Time to think about time
I like to read while I’m eating lunch and this past week I was working my through Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Now, lunch isn’t usually a time of deep thinking for me. And the last thing I would have deep thoughts about is lunch itself. But suddenly, Saving Time was making me think about lunch in a whole new way.
Odell’s examination of the history, politics, and even morality of contemporary Western understandings of time had me asking myself:
Why do I consider reading to be a “good” use of time on my lunch break?
Why is eating lunch—a physical necessity for most of us—considered a “break,” anyways?
Is lunch “leisure time?” How can it be leisure if it’s something we have to do?
These questions touch on the moral values assigned to different uses of time; the overlay of capitalist clock time onto our bodies; and the culturally-influenced ways we’ve come to divide work and leisure. Odell tackles all of these themes and more in Saving Time. A connecting thread through the whole book is how we think about and experience time in relation to the natural world when we exist in a period of climate crisis. This is a very complex and nuanced book; I’m not sure I always follow where Odell is leading me, but nevertheless her writing often opens up new things for me to ponder (check out How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, as well).
Saving Time is definitely not a self help book, although it addresses the self in relation to time and the world around us, and has profound implications for how we might help ourselves and each other through cataclysmic change. It did make me realize, though, that conceptions of time are central to self help. Time is intertwined with our approaches to happiness, meaning making, personal development, relationships, work, rest, and beyond.
Time is one of those elements of life that is completely pervasive, and weirdly invisible. It’s the “water we swim in,” (if we were fish). It becomes “visible” to us when we feel like we don’t have enough of it or we’re suddenly “out of time.” We check watches, phones, and calendars for time information constantly, but we rarely reflect on why or how modern life came to be organized this way, and how it became “natural” to exist under an ordered regime of clock time.
Sometimes little things will force a mini-reckoning with our relationship with time. As I worked on this newsletter, I decided to put the computer away and make notes on paper. I’m trying to practice nicer cursive handwriting, so my thoughts were coming much faster than I could write them down. My speed of thinking wasn’t synched up to my speed of recording, which made me feel as if my mind and hands were in two different time zones. I had to consciously slow my thoughts down, and even wind thinking-time backwards to remember things I temporarily forgot whilst writing something else. It made me wonder how human “thinking-time” has been influenced by the development of faster recording machines (typewriters, computer keyboards, voice recorders).
As I worked, I was also conscious that every 30 minutes or so I “should” get up and move for 5 minutes (and of course my watch will tell me to “move!” should I forget). I also thought about how often I was taking a drink of water, and whether my water consumption for the day was “on track,” given the clock time (it wasn’t). There are probably a dozen or so temporalities running in the back of mind at any given moment.
I started to think about the many different self help themes I’ve written about in Perfectly Cromulent.1 Implicit in any approach to these themes is a way of thinking about time, but it’s not always obvious (or perhaps, it’s so obvious that we don’t even think to remark on it).
Planning and organizing. To a large extent, planning ahead and organizing spaces are all about optimizing time, where optimizing means avoiding any “watse” of time or extensions of the time it takes to do a thing. It implies a belief in a good or right or perhaps even best way to organize days, weeks, and months (as well as kitchens, closets, and toys). Disorganization and poor planning result in “dead” time, or lateness, or wasted time.
Worrying and anxiety. It’s often said that worrying is a way of trying to control the future. It’s inherently an “out of time” activity, in that you don’t worry about the past and you don’t worry about the present moment. Worrying assumes that it’s possible to predict the future, or at least one of a few possible futures, and that by thinking intensely about it, you can either influence the outcome or manage your response to it.
Habits. Developing habits is all about creating repeating time loops, at the top of which you do certain activities. Brushing your teeth, for example, happens on a twice daily loop for most of us. If you were to visualize, or draw, the time loops of all your habits it would probably resemble one of those Spirograph drawings from the 80s (btw I loved my Spirograph!).
Mindfulness. As a purported antidote to stress and worry, mindfulness promotes a different kind of time mastery: mastery of being “in the moment.” Being “present,” i.e. noticing the current moment and backgrounding the past and the future, is proposed as the ideal way to experience life. It’s hard to argue with centuries of Zen or Buddhist wisdom but perhaps it’s only a different way of approaching time, not necessarily a better one.
Productivity. Odell traces our obsession with productivity and the idea that “time is money” to the colonial period and particularly the ways in which slave owners tried to maximize the labour (time, intensity) of enslaved people. Under waged labour systems, we learn from an early age to think of our value—value being defined by economic productivity—in terms of dollars per hour. In the productivity self help world, the assumption that time is money is quite explicit, with the idea being that if you can “hack” your productivity, you naturally increase your value in terms of dollars per hour.
Happiness and meaning making. Even if we disconnect happiness from money and attach it to a search for meaning instead, we still have to acknowledge that different ways of thinking about time run through these approaches. For example, YOLO or more serious-sounding advice to make the most of your time on Earth and do what makes you happy and find meaning in all your days and hours: it all works with the idea that our time is linear and finite. As time moves forward, we have less of it. It’s not that different than the approach of the productivity-maximizer bros, who urge us to be aware of the wasted minutes/money ticking by. Maybe it’s experience we’re trying to maximize rather than money, but it still encourages us to think of time like “sands through the hourglass.”
Rest and leisure. As Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance, maintains, rest can be a deliberate strategy to push back against the demands of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, particularly for those whose ancestors have had time stolen from them, for example thorugh slavery, and those whose time and labour is un- or undervalued, such as caregivers. It’s incredibly challenging for most of us to conceive of rest or leisure without them being in relation to work, usually paid work but perhaps care work too. This was the “lunch” conundrum I pondered earlier. Right “on time,” The Guardian had a piece on lunch breaks, calling them our “hour of freedom.” Emma Brockes laments the encroachment of work into lunch time, and our own increasing unwillingness to take a serious break:
“Skipping your lunch hour feels like part of a larger bait-and-switch, on a continuum with zero-hours contracts, gig labour, no security, no benefits – all bad deals that were presented by employers as opportunities for us to enjoy greater freedom. You can, of course, take all the lunch break you want if you’re on your own clock. In which case, why take any lunch break at all?”
Thinking about lunch is a good reminder that our ideas about rest and leisure have been fully saturated by our economic norms.
Romantic relationships. Many of the challenges we face in relationships, especially heterosexual ones, boil down to questions about time, specifically, whose time is seen as valuable, who controls time, and who gets leisure time. Much of the advice oriented to these problems focuses on what could be considered time management strategies to help achieve somewhat more satisfactory divisions of labour. Time is understood as finite, like a pie each person can only have so much of. Moreover, it’s not just the ticking of the clock that has to be managed. Perhaps the more difficult thing (and a reason why these problems seem so intractable) is to reckon with deep-seated beliefs about what the most valuable uses of time are (e.g., those that make money), the power that comes from being in charge of one’s own time and the time of others, and the beliefs we have about whose work is worthy of earning them rest and leisure.
Further reading
Phew, that’s a list. And I could go on. But in the words of a great cultural prophet, nobody got time for that. If you do want to read more on any of the themes above from Perfectly Cromulent, check out these past newsletters. I’ve made them all free to access for a time. If you want to join the paid community, you can read any of the dozens of posts in the archive.
Odell sprinkles Simpsons references throughout her book which of course embiggened my heart.