NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the author of How to Do Nothing
comes a "paradigm-destroying new book . . . about the various problems
that swirl out from dominant conceptions of 'time'" (The New York
Times Editors' Choice).
"Saving Time's real triumph lies in her road map for experiencing time
outside the capitalist clock. . . . Expect to feel changed by this
radical way of seeing."--Esquire
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the
importance of disconnecting from the "attention economy" to spend time
in quiet contemplation. But what if you don't have time to spend?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep
dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the
clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our
lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be
bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how
our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to
persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential
dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different
ways to experience time--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological
cues, and geological timescales--that can bring within reach a more
humane, responsive way of living. 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; the time it takes
to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these
different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized
units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it--the way we
experience time itself--and rearranges it, imagining a world not
centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can
"save" time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside
these things, time might also save us.
