, have recounted how the establishment of National Parks and wilderness areas in the United States not only violated treaties with indigenous tribes, but also constructed wholesale the American idea of a “ ‘real’ wilderness” or “ ‘virgin’ landscape.”

In other words, the situation would have to have been a postcard—and I the buyer of the postcard—rather than a living, breathing time and place subject to the same pain and injustice found anywhere else.

It was the opposite of a postcard, something that could not be pictured—because a picture would be immediately out of date, and because there was so much that wouldn’t show up on the camera lens. It was complex and bittersweet, occurring in the interstices among ecological time, my personal memories, histories of injustice, and concern for the future—all washed over by a momentary pattern of light.

Thinking about a kind of leisure that pushes against rather than bolsters the current order makes it possible to consider it not as a rarefied escape, but as something vitally related to political imagination. If leisure has been an apolitical sanctuary for the people who are favored by such norms, it has always been political for those who are disfavored and for whom access to an enjoyable, dignified life is inescapably an issue of justice.

What songs are audible when the wind stops? What has been kept alive in the time snatched from work and sheltered from ongoing destruction—what moments of recognition, what ways of relating, what other imagined worlds, what other selves? What other kinds of time?

The identity of a rock is inseparable from both time and space.

Resting here gives us a very different sense of being “on time.” Rather than avatars passing through an empty calendar square, we are actually on top of the material outcome of processes that span millions of years into both the past and the future. Suddenly, everything we look at is suffused with concrete time: not just the pebbles, crags, and cliffs, but also the fog’s slow movement to the south; each wave’s unrepeatable expression of tides and wind; the frenetic activity of the beach flies; the dispersion of air and water through our bodies; and even the chemicals flashing across our synapses as we think these very thoughts. They, too, will never repeat, and they, too, make the world anew.

The geologist Marcia Bjornerud has called this sense “timefulness,” writing, “I see that the events of the past are still present….This impression is a glimpse not of timelessness but timefulness, an acute consciousness of how the world is made by—indeed, made of—time.”

Until relatively recently, the naming and recognition of seasons or seasonal entities was an indicator of some action to be taken: collecting, hunting, harvesting.[*3] Likewise, no element of a season can be considered in isolation from space, time, or other components—you will find no perfect billiard balls here, only dense meshes of interrelated or overlapping processes.

What would happen to our view of time if we could better see our wheres?

Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary—things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual. This was no small task, given that invisibility is part of the very nature of habit. “This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia,” Perec writes. “We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”

Their observations were perhaps symptomatic of a larger national trend: For people staying at home during the pandemic, birds started to become more noticeable. In “The Birds Are Not on Lockdown, and More People Are Watching Them,” The New York Times interviewed Corina Newsome, who pointed out that the beginning of lockdowns happened at the same time as spring migration. She suggested that it might “give us peace and calm to see that even though our rhythm is interrupted, there is a larger rhythm that continues to go on.”

Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how.

Instead of things that the empty “stuff” of time simply washes over, you may begin to see “things” more often as patterns in time. The world, just like the architecture of a city, becomes a patchwork of outcomes from different weeks, decades, and centuries, all of it being built upon and eroded—pushing, trickling, and winging forward into the unknown.

Wildcat writes that “indigenous thinkers not only acknowledge contingency and human’s lack of control in the world; they also see it as empowering and humbling, not something frightening.” If “empowering and humbling” sounds like a paradox, it’s because of how we normally conceive of power. In a worldview where power, agency, and experience are not bound by individual bodies but reside “in and through the relations and processes that constitute life,” the paradox dissolves.

Nor is creation a “mystery,” because “we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.” Freedom is choice, and choice is scattered throughout the universe, pushing forward and acting upon what would constrain it.

grade. As I sat down at my laptop to work, I felt so humiliated by the contrast between my pedestrian tasks and the macabre surroundings that I couldn’t decide whether to keep the blinds open or closed.

Indigenous groups are sometimes said to be more attentive to an ecology’s changes and temporal cues: flowerings, weather patterns, and migrations. Yet it’s too easy to read this as passive adaptation, a total lack of footprint, rather than active construction and collaboration with the nonhuman world. Indigenous practices, as much as any other, can speed and suspend—both on the minute level of individual plants and on the scale of entire landscapes and communities.

“SUPPRESS[ING] OUR WAY out of the issue” is good shorthand for a range of things that structure the lived reality to which I and many other nonrural dwellers are accustomed. In California, the landscape of suppression is easy to find once you start looking: dams, seawalls, sand fences, netting, debris basins, concrete-lined creek channels, and the occasional plastered hillside—all dedicated to keeping water and rocks from moving in ways disadvantageous to people and property.

