WHEN LOOKING AT the history of how productivity has been measured, it is always illuminating to ask: Who is timing whom? The answer to this question often identifies a person who has purchased someone else’s time or owns it outright—and who, in either case, wants to make the most of it.

the clock is just one tool among many for reckoning time, and its full meaning emerges only when it’s joined with a particular goal or cosmology.

Hope and desire, after all, can exist only on the differential between today and an undetermined tomorrow.

The problem is that, according to this plan, more freedom requires ever more (self-)mastery,

The “time-study man” was the forerunner to “high-level thinkers,” consultants, and idea men,

self-employed people outnumbered wage earners. Even after a dramatic rise in wage labor after the Civil War, it was compared to prostitution or slavery, sometimes by white workers wanting to maintain distance from sex workers and enslaved Black people.

boundary of this audible range was not one between time and timelessness, but between two fully formed understandings of time, ritual observances, and age.

Black miner, maintained that “none of us who toil for our daily bread are free. At one time…we were chattel slaves; today we are, one and all, white and black, wage slaves.”

Even outside extreme conditions, mosses complicate the idea of uniform time with the ability of some species to go dormant for more than a decade without water; under the right circumstances, they will revive. It was this very quality, as Kimmerer mentioned in a 2020 interview in The Believer, that made moss especially worth paying attention to