Saving Time

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.