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Time has been codified and commodified. This author wants to set it free
New York Times
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For many people locked away during
the pandemic in the summer of 2020, time felt different. Gummy and unfamiliar,
it lacked the usual signposts of a commute, a day in the office, time in a
classroom. A single day, or just an hour, felt like it could go on forever.اضافة اعلان
To counter the “deadening” effect of the sameness, author Jenny Odell said, she focused on natural markers of time: migratory birds passing through her part of California, the flowering of a buckeye tree or a friend’s baby growing into a toddler and learning to speak.
She poured that frame of reference into her new book, “Saving Time”, which was published earlier this month by Random House. In it, Odell looks at how time became codified and commodified, and how it might be different.
“I’m really interested in problems that feel personal and are experienced personally, but tie into much larger historical and structural forces,” Odell said.
The project, Odell said, grew out of her first book, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”, which targeted the zeitgeist in a similar way. In it, Odell examined our obsession with productivity and why creating monetizable things feels productive, while taking care of our own children does not.
The book became a bestseller. But Odell said that when she heard from readers, they often told her they did not have enough time in the day to reconsider how they approached productivity.
“I want to think about time in a shared way,” Odell said. “What becomes possible collectively when you remove the grid and stop thinking about it as little bits of time currency in each individual person’s time bank, and that all you can do is hoard it.”
‘A good teacher’“Saving Time” is an unusual book, a mix of history, philosophy, and personal narrative. And while it takes on a topic that is central to work-life balance and conversations about well-being, it is not self-help. Odell is not trying to tell anyone what to do. She does not see herself as “fixing anything”, she said, but as mapping out a societal problem.
Odell, 36, is an artist by training who taught digital art at Stanford for eight years. Her work often has an environmental focus; in one art show, she displayed pieces of trash, sometimes pairing them with images of those same objects when they were new, along with research on where they were made.
The idea was to encourage people to think about the entire life cycle of an object, she said, not just our short relationship with it. A CD player, for example, which was muddy and crushed and looked “like it had been run over by a truck”, she said, was juxtaposed with an advertisement for it in pristine condition and information on its manufacture.
She has been an artist in residence at a recycling center in San Francisco and at the San Francisco Planning Department.
“My whole vibe,” she said, “is artist in residence at weird places.”
What unites her work is an appetite for research and an attention to detail.
From spreadsheets to highwaysIn “Saving Time”, Odell looks at how quantified time was exported around the world by colonialists and how plantation owners used early spreadsheets to track the labor of enslaved people. She pulls from Karl Marx and eviscerates the mindset of those she calls “productivity bros”. A significant portion of the book examines climate change; Odell tries to translate her “climate dread” into something useful rather than crippling, arguing that we are at a moment when the future of the planet can still change.
But the book also focuses on the immediate physical world. Each section begins with a few paragraphs that take the reader to a particular place in the San Francisco Bay Area — a cemetery, a beach, a stretch of highway where the minutes slip away in traffic.
Odell even approached the interview for this article in an unusual and physically grounded way: She assigned me homework, hoping I would better understand the version of time she was pursuing. In her book, there is a picture of a giant boulder in Upper Manhattan sandwiched between two residential buildings on Bennett Avenue, a protrusion of Manhattan schist about three stories tall rising out of the ground.
“Observe the outcrop of 450-million-year-old schist on Bennett Ave.," Odell instructed by email, “at first from across the street, then up close, including any plants that may currently be growing on it.” (On the day of my visit, the rock was decorated with a snow leopard stuffed animal and a large plastic reindeer named Sven from the “Frozen” movies.)
Stuffed animals aside, this kind of grounding is central to Odell’s relationship with time, the one she forged while writing this book.
“This is probably something a lot of people experienced during the pandemic,” she said. “There was some assurance in seeing, ecologically speaking, big things, like migratory birds, seeing the flowers come back and seeing that this goes on. I think that was very therapeutic for people; it obviously was for me.”
Ultimately, she said, her goal in writing this book was to find a relationship to time that “wasn’t painful”, she said. And while she is not living in bliss every moment of the day, she said, she thinks she succeeded.
“I feel better,” she said. “Time feels thicker. It’s made out of stuff. It’s made out of people and things that are in it. It doesn’t have as much of that ‘empty grid of minutes’ kind of feeling,” she said. “When you start to think of time in more collective ways, trying to leave behind the individual time banks, it opens up the horizon of what’s possible in your and others’ time — together.”
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To counter the “deadening” effect of the sameness, author Jenny Odell said, she focused on natural markers of time: migratory birds passing through her part of California, the flowering of a buckeye tree or a friend’s baby growing into a toddler and learning to speak.
She poured that frame of reference into her new book, “Saving Time”, which was published earlier this month by Random House. In it, Odell looks at how time became codified and commodified, and how it might be different.
