Now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labor time; it’s you, too, when you look in the mirror.

There was something difficult and self-defying about these processes of shedding, I thought. And this quality was also mine to claim, given that I, too, had desires to follow, a will to express, and a container to supersede. Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today, and in it, I’d be different. All of us would.

looking for kairos while living largely in chronos puts you in that difficult gray area between personal agency and structural limits,

At some point, you hit the limit of what an individual can do.

But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase

The more fragmented and minutely timeable work becomes, the more meaningless it becomes.

“metric time first gave us the rule of the seas and oceans, then the colonization of the land; it taught us how to structure our bodies and movements in work and how to rest when the job is done.”

The employer is busy trying to get more labor out of the worker, while the worker is trying to keep herself from being worked to death.

the United States, when domestic work did become waged, it was often done by Black women, and it was (and is) devalued compared to work that directly produced a profit.[*3]