This view of abstract labor hours could not have been more alien to task-oriented communities who organized their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues – such as the flowering or fruiting of a certain plant – and where things took however much time they took. These communities, for whom work was not profit but part of a social economy, did not make the same distinctions between what was called “work time” and “nonwork time.”
“The aim is to achieve a laser focus and find ways to work around the limitations of the human body.”
When employment is insecure, “we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing”
Oliver Burkeman, “Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives”
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-better playing of your cards.
Even seemingly practical self-help can read as an invitation to find a niche in a brutal world and wait for the storm to pass you over.
Advice for “becoming more man-shaped to not die in the car” reproduces the life of the wrong-shaped car.
It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “Who will do the low-wage work?” is that it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not you.
regarding the phenomenon of burnout: “Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?”
“white people own time.” white people overwhelmingly set the pace of the workday and dictate the worth of everyone else’s time.
No, we don’t all get equal time, but we can decide that the time we do get is just and free. We can stop making your zip code the primary determinant of your lifespan. We can stop stealing learning time from black children through excessive use of suspensions and expulsions. We can stop stealing time from black people through long periods of incarcerations for nonviolent crimes. The police can stop stealing time and black lives through the use of excessive force.
Brittney Cooper, “The Racial Politics of Time”
As a form of evaluation, grading requires you to invoke some kind of standardized scale on which qualities can be reduced to quantities. Social comparison is probably as old as time, but to compare a wide range of people using the same grades, you have to be able to turn those people into data and decide what you’re optimizing for.
Therefore, for her sake and everyone else’s, the Linda should consider paying that cost – becoming less man-shaped in order not to fit into the car in which most people, in some way or another, are dying.
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.
==This shit is killing you, too, however much more softly.==
how social media would supercharge the experience economy, the world itself becoming a twenty-four-hour, 3-D emporium of potential 2-D backdrops.
Once assembly-line jobs made it difficult to see how well or hard someone had worked, what became visible instead was how much someone was able to consume.
But that is just the issue with social media: It’s never clear where an individual ends and where the individual-as-entrepreneur begins.
it involves a mixture of awe and gratitude that “springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe.” It opens onto, and finds peace in, chaos and things larger than the self, the way you might feel when looking at an enormous cliff face – or a sunrise, for that matter. 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.
“Walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone”
The offer of safety and “freedom from care” to one group was composed of the tacit and violent exclusion of other groups.
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.
To demand leisure in the nineteenth century was also to ask a fundamental question about whether workers existed for capitalists or for themselves. How much of this one precious life was owed to capital?
Workers found that they actually wanted more than just money and the trappings of leisure – they wanted not to have to sell their time in the first place.
Bergson thought that our predisposition toward thinking of time in these kinds of spatial terms came from our experience manipulating inert matter; we wanted to see time in the same way, as something we could cut up, stack, and move around.
“The sundial directly models natural facts, yielding stretchy days and hours that expand and contract as the earth makes its elliptical way around the sun, but the clock is a solar mood stabilizer, soothing the sun’s annual swings into twenty-four-hour average units and ticking away regardless of sun or cloud.”
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.
Like the concept of time as money, the abstraction and separation of time and space is a culturally specific and fairly recent event in human history. The idea was given its fullest expression in Isaac Newton’s “clockwork universe,” in which events and interactions between discrete and bounded entities played out: a sort of billiard ball universe of cause and effect that could be described and predicted in full if we had enough information.
“What happens when nothing happens.” It’s never true that nothing happens. Weather, people, cars, and clouds are all things that move. Even if you were to stand on a vast, sterile concrete plaza in the middle of the desert, you would be surrounded by the swirling of air particles, the movement of the sun overhead, a drifting tectonic plate, and the aging of the mind and body you use to perceive these things.
What is a clock? If it’s something that “tells the time,” then my branch was a clock – but unlike the clock at home, it would never return to its original position. Instead, it was a physical witness and record of overlapping events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring as I write this.
