if money is fake, and time is money, then time is also fake? lol
some thoughts revolving around jenny odell's "saving time."
Dear friend—
I live alongside a set of train tracks in Pittsburgh. I also live with Hazel, my dog, a skittish terrier mix who can handle the trains’ roar and screech but would definitely prefer not to. Hazel would also (putting it mildly) prefer not to come across other dogs while on her walks. And so (thanks to the flexibility that my job affords me), I walk her at odd hours.
Often, I find myself listening to the whistle and whir of a passing train, waiting for it to go by before I take Hazel out. The train and I are on similar schedules. I hear it whoosh by and think to myself, It’s about that time of day.
Now, I also think about the two or three people on the passing freight train who, by confluence of fate, policy, technology, capitalism, and their own skill and expertise, find themselves minding a roaring vehicle perhaps dozens of cars long, perhaps carrying any number of dangerous materials.
Here in Pittsburgh we are twenty miles away from East Palestine, a small Ohio town. Last February, a train derailed there and spilled a cocktail of hazardous chemicals, resulting in two fires—one accidental and one prescribed ostensibly to avoid a more catastrophic explosion.
The disaster involved a train of 150 cars, and many of those cars carried precursors and ingredients for petrochemicals and plastics that can cause cancers, respiratory damage, and so much more. (Disclosure: I have written about the derailment at East Palestine for my job at Food & Water Watch.) Since the disaster, the residents of East Palestine and surrounding communities have faced an opaque, frustrating government response, which mostly consisted of parroting the company line: All is well.
The company in this case is Norfolk Southern. I passed by the train tracks near my house the other day as a train blew by, and, out of curiosity, I peered down at the tracks. There it was, emblazoned on the black, beetle-like body of a tank car: the white logo of Norfolk Southern.
In the weeks following the disaster at East Palestine, I learned that an estimated 40% of (explosive) Bakken crude oil headed for East Coast refineries flows by rail through Oakland—the Pittsburgh neighborhood I went to college in. Since East Palestine, a much smaller Norfolk Southern train has already derailed in the city. There were no injuries or toxic chemicals involved—this time.
As I dug into the East Palestine disaster and Norfolk Southern, I found that many in the rail industry spoke of the derailment as a condemnation of precision scheduled railroading (PSR).
One of the major effects of PSR are leaner staffs. The train that derailed in East Palestine had just three crew members for its 150 cars. The thinning staff also means shorter inspection times and exhausted workers, raising the chance of accidents.
So why has PSR persisted? Well, one—the downsized crews save companies money, and two—PSR consolidates freight rail trips and allows for tighter, more predictable schedules, which also save companies money.
Around the same time I was following the East Palestine disaster, I was reading Jenny Odell’s (she/her) Saving Time, which reminded me that PSR is just a continuation of the rail industry’s centuries-old relationship with the standardization of time.
As Odell and others write, the advent of our cross-country rail system birthed formalized time zones in the United States. Without these time zones, moving goods across the country often risked train crashes, as no one knew exactly when two trains from different parts of the country would be on the tracks at the same time. Time zones made interstate rail—and its attendant commerce—possible.
In that way, especially in the U.S., ideas of time are inseparable from money and capitalism. Ideas of fast, slow, good time, bad time, structures of time—these are all symptoms and drivers of our current economic system.
As we may have heard again and again throughout our lives: “Time is money.” And if time is money, it must also be plan-able, standardized, and quantifiable down to the second, to ensure we maximize profits.
While these ideas are old, Odell recounts, they really popped off with the industrial era. During that time, many factory workers became ruled by scientific management. This approach to managing work broke a process (e.g. making a car) down to its most discrete parts and sought to make each part of the process as efficient as possible.
Purveyors of scientific management conducted time studies, recording to the millisecond how long a worker should take for each task to maximize productivity. And we can trace these time studies back to American slavery. Before bosses timed employees, overseers timed slaves, seeking the most efficient way to wring as much profit from unfree labor as possible.
