Occasionally I read something that gives me the mental equivalent of an allergic reaction. Today it was a NY Times story about a new book called “Saving Time” by Jenny Odell. What caught me was this description of the contents.

In “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 mind-set 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.

And immediately I’m recalling another NY Times story about anti-racist trainers who were fixated on labeling a bunch of ideas part of “white supremacy.” One of those was “clock time.” Here’s a bit of anti-racist trainer Marcus Moore explaining how clock time is racist.

In Hartford, Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.” Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

So today I found myself wondering if Jenny Odell is just channeling this same woke junk and I started looking around at all the reviews of her new book which seem to be everywhere this week. And it just seemed to go from bad to worse.

One important moment in the book comes when Odell visits a friend who offers some lettuce from her garden. Odell tries to decline, until her friend explains that taking off the outer leaves will stimulate growth, and then there will be more lettuce for everyone.

“It’s sort of beautiful, right?” Odell said. “It’s a concrete example of how my friend needs to give me something so that she can have more of it.”

That’s an important moment in the book? Good grief. I think I’d rather actually watch lettuce grow than read this. And the more I looked the more I became convinced this book is a special kind of awful, like Marx on magic mushrooms awful.

The phenomena of “individual time pressure and climate dread,” Odell writes, “share a set of deep roots, and they have more in common than just fear.” European colonialism, she argues, let loose upon the world an economy of extraction, both of human labor and of natural resources. Our problems stem from the economic model that makes “stuff” and assigns a monetary value to that which is priceless: our lives, the miracles of physics and coincidences and evolution that have given rise to everything on this planet, and our continued ability to live here.

Odell’s undertaking is massive and ambitious. The book cites everything from Frederick Winslow Taylor to bird-watching to travel influencers to the racial geography of leisure in the United States to niche but influential zines about office work in San Francisco to the work of disability activists, to Indigenous philosophy and historical scholarship, to the writings of Henri Bergson, to her own life experiences, diary entries and dreams from childhood to the present — and even this hardly touches on the diverse sources and forms of knowledge she impressively unites.

In keeping with her anti-capitalist take, she was also interviewed by the Nation.

SF: At the beginning of the book, it feels as though you’re writing to pull yourself back from a brink or a threshold.

JO: There are things that kind of float in the background, that maybe don’t seem like a brink until you’re close enough to them. I’m trying to approach the conversation about whose time is worth what with an awareness of global capitalism as the thing hovering in the background of all our conversations about labor, wages, and personal time management.

There’s also a piece at the New Yorker:

In “Saving Time,” with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch. She wrote this book to save her life, she explains, as she struggled to understand why the world came to be organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving. She charts how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells, then by the nineteenth-century railroads; the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force; and the ways that time has been progressively commodified and disciplined, from the factories of the early twentieth century to the floors of contemporary Amazon warehouses. A capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time, she argues, as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time. Modernity has pulled us out of synch with nature and the needs of our bodies; it has depleted our inner and outer worlds.

To her great credit, the New Yorker’s reviewer doesn’t seem to have been taken in by it. She notes first that it’s just part of the latest publishing trend.

“Saving Time” joins a ripening genre—on burnout, on the depletion of working and parenting during the pandemic, on the “great resignation”—that champions the revolutionary potential of rest. Human attention is presented as an endangered public resource, befouled by the attention economy, tech companies, virtual workplaces, Slack notifications. To lose the capacity for deep, sustained focus is to lose everything, we’re told—it is to insure loss after loss. We fiddle with our phones while the world burns. Indeed, “attention” seems to occupy the space that “empathy” once did, when President Obama warned of an “empathy deficit” and critics made fervent claims about reading novels as a way to understand other points of view.

On top of that it’s not particularly insightful and doesn’t contain much original thought on the topic at all.

Perhaps her hope is to rush past the fact that so many of her observations are commonplaces. The “modern view of time can’t be extricated from the wage relationship,” she reports, as if the knowledge were hard-won. As I read, I told myself that some hidden seams would surely be discovered, fresh evidence brought forth, complacencies unravelled; Odell seems to hint as much, hailing the benefits of dissonance and doubt. (“Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else.”) Instead, we are led down a path of truisms to a well-padded account of how the capitalist logic of increase squeezes dignity from our days. “Accepting a life with less of a certain type of ambition is not the same as settling for a life with less meaning,” Odell writes…

Odell’s signal question is to ask whose time is being devalued. I began to respond in the margins, faintly at first, and then with despair. Whose time is being devalued? Mine, I wrote. Of all the “overlapping temporalities” Odell attends to, the one she seems indifferent to is the time unspooling within her book. A writer, after all, is in the business of taking up time; time is her medium. It is not an unusual experience to feel that one’s time has been misused by a book, but it is novel, and particularly vexing, to feel that one’s time has been misused by a passionate denunciation of the misuse of time—and by a writer who invokes the act of reading to illustrate the very attention she enshrines.

I can’t really explain why I spent part of my day reading about all of this but my feeling is that the amount of media attention this is receiving is inversely proportional to how original it is. The author wants to take up your time, money and attention with a book whose premise has probably occurred to every teenager working is first retail job. Why I am here when I could be off the clock spending time with my friends? Isn’t there some way out of this rat race? And the answer is, hey kid, grab that broom.

But the lettuce. The beauty. Of the lettuce.