“In a display case, a thing becomes only a facsimile of itself, like a drum hung on the gallery wall. A drum becomes authentic when a human hand meets the wood and hide. Only then do they fulfill its intention.”
“Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of the thing.” If the owner had really loved the mosses, “he would have left them alone and walked each day to see them.” To see something in time is to allow that it has a life and to allow that this life entails more than the mechanistic cause-and-effect of a Newtonian world. In this way of thinking, mosses “decide” which rocks to live on, and even rocks have lives.
You see, you are the ones who are actually anthropocentric. You believe that everything in the world works differently from yourselves.
The difference between respecting something and not respecting it is the acknowledgement that that something is not an automaton, that it is registering time by acting and not just existing in it.
If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
The co-creation events of our lives do not play out in an external, homogenous time. They are the stuff of time itself.
“It is interesting to note that what attracts people to live on the forest margins, that is a sense of living in a ‘natural environment,’ is done under the mystique of eliminating the ‘wild’ from wild lands.”
“The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs… It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self.”
Energy companies have every incentive to make their future be the future.
“Instead of debating whether to buy electric, gas or hybrid, just keep the car you have. Better yet, start carpooling, walking to work, working from home, or working less.”
“without invalidating those that feel that way, the reality is that through colonisation, we’ve been experiencing the symptoms of climate crisis for generations.” for them, annihilation is not in the future but, rather, in the past, continuing into a white American present that seeks to “exterminate the Siwash they see in me.”
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.
We live according to the sun, not the clock.
the zeitgeber that dominates our lives seems to be not the Doomsday Clock but the quarterly earnings report.
where history appears as a smooth, deterministic, devastating onslaught where anything else (“resistance”) looks like a postponement of the inevitable rather than an opening onto another trajectory.
these strategies were nothing more than a “studied pretense of worker ‘participation’, a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illusion of making decisions.”
the power of those in control is enhanced because there is an illusion of increased freedom. The inhabitants of this electronic village may be allowed total autonomy within their personal “user ID’s,” but they are systematically excluded from taking part in “programming” the “operating” system.
Cathy has to face the fact that she fills her time in a totally unproductive manner. She too is economically inactive, and economists record her as unoccupied.
all the time that goes into making the kind of time that can be sold for a wage. To describe its basic production and reproduction is to describe women’s work.
By imputing value to women’s work and thus to care, Wages for Housework sought a society in which care and collective liberation, not personal ambition and brutality, would be paramount – for everyone, and a benefit to all.
To “have time” means to work less.
a painfully recognizable rage about the scam of selling one’s own life for the honor of selling it some more.
one where you simply use personal ambition to outcompete others, blame yourself when you fail, and blame others for their failures
There are many forms of frustrations beyond what is trivially referred to as burnout. 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. There is wanting more for yourself, and then these is simply wanting more.
Just as Wallis was poor from PW’s perspective, an enthusiastic ladder climber is, in another sense, unambitious. It is far more “ambitious” to make the demand that James sensed at the march: “We want to have the freedom to live the lives as we like them, and we are together for that.”
Many love certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair, itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known. It is neither.
leaving a barren social landscape of “huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both.”
it was not only clear that time was not money, but that the category of “not money” could be infinitely elaborated.
Time is not money. Time is beans. If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world.
A natural partner to time management, wellness is invoked both as a means to “perform” better and as a way to increase your overall years of life, as though you were a car or a watch.
the question of what it is that we want to be well and live for, not to mention the irony of a life consumed by the effort to make more of itself.
a questioning of what the good life means not just for disabled people, but for every person with a body that is not a machine and a soul that is more than a worker.
“It’s actually okay to be on a spectrum of reality. It means that there are times when it’s juicier, there are times when it’s drier, there’s times when I’m gonna be tired, there’s times when I’m going to have a lot of energy. It’s actually part of being alive. It is being alive.”
“deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges.”
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.
