I was laid off from my job recently, so the passing of time feels very different for me right now compared with just a few weeks ago, though I think I’ve always had a weird relationship with time as our culture has come to define it. Neither of my parents had a “normal” nine-to-five type job when I was growing up. My mom didn’t have a paying job at all, and my dad was an art teacher and an artist, which didn’t seem like real jobs in a lot of ways. He slept in late a lot of mornings and had summers off work for the entirety of my childhood. So I didn’t really have any sense of the corporate work week, of business days and weekends, until I succumbed to the rat race myself at age 30 or so.
I’ve been laid off three times before, so there’s something familiar about my current situation. It’s akin to a layover between connecting flights that’s long enough to grab an expensive beer and enjoy a bit of people-watching, but not exactly relaxing. There’s still an itinerary to keep, bills to pay. Another way the airport analogy works is that travel often takes us out of certain ruts in a way that enables us to see those ruts from the outside. Similarly from the brief perch of idleness, the steady corporate march of days and weeks looks pretty weird.
I think the pandemic also hit the reset button on how a lot of us experience time. After things shut down, those of us who are able to do our jobs from home adjusted to routines that had us questioning previous assumptions about our time versus what we owe our employers. The tension between those things is central to the return-to-the-office debate. I wrote and deleted a long digression on that debate, but suffice it to say time is money, as the saying goes, and this notion is deeply embedded in our collective psyche. Just like money, we talk about spending time, saving time, borrowing time, owing time.
Speaking for myself, this has always felt perverse. I have always felt pangs of resentment against the very idea that someone else is the owner of my time and therefore, I suppose, I resent the great machine of capitalism itself. It is self-evidently unnatural to imagine time as money, and especially to convert one person’s time into someone else’s money. This machine is a human invention, a self-inflicted curse.
With all these ideas and questions rolling around in my head, I came across a talk by Jenny Odell on the Long Now podcast, also available as a video:
It resonated with me so deeply that I ran out and bought her latest book, which is wondrous from the get-go—wise, poetic, and inviting.
The book is an elegy to nature’s cycles and cadences, as a direct counterpoint to productivity culture. One thing she talks about quite a bit is indigenous peoples’ notions of time, and the colonization of it. This will sound hyperbolic, but as a dad, it’s a dynamic that’s baked in to one of my least favorite parenting activities: keeping my kids on their schedule, urging them to hurry and get dressed, hurry and finish breakfast, hurry and brush teeth, hurry and get their shoes on, etc etc. I don’t like being ‘that guy’ because that guy is a colonizer, a whip cracker, a capitalist.
I’m aware I’m probably the weird one here, in that I have never been able to fully internalize a sense of corporate time. Weird periods—laid off time, pandemic time, etc—feel like corrections to me, rather than disruptions.
Nonetheless, if you have a good job lead, I’m happy to hear about it!
Beside the point…
My uncle Bob passed away recently, and I just want to give him a shout out. I remember him as a warm-hearted, generous, downright decent man. I have many fond childhood memories of him and my cousins, and though I didn’t visit with him or talk to him very many times in recent years, he always had a spiritual presence. I can feel that now as much as ever, and I feel my dad’s (uncle Bob’s brother’s) spiritual presence still as well. That love is real and powerful. The rest is a beautiful mystery.
Sorry about your Uncle, Shawn. I too just got the Jenny Odell book and am about to start reading it. Her “How To Do Nothing” is excellent as well.