Why We Never Have Enough Time

The intruder entered not through the door but through the window. Silently, it began making a home in the cool damp of Jenny Odell’s kitchen, in a pig-shaped planter. The moss spores arrived in the spring that Odell began working on her book “Saving Time” (Random House). For the next three years, she and the moss shared air and sunlight as she wrote at the kitchen table, the rhizoids that grabbed at the soil taking root in her imagination. “It has been a reminder of time,” she writes about her unlikely companion. “Not the monolithic, empty substance imagined to wash over each of us alone, but the kind that starts and stops, bubbles up, collects in the cracks, and folds into mountains. It is the kind that waits for the right conditions, that holds always the ability to begin something new.”

Odell’s work has a knack for finding the right conditions and anchoring itself in them. Her previous book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (2019), became a surprise best-seller, raising an alarm about how social media had fractured our capacity for deep focus and corralled us into relentless self-optimization. Although a glut of books on attention were vying for our own, hers stood out—not for the originality of its argument, I suspect, but for the sincerity of her persona on the page. Here was a multidisciplinary artist for whom the Internet was a native landscape; now she was teaching herself to see her surroundings, to notice more—more birds, more flowers—and claiming far-reaching consequences for simple acts of awareness. Looking up, looking around is the “seed of responsibility,” she argued. It was the prelude to enlarging one’s notion of community and our obligations to it.

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.

Odell approaches these matters with acute sensitivity and feeling. And yet a larger question persists. Why does a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day, and possessed of such an urgent authorial voice, feel like such a time sink?

“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. Columnists still prescribe novels, but as a way to retrieve our concentration. In one recent book, Sheila Liming’s “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” we’re told that unstructured social time, freed from the pressures of productivity, could save our souls. Then, there’s the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a critical influence on Odell’s work and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass”—which has spent more than two years on the best-seller lists—who argues that “our attention has been hijacked by our economy, by marketers saying you should be paying attention to consumption, you should be paying attention to violence, political division.”

Kimmerer has playfully envisioned a world in which Fox News was about actual foxes: “What if we had storytelling mechanisms that said it is important that you know about the well-being of wildlife in your neighborhood? That that’s newsworthy? This beautiful gift of attention that we human beings have is being hijacked to pay attention to products and someone else’s political agenda. Whereas if we can reclaim our attention and pay attention to things that really matter, there a revolution starts.” We hear similar appeals in recent work by Rebecca Solnit and, going back, by Annie Dillard, even D. H. Lawrence—the notion that tending to an actual garden can make us fitter stewards of our minds and, ultimately, our world.