Artist and critic Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy was a New York Times bestseller and a crucial favourite. The 2019 e book thought-about the methods we spend our consideration in a world full of applied sciences vying for (and benefiting from) that spotlight. Now Odell returns with Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, a provocative examination of effectivity tradition that encourages readers to rethink their relationships with time.
Odell was impressed to jot down the e book after listening to from readers who loved How to Do Nothing however struggled to include their new pondering into their busy lives. “That feedback became generative,” she says throughout a name to her dwelling in Oakland, California. “I started to think, if it’s true that we don’t have enough time, how did we get here? And why? Why do we think of time as scarce? What is the difference between, for example, someone who feels like they don’t have any time and someone who really doesn’t have any time?”.
Read our starred assessment of ‘Saving Time’ by Jenny Odell.
Saving Time started with two inspirations that got here collectively in a stunning approach. First, Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Library, a privately funded public analysis library in San Francisco, instructed Odell that she wanted to learn E.P. Thompson’s 1967 work, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” “It’s an early building block for thinking about the relationship of time to capitalism,” she says, and the way the Industrial Revolution required employees to be extra disciplined with their time with a view to maximize earnings. The second inspiration was Odell’s burgeoning curiosity in geology, which additionally exhibits up within the e book’s cowl artwork. “I spend a lot of time in the mountains, and that’s obviously a very different way of thinking about time,” she says. Mountains provide a approach of zooming out on fashionable life by considering layers of earth forming, colliding and eroding over thousands and thousands of years. “Saving Time is about these two ways of looking at time.”
The pure world is of central significance to Odell’s work, and her cautious research of nature feels refreshing. For instance, birds performed a key position in How to Do Nothing, and so they stay necessary in Saving Time. “I don’t think birds entered my work until I was writing the original How to Do Nothing talk,” she says, referencing a keynote tackle she gave at an artwork and expertise competition in 2017, which later appeared within the e book. “It was unexpected; I was doing a lot of that thinking in the [Morcom] Rose Garden, which has a lot of birds, and I started to see parallels between the natural world and things that happen with attention and information.”
That municipal rose backyard in Oakland is an instance Odell provides of a noncommercial leisure house, a “third space” the place individuals can collect outdoors of work and residential, ideally with out spending cash. It’s the place Odell spends a lot of her time, and in Saving Time, she complicates her emotions towards the park and its troubled historical past. “I still find it utopian, even though when it was built, it would have been a de facto white space because of redlining,” she says. “But the current-day rose garden gives me hope for what places like this could be.” Places the place individuals can spend time, gathering or sitting in quiet remark, with out working or shopping for one thing. Places the place individuals could be.
I learn Saving Time on the finish of 2022, simply as individuals have been posting their ambitions for 2023. I share this with Odell, mentioning how clarifying it was to examine Frederick Winslow Taylor, a Nineteenth-century “efficiency bro” (as she calls the trendy era of productiveness influencers) who advocated for rigorously breaking down actions into small, trackable parts, on the identical time I used to be feeling tempted to jot down an in depth record of resolutions.
“It’s seductive,” Odell says after I ask her about why we love seeing Taylorist statistics just like the quantity of steps tracked by a Fitbit. (Taylor himself counted his steps and timed his personal actions.) “For a user who wants to have a sense of control in their life, it’s really seductive. It offers self-understanding. You’ll be able to see yourself at a glance and make changes accordingly.” But this information additionally leads us to attempt to make every second as productive as doable.
“After you read [Saving Time] . . . the world feels filled with curiosity rather than dread.”
So then, what can we do? “The only way to counter this desire is to ask why you’re doing something and if you want to be doing it,” is Odell’s recommendation. This requires a stage of mindfulness that the majority of us battle to achieve. But Saving Time will not be a screed, and Odell has no real interest in scolding her readers, nor miserable them with grim truths about fashionable capitalism. Instead she affords hope. “I walk around a lot with a pair of binoculars and a jeweler’s loupe,” she says. “Sometimes when I’m hanging out with a friend, I’ll give them the loupe. At first they say, ‘Okay, why do you have this?’ And then they’ll look at something, and every single time they say, ‘I had no idea it looked like this. It’s incredible.’ And then they want to look at everything with the loupe.”
“Unfortunately for a lot of adults, the last time they remember that feeling of discovery was childhood,” Odell continues. “That’s what motivates my work. I want the end of Saving Time to be the beginning. After you read it, you have to go back outside and look at everything with a new lens, and now everything looks different. And hopefully it looks different because the reader has a new relationship to reality, and the world feels filled with curiosity rather than dread.”
I can attest to the sense of discovery provided by Saving Time. In Odell’s work, remark, each inward and outward, is sacred. Here, she proves that there are new methods to consider time and productiveness, that we don’t have to all the time really feel like time is hopelessly scarce. Saving Time presents a brand new imaginative and prescient, each by means of a jeweler’s loupe and a pair of binoculars, of what a greater world might appear like.
Headshot of Jenny Odell by Chani Bockwinkel
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