Saving Time Quotes

“Maybe "the point" isn't to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“Time is not money. Time is beans.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“In failing to recognize the agency of both human and nonhuman actors, such a view makes struggle and contingency invisible and produces nihilism, nostalgia, and ultimately paralysis.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“In comparison to those other forms of 'screwing the nine to five' - worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid - the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don't need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom. The problem is that, according to this plan, more freedom requires ever more (self-)mastery, ever-bettering playing of your cards. Increasingly unable to control any of her surrounding circumstances, the consumer of this kind of self-help risks turning on herself with displaced intensity, surveilling herself with spreadsheets and averages, docking points , and meting out punishment in a secularized space of 'confession and rebuke'. This approach perfectly fits the neoliberal worldview of total competition. Not only will you not find help among others, but everyone else becomes your opponent while you jealously guard and 'supercharge' the time you possess. Whether you wring enough value out of it is on you.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“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.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time

“At first glance, there seems to be a paradox here: While industrial capitalism spawned many machines that saved time and labor, it seemed only to take up more and more of workers’ time. But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. Thus the paradox: The factory is efficient, but it also produces “the drive toward the consumption of the person’s time up to its outermost, physical limit.” Or, as the workplace adage would have it, “The only reward for working faster is more work.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“I’VE INVOKED THIS backstory of purchased and timed labor in order to defamiliarize, just for a moment, the concept of the wage. When the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer. This may seem obvious, but if time is money, it is so in a way that’s different for a worker than for an employer. For the worker, time is a certain amount of money—the wage. But the buyer, or employer, hires a worker to create surplus value; this excess is what defines productivity under capitalism.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“A boy who is impatient to grow up is wandering in a forest when a witch appears and gives him a ball with a golden thread sticking out of it. If he pulls the thread, she says, time will go faster. But he must use the device wisely, as the thread can no more easily be put back in than time can run backward. Predictably, the boy can’t help himself: impatient to go home from school, he pulls the thread; impatient to marry his crush, he pulls the thread; impatient to have a child, he pulls the thread. All too soon, he finds himself at the end of his life without the sensation of having lived it. The moral of the story is supposed to be about “living in the moment” and the folly of wanting to skip over the bad parts of life to get to the good ones. But when I read it, the thing I fixated on was the thread and the ball, simply as an illustration of the irreversibility of time. Even though it has a happy ending (the witch finds the old man and lets him live his life over again), I remembered this for a long time as a horror story.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“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 nihilism. There is a lonely absurdity in the idea of racing against the clock at the end of time, as evidenced in a headline by the parady site Reductress: 'Woman Waiting for Evidence That World Will Still Exist in 2050 Before She Starts Working Towards Goals'" (Introduction xv-xvi).”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“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" (Introduction xiv).”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. 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. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

“having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing in another, having to build yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, and having to ignore everything and everyone whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time

“As Carole McGranahan writes, “To refuse is to say no. But, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions.”76 Refusal may start in you but cannot end with you.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time

“Why are individuals expected to be “resilient” when corporations are not?”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time

“capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“The Colonisation of Time, Giordano Nanni”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“To speak state language was to be comprehensible to the state; to be comprehensible was to survive in a land increasingly dominated by the state.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“In China, the one holdout from Beijing time is Xinjiang, a mountainous and desert region in the west that partially observes Xinjiang Time (or Ürümqi Time, named after the capital of Xinjiang). Situated on China’s border with Kazakhstan, Xinjiang is home to the Uyghur, whose pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic identity has never sat well with the Chinese Communist Party. Although Xinjiang was designated an autonomous region in the 1950s, China began trying to assimilate it politically, a project that included an effort to officially abolish Xinjiang Time in 1968. On the one hand, Xinjiang Time appears merely practical: Xinjiang is more than a thousand miles west of Beijing, which puts its solar time two hours behind that of the capital. A sanitation worker in Ürümqi told The New York Times he thought they must be the only people who eat dinner at midnight (by which he meant Beijing midnight). But Xinjiang Time is fundamentally cultural, running along ethnic lines: Local TV networks put their schedules for Chinese channels in Beijing time, while Uyghur and Kazakh channels are in Xinjiang Time. In a period when the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts have moved from assimilation to anti-Islamic annihilation, observation of Xinjiang Time could not be more political. Uyghurs have been subjected to sterilization, forced labor, detainment in reeducation camps, and bans on Uyghur cultural materials and practices.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“In the United States, the story of DST is rather ridiculous, influenced by that especially American blend of wartime morality and blatant commercial interest. In the surprisingly hilarious book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, Michael Downing writes that soon after the United States adopted DST in March 1918, “the lofty humanitarian goals of Daylight Saving—to get working girls safely home before dark, to reunite dads and moms with the kids before shadows fell on the backyard garden, to safeguard the physical and mental health of industrial workers by increasing their daily opportunity for sports and recreation—also resembled an innovative strategy for boosting retail sales.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“WE ENTER THE stacks. This library does not use the Dewey decimal system, instead relying on the librarians’ intuitive, psycho-geographical layout. Starting on the left-hand side with subjects local to San Francisco, things proceed outward and along the aisles into the American West, World Geography and Natural History, Extraction, Transportation, Infrastructure, Housing, Art, Film, Networked Media, Material Culture, Language and Gender, Race and Ethnicity, U.S. Political History, Geopolitics and Un-American Activities, and finally, a section called Abstract and Off-Earth.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“In the 1920s, this place housed a commercial laundry that was listed in the phone book under an ad for the Anti-Jap Laundry League, at a time when businesses proudly advertised “white labor” as if it were a fair-trade label.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“He also discusses Christopher D. Stone, a law professor from the University of Southern California who used a theory of legal standing in 1972 when arguing Sierra Club v. Morton and went on to write the book Should Trees Have Standing? Since then, similar legal undertakings have happened in Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, India, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. In 2019, the Yurok Tribe (the same tribe that provided guidance for the California law on controlled burns) granted legal personhood to the Klamath River under tribal law, hoping it would aid legal actions on behalf of the river.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“Ronald T. Takaki, in Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920,”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“Wynter describes in her 2003 paper, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“Whereas, as Jan W. van Wagtendonk observes, the Forest Service was created in 1905 with “fire suppression [as] its reason for being,” the shift away from fire suppression in California was gradual. In 1968, the National Park Service changed its policy to allow lightning-initiated fires in some parks to run their course if they happened within approved zones, and in 1974 the Forest Service did the same for lightning-initiated fires in wilderness areas. The Forest Service has also begun to allow indigenous communities to conduct cultural burns. In 2021, the Yurok Tribe provided guidance for a California law that eliminated the liability risk for private citizens and Indigenous people doing controlled burns.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“A review of How to Do Nothing once said that I “employ[ed] the annoying term ‘bodies’ ” when, clearly, I must have meant people or humans. But I don’t mean “people” or “humans.” I mean bodies: double bodies, triple bodies, alliances and amalgamations that can shift and bear the weight, brace the walls. This moment requires that we be pressed together, pressed against the world. Now is not the time to turn your back on the ocean.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“WHEN WE ALLOW the climate crisis a moral dimension, certain things lost in the haze become clearer, including its relationship to other fundamental injustices. For example, the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apologists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. Only by viewing enslaved people as nonsubjects could someone like Henry Lascelles, Second Earl of Harewood, have spoken plausibly of a “progressive state” of “improvement in the slave population” at an 1823 meeting about his West Indian plantations. Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

“THE WEATHER SPEAKS, though not in English.”
― Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture