Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
Jenny Odell
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Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
Jenny Odell
A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.
Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it - the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by - inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time - that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries - physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives - or the life of the planet - is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, 'saving' time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us.
Review
Joe Murray
In 2019, Jenny Odell renegotiated our understanding of attention with How to Do Nothing, invoking the perennial self-help bogeyman of social-media distraction to lure readers into a deftly researched and beautifully written manifesto for our collective reorientation towards nature and community. Four years later, Odell is back with the masterful Saving Time, performing a similar reversal with the same erudition and style. In this new work, she takes the common question, ‘How can I make more time in the day?’ and instead asks, ‘What kind of time do I want more of?’.
To answer this, Odell goes far beyond morning routines and motivation journals to instead trace ‘time’ through history and across cultures, defamiliarising the dominant idea of time as a succession of infinitely divisible and endlessly productive labour hours by presenting all the other ways we could understand time. From the fluid ecological time of the sun and the tides to the chronologies of Indigenous communities, Odell breaks time free from its conceptual cage and, in doing so, saves it in a way much more meaningful than just pinching hours from the clock.
There is a stunning foundation of research supporting Odell’s prose, with the depth to produce a six-page bibliography and the breadth to allow The Simpsons and Das Capital to occupy that list together with a myriad of contemporary writers. I found myself wanting to follow each and every thread to its source, which is a testament to Odell’s ability to do justice to the many works from which this book draws its ideas whilst still maintaining her own voice.
Saving Time is so many things at once: a history of time, an ecological travelogue, a self-described ‘panoramic assault against nihilism’ and a rallying cry for climate hope. It is also a self-help book, but only in the sense that helping the self is only truly possible if we help the world too.
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