A book about how we can reclaim time from a culture that commodifies and capitalises it from the bestselling author of HOW TO DO NOTHING
A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.
Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. 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, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us.
About the Author
Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and author. Her first book was the New York Times Bestseller, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and more. She lives in Oakland, California.
Industry Reviews
Saving Time is an expose of our past, an antidote to our present, and a manifesto for the future. It is rigorous, compassionate, profound, and hopeful. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life * Ed Yong, author of An Immense World *
A revealing exploration of the forces that keep us locked in a shallow, commodified and adversarial relationship with time. But it is also a portal to a far richer alternative. To read it is to slip through the bars of our modern temporal prison and experience how freedom might feel * Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks *
The rarest kind of intervention: it alters you immediately, and then it lasts ... Saving Time is an inimitable gift * Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror *
A rare book that does more than meet the current moment, it defines it * Booklist *
Odell's journey to find the best way to use our limited time on earth is an eye-opening look at what it really means to be alive * TIME *