We now see the legacy of scientific management in the operations at warehouses like Amazon’s. There, workers are timed precisely for their tasks and breaks, and penalized if they are over time or miss quotas (i.e., wasting time). The fast-paced nature of this work has been linked to repetitive stress injuries, on top of (sometimes deadly) warehouse accidents from cut corners that fight against the clock.
When time is money, it’s no surprise that much of modern life in the U.S. revolves around finding more of it. Life feels increasingly fast-paced, harried; like we’re being attacked on all sides by different demands on our time. Hence, the rise of time management, productivity, and self-help content.
But Odell argues that the ideas of time embedded in this kind of advice/content/genre are reductive. They reinforce rigid structuring and standardization of time, putting us out of step with nature and community for political and economic ends.
When time = money, time becomes a zero-sum game—one in which the only way to win is to grab it from someone else. For example, the harried office drone working 60 hours a week orders from Door Dash, pulling time from the driver who perhaps is treating Door Dash as a day job—or perhaps must fill every spare minute with rides to make ends meet.
Odell explores the alternatives. One she only discusses briefly, but that has stuck in my mind: mutual aid. When you have six friends and one can cook for everyone every night, you only have to cook once a week.
Instead of taking someone’s time to reclaim some of your own, you can give your time and receive more in return. In a circle of friends, in a network, you put 2 hours of cooking in and get 10 back—plus the unquantifiable community, love, care, and good food.
As writer Robin Wall Kimmerer would say, that’s reciprocity.
(I was delighted to find discussions of Kimmerer’s work throughout Saving Time, especially her previous book which I haven’t read, Gathering Moss).
Odell also questions the instinct to grasp for more time, rather than simply bettering the time we do have. The classic quality over quantity. But what does it mean to have quality time?
She points to all kinds of theories and thoughts, from religion, politics, activism, and philosophy. But ultimately, she seems to argue that quality time is something like aliveness, which is something like ego-death—existing for another, holding someone or something so fast in your attention that you forget yourself.
This also reminded me of Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass in how Kimmerer talks about intimacy with other living things; she writes how knowing and understanding those other living things (humanizing them) is essential for loving them.
Time and attention and intimacy and de/humanization are all tightly intertwined. In a negative example, Odell writes about how we use incarceration, the stealing of time, as a kind of “spirit murder,” referencing the work of legal scholar Patricia Williams.
Through incarceration, we alienate people so deeply from any kind of community that they lose their humanity. Not only does incarceration rob them of quality time with others; it robs them of their agency over how they use their time. These are both huge parts of that alienation.
Ideas of time have the power to alienate and exclude in less extreme ways, as well. Through standards of what is “on time” or what takes an acceptable amount of time, society excludes those who don’t fit into that mold.
For example, as disability scholars like Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels write, people with disabilities often can’t fit into society’s rigid time expectations. They may move more slowly or need more time to process information. A flare-up of a chronic condition may make punctuality impossible.
Our time expectations are just another way we exclude people with disabilities from society, as with narrow staircases or public events without ASL interpreters. So it is with people from non-white/Western cultures for which exact timing is not a big deal.
Imposing ideas of time on others is inherently political. In fact, Odell writes, we can generalize much of power relations throughout history—boss and worker, colonizer and colonized, master and slave—into two groups: the “timer” and the “timed.”
Once we see time in this way, a whole world of possibilities open up.
What would a society look like that equitably distributes not just basic needs like housing and food, but time as well? What would time reparations look like? How do we deconstruct our time biases, in both our lives and in government policies?
What if we were more free and generous with our ideas of time? What would happen if we stopped thinking of time as money, or of productivity as the ultimate goal of every second?
What if we could move past an individualistic, zero-sum game of time, and toward a communal, loving sense of time? Toward goals of making time for others? How might our minutes, days, and years expand?
Thanks for reading, take care,
—mia xx