But isn’t there something other than mountain time, captured in a series of recorded events, that needs to be admitted here? And if we’re “suppressing our way out of the issue,” what actually is “the issue”? On the material, everyday level, the issue in this case would seem to be a series of boulders that keep destroying property despite the city’s increasing infrastructural reinforcements. But what I want to suggest is something more: that the “issue” is a failure to recognize the mountain itself.

Seen through the lens of the Anthropocene, the nonhuman world is inert, but what’s funny is that, upon closer examination, the innately exploitative humans don’t have agency in this view, either. They just do what they do—mess up a “state of nature”—and they all do it. The Anthro- of Anthropocene lumps humanity together, as if one specific portion of humanity were not responsible for a culture of extraction, visiting environmental horrors upon the rest of the world. This blunt-edged framing has informed the unstoppable “video playhead” of my nightmares—a history with no actors, only mechanisms; no moments of struggle, only linear evolution.

But this creeping sense of inevitability doesn’t just feel bad; it obscures the actors continuing to tighten the ropes and everyone who has fought, and is fighting, to get free.

the people who stand to gain the most from determinism (in others) are typically the people doing the determining. This strategy is detectable not just in the long historical sense, but also in the current maneuvers of those energy companies now driving climate change.

In other words, they present growing energy demand as inevitable, and imply that it can only be met with fossil fuels.

One smoky day while I was writing this chapter, a Wells Fargo ATM asked me if I wanted to donate to help with the wildfires. I stared back at the screen. Wells Fargo is one of the largest funders of fossil fuels, having invested $198 billion into the coal, oil, and gas industry in the four years following the Paris Agreement.

Aronoff takes great pains throughout her book to remind us that the hill in the uphill battle is historically specific: “In positing all of human existence as an endless striving toward market society, neoliberals had to erase not just the possibility of a future but all memory of a past when humans managed to organize themselves in other ways. The kinds of tools needed to navigate out of the climate crisis—things like public ownership, full employment, or even just tough regulations—have receded into memory.”

“Instead of accepting Nixon’s oft-cited definition of slow violence as ‘out of sight,’ we have to instead ask the question: ‘out of sight to whom?’ ” A spectacle means something different for those who view it on the news for a week than it does for the people who live in it. “Having spent almost a decade investigating the lives of communities in various toxic geographies—including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and now ‘Cancer Alley’…the last thing I would describe these spaces as, is lacking in spectacle,” Davies writes. “Communities who are exposed to the slow violence of toxic pollution are replete with testimonies, experiences, and bereavements that bear witness to the brutality of gradual environmental destruction.”

There are many people and places that could accept neither Enlightenment Man’s march of progress nor the billiard ball declinism of the Anthropocene—because that narrative was inherently premised upon their destruction, commodification, and relegation to a state of nonbeing. For those people and places, the historical past can never be an object of nostalgia, and the future has always been in jeopardy. If you don’t want to kick the can down the road, look to those who never recognized the road in the first place.

‘Mother Nature is patient,’ he said. ‘Mother Nature has more time than we do.’ Rabelais said, ‘She has nothing but time.’ ”

Seth Heald warns against talking about climate adaptation and resilience “without mentioning what it is we are adapting to or working to be resilient from.” He cites a study finding that most Americans conceive of climate change within an environmental, scientific, or economic lens, but not a moral or social justice one. For Heald, this is a form of “partial climate silence.” While it is undeniably good that more people are polling as concerned about climate change, partial silence will bring partial solutions. I can imagine, for example, a future in which the increasingly burning, storming, sliding world is vilified at the same time it is suppressed and denied agency—the same way all objects of colonialism have been. This perspective would (and does) see waves of migrants in the same objective terms as a hurricane, declaring them as “unnecessary” as a landslide and substituting technocratic interventions for a long-overdue reckoning.

The world is ending—but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, “a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.”

The workings of the IAATW—and those of the more than century-old International Transport Workers’ Federation that has pivoted to support them—exemplify what Oli Mould would call an actually creative activity, as distinct from “creativity” under capitalism. In Against Creativity, Mould observes that jobs of all sorts now encourage their employees to be “creative,” which often translates to competitive flexibility, self-management, and individual assumption of risk. Meanwhile, even nominally anti-capitalist creative work, whether art, music, or slogans, is handily appropriated by the market. Mould writes that, in either case, creativity is not actually creative, because it merely “produces more of the same form of society.” If it makes progress, it is the progress of capitalist logic into ever-more-minute corners of our daily lives, making what Braverman calls “the universal market” even more universal.[*8]