“I want to think about time in a shared way… What becomes possible collectively when you remove the grid and stop thinking about it as little bits of time currency in each individual person’s time bank"Arriving after the perspective-shifting experience of the pandemic lockdown, the book lands as many are trying to define a new normal and re-examining their relationship to time — in particular, how much of it they want to devote to their jobs.
“I’m really interested in problems that feel personal and are experienced personally, but tie into much larger historical and structural forces,” Odell said.
The project, Odell said, grew out of her first book, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”, which targeted the zeitgeist in a similar way. In it, Odell examined our obsession with productivity and why creating monetizable things feels productive, while taking care of our own children does not.
The book became a bestseller. But Odell said that when she heard from readers, they often told her they did not have enough time in the day to reconsider how they approached productivity.
“I want to think about time in a shared way,” Odell said. “What becomes possible collectively when you remove the grid and stop thinking about it as little bits of time currency in each individual person’s time bank, and that all you can do is hoard it.”
‘A good teacher’“Saving Time” is an unusual book, a mix of history, philosophy, and personal narrative. And while it takes on a topic that is central to work-life balance and conversations about well-being, it is not self-help. Odell is not trying to tell anyone what to do. She does not see herself as “fixing anything”, she said, but as mapping out a societal problem.
“This is probably something a lot of people experienced during the pandemic,” she said. “There was some assurance in seeing, ecologically speaking, big things, like migratory birds, seeing the flowers come back and seeing that this goes on.”“She’s a good teacher,” said Joshua Batson, a good friend of hers. “She wants you to have an experience, not to listen to her.”
Odell, 36, is an artist by training who taught digital art at Stanford for eight years. Her work often has an environmental focus; in one art show, she displayed pieces of trash, sometimes pairing them with images of those same objects when they were new, along with research on where they were made.
The idea was to encourage people to think about the entire life cycle of an object, she said, not just our short relationship with it. A CD player, for example, which was muddy and crushed and looked “like it had been run over by a truck”, she said, was juxtaposed with an advertisement for it in pristine condition and information on its manufacture.
She has been an artist in residence at a recycling center in San Francisco and at the San Francisco Planning Department.
“My whole vibe,” she said, “is artist in residence at weird places.”
What unites her work is an appetite for research and an attention to detail.
From spreadsheets to highwaysIn “Saving Time”, Odell looks at how quantified time was exported around the world by colonialists and how plantation owners used early spreadsheets to track the labor of enslaved people. She pulls from Karl Marx and eviscerates the mindset of those she calls “productivity bros”. A significant portion of the book examines climate change; Odell tries to translate her “climate dread” into something useful rather than crippling, arguing that we are at a moment when the future of the planet can still change.
But the book also focuses on the immediate physical world. Each section begins with a few paragraphs that take the reader to a particular place in the San Francisco Bay Area — a cemetery, a beach, a stretch of highway where the minutes slip away in traffic.
Odell even approached the interview for this article in an unusual and physically grounded way: She assigned me homework, hoping I would better understand the version of time she was pursuing. In her book, there is a picture of a giant boulder in Upper Manhattan sandwiched between two residential buildings on Bennett Avenue, a protrusion of Manhattan schist about three stories tall rising out of the ground.
“Observe the outcrop of 450-million-year-old schist on Bennett Ave.," Odell instructed by email, “at first from across the street, then up close, including any plants that may currently be growing on it.” (On the day of my visit, the rock was decorated with a snow leopard stuffed animal and a large plastic reindeer named Sven from the “Frozen” movies.)
Stuffed animals aside, this kind of grounding is central to Odell’s relationship with time, the one she forged while writing this book.
“This is probably something a lot of people experienced during the pandemic,” she said. “There was some assurance in seeing, ecologically speaking, big things, like migratory birds, seeing the flowers come back and seeing that this goes on. I think that was very therapeutic for people; it obviously was for me.”
“I feel better,” she said. “Time feels thicker. It’s made out of stuff. It’s made out of people and things that are in it. It doesn’t have as much of that ‘empty grid of minutes’ kind of feeling.”“Your body also has that kind of time,” she continued. “You are in that. You’re not just in a calendar box.”
Ultimately, she said, her goal in writing this book was to find a relationship to time that “wasn’t painful”, she said. And while she is not living in bliss every moment of the day, she said, she thinks she succeeded.
“I feel better,” she said. “Time feels thicker. It’s made out of stuff. It’s made out of people and things that are in it. It doesn’t have as much of that ‘empty grid of minutes’ kind of feeling,” she said. “When you start to think of time in more collective ways, trying to leave behind the individual time banks, it opens up the horizon of what’s possible in your and others’ time — together.”
Read more Books
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