Disability highlights something that is true for all of us: No matter how independent and fit we may feel, we are not simply alive but, rather, kept alive – against odds that some people are nonetheless privileged enough to ignore.
“People do not spring up from the soil like mushrooms. People need to be cared for and nurtured throughout their lives by other people.”
“We say a person is a person through other persons.”
The unchanging propensity is just one more way of seeing someone as outside time.
A life sentence represents one of the most extreme examples of rendering someone socially dead, by creating a person with no future.
“What is prison? Immobility, yes, but also the manipulation of time as a form of psychic torture. The regimentation of time. The phenomenology of waiting. The agony of juridical limbo. The carceral ripple effect when any life is taken by the state, how it warps the temporalities of everyone in the orbit of the disappeared person.”
“Time is when you look at pictures of your babies when they were smaller and then you look at them and you see that they have mustaches and beards, and that the biggest hope that you had was that before they turned into men, they would have a chance to be with their father.”
“This bird is like me. I’m also injured, they might want to get rid of me, but they won’t succeed.”
“It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.”
This would be a kind of life extension that reaches outward instead of forward, an increase in aliveness for everyone that begins with mutual regard – a world with living beings in it, not zombies.
“from a physical standpoint that the atoms of your body and the energy that animated them don’t simply disappear, any more than they could appear out of nowhere. As earthly beings, we have someplace to return, a substrate in which this energy transmutes into something else.”
Though this haunting is no substitute for her presence and still carries the sharpness of loss, I welcome it nonetheless. Her life has extended into mine.
It is one thing to die into a dead world and, metaphorically speaking, leave one’s bones to bleach on a desert lit by only a dying star. It is another thing to die into the actual world, which seethes with life, with agency other than our own, and, at the very least, with endless possibility. For those of us, which is probably most of us, who – with or without drugs or religion – have caught glimpses of this animate universe, death is not a terrifying leap into the abyss, but more like an embrace of ongoing life.
in a state of complete attention, “the thinker, the center, the “me” comes to an end.” “it is only a mind that looks at a tree or the stars or the sparkling waters of a river with complete self-abandonment that knows what beauty is, and when we are actually seeing, we are in a state of love.” that state, he says, has “no yesterday and no tomorrow.”
I know that I will wake up soon, and I want to prolong the dream. But I’m not afraid of waking up. I have only gratitude for this ephemeral fluke, making the most of my time by perceiving and testing the environment around me. When I reach out my hand, I often become aware of a gripping sensation, but it is not the iron grip of fear. Instead, it feels like holding fast, like “touching the planet” before I inevitably drift away.
The meantime implies waiting, a less important area between two specified times. In the case of dread or, really, any overemphasis on some future point, the meantime also appears empty: With nothing but distance between you and your destination, it may as well have already taken place.
Because skyscrapers tend to be built where hard rock is close to the surface, the shape of the Manhattan skyline can be read as a translation of the underground presence of Manhattan schist. Like serpentinite, schist has a composition inseparable from its history: The reason it’s so hard is that it was compressed over three hundred million years ago under a mountain range with heights similar to those of the Himalayas today. That range formed when two landmasses collided in the formation of Pangaea.
Trying to draw a line around myself, I am forced to ask, Am I Jenny or am I my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s granddaughter? and so on. If I am an event, when did I start? Thirty-five years ago? Hundreds of years ago? Thousands?
Then, at the very minute when the act is going to be performed, something may revolt against it. It is the deep-seated self, rushing up to the surface. It is the outer crust bursting, suddenly giving wayto an irresistible thrust. Hence in the depths of the self, below this. most reasonable pondering over most reasonable pieces of advice, something else was going on – a gradual heating and a sudden boiling over of feelings and ideas, not unperceived, but rather unnoticed.
otherwise, you’d get flattened by certainty: the past would crush you with tradition, and the future would crush you with determinism… It makes me wonder if one meaning of “having time” is to halve time – to make a cut in chronos and hold the past and the future apart as much as hope will allow.