It's about how to use your time well. The book begins by making fun of the productivity bros, those social media personalities who tell you that you need to use your time more effectively by setting up passive income so you become rich in your sleep by, say, writing a best-selling book. (That's why so many billionaires got their starts as authors, you guys.) Poking holes in these dorks' scams is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it's a good jumping off point into thinking about how we experience time.
It's all very well to use vibrations of a cesium atom control your time if you're trying to coordinate movements of trains on a network of tracks, but that doesn't capture the scale of events we encounter. It's all very well to find out what kinds of wages employers might offer for your time, but that doesn't tell you what your time is worth.
Some "fun" quotes:
May Anderson, an admin for a Facebook Group for working moms, told me that she had given up on mainstream time management books, comparing them to the common financial advice, "Just don't buy the damn latte."
…we might imagine, as Angela Y. Davis did in 1981, that "child care should be socialized, meal preparation should should be socialized, housework should be industrialized, and all these services should be readily available to working-class people."
On the origins of California's Save the Redwoods League (it's better now!):
Ridiculous as it sounds, Madison Grant associated redwoods with the Nordic race and equated the threat to their survival with threats to racial purity.
Writing about how we experience time, she writes about how we experience life. As part of her research, she noted how Georges Perec took notes about time watching a plaza; noticing rhythms in bus arrivals, clothes of passersby, things you'd normally let pass out of mind, discarding memories for more efficient storage. But first she got my attention by pointing out Perec was one of those Oulipo wordplay nerds, who wrote La disparition, that novel that doesn't use the letter E.
Chapter 5 gets into the polycrisis. It's not clear how much future
the human race has; the difference between a time-line and a
time-line-segment gets concrete.
You experience time differently if you're paralyzed
by dread. And you should resist falling into dread, thinking that we're
predestined for doom. Long before the productivity bros, the people who
though a
lot about efficient time use were slave owners; they were so wrapped
up in their warped world-view that they couldn't understand how crazy
their thoughts sounded to anyone who respected people. We see the echos
in the thinking of energy executives: "of course we had to frack
that oil and then send it through leaky pipelines; people want oil though
they keep telling us they don't." But we don't need to keep
cooking the planet with fossil fuel fumes, no matter what you might think
if you listen to too many rationalizations from energy company execs.
Uh, yeah, so this book gets heavy in places.
Probably part of the reason that this book hit me so hard is that it's embedded in the San Francisco bay area. To illustrate a different time scale, the author visits a tide pool; to illustrate the polycrisis, she visits the coastal town of Pacifica, where former cliffside homes now lie in the ocean; she visits the Prelinger Library, the Chapel of the Chimes, she goes to the places