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Capitalism Time
After a long summer of not reading much I finally finished Saving Time by Jenny Odell and one big idea stuck out to me this week in light of my post on 5-Year timeframes. As so often happens to me the idea felt solid and exciting as I read and thought about it yet it feels elusive as I write.
Odell spends a chunk of Chapter 7 talking about “crip time”, as in the timeframes that those who are not fully able bodied must inhabit that are outside of what the world adopts which I’ll refer to as capitalism time1. “Crip time” is a slower pace, and sometimes it’s no pace at all if the day is going poorly.
Capitalism Time: The “productive” timeframes you’re supposed to live your life under so that you get lots of stuff done and make money and look successful.
You’ll see similar ideas in the timeframe children inhabit. It doesn’t matter how rushed an adult is, if you see a flower worth smelling or a rock that looks like poop, you stop and smell the flower or comment on the poop rock. This brings much consternation to the parent trying to get a child somewhere and much admonishment about how “busy” we are and we don’t have time to stop and do whatever is interesting to us.
But somewhere between childhood and adulthood we loose this loose meandering sense of time and start to inhabit the frenetic pace most of us know today. Where the child longs to be an adult so they can do all the cool things adults do, an adult longs to be able to inhabit each moment as fully as a child does without little things like being on time getting in the way.
Parents break the meandering frame of reference that children have so that we no longer feel like we have any time to simply stop and observe the world around us.
Comparison Traps
As an astute reader from Kingston Ontario commiserated with my after my 5-year post, he too feels like he struggles to be “productive” despite trying all the weekly plans and following all the YouTube productivity guru’s you all have heard of. He’s read the books that are recommended and at the end of the day he’s in the same spot I am.
Multiple kids going to activities. Exhaustion at the end of the day after work and handling the baggage of children. In the midst of the exhaustion some dread that we’re falling behind because we’re not reading books or working on some side project like everyone else must be.
We all fall into these comparison traps. We see some productivity method and figure this now will solve our problems. We neglect to realize that said productivity guru has a job to show us productivity stuff and sell us courses. They held together their productivity long enough that now they often have people to clean their houses and they’re never going to show you the shit show that is their regular day.
But as this video says maybe we need to be brave enough to be ourselves instead of trying to fit in. That entails not getting shit done and then being public about it.
I haven’t written that book I’ve wanted to write for 3 years. I haven’t produced a new course in 3 years. I haven’t produced all the amazing member stuff I had once planned on producing, because kids need to eat and that means I have to program 35 hours a week then do all the kid stuff while hopefully riding my bike and getting some quiet time once in a while.
Missing all these goal is alright, but I have to keep reminding myself that it’s okay. I have to work daily to inhabit a more relaxed sense of time that lets me take breaks to do nothing more than look out the window or throw the ball for the dog.
I’m not sure what this sense of time is called, but it’s not in line with checking off huge lists of tasks every day. It’s about being a human and inhabiting the spaces around us fully. Maybe it’s called human time?
Human Time: Inhabiting the moments of the day without rush. Get stuff done, but don’t measure your self-worth on how many things you’ve done and certainly don’t compare anything about your life to the fictional peaks you get at the lives of those around you.
Reading Old Writings
Kevin wrote about reading his old blog posts. I did this recently as I tried to find when I switched back to WordPress from Statamic and back again. I went through the titles of 2 years of posts looking to see when I switched back to WordPress. During this romp through the time capsule of my past self I saved a number of my own articles to read and see what I thought.
Your notebook/journal provides the same function in a less public way. It’s a portal to your past self which helps you realize that you’ve never had it all together so you should have some empathy for yourself. While I credit blogging with the career I have today, writing privately for yourself where no one can see it is still that empathy portal for yourself.
So write.
Conflict Culture
Om on social media and conflict.
I hoped that when faced with the algorithmic avarice, we the people would look to self-control. Little did I know, that pandemic would hasten us towards a future of tribalism, anger, and perhaps a realization that online social isn’t social after all.
No notes, just read the article.
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