Saving Time

What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose.

When the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer. This may seem obvious, but if time is money, it is so in a way that’s different for a worker than for an employer.

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.

Oliver Burkeman observes that when employment is insecure, “we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.”

But even before unions began forming in the United States, northern industrialists had already begun to act collectively, agreeing to institute certain policies or to blacklist employees across the board.

IT’S WORTH NOTING here that a scrupulous accounting of time is not in itself unique to capitalism.

In any moment, we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness.

The industrial view of time as money can see time only as work,

This modern view of time can’t be extricated from the wage relationship, the necessity of selling your time, which, as common and unquestionable as it seems now, is as historically specific as any other method of valuing work and existence. The wage relationship, in turn, reflects those same patterns of empowerment and disempowerment that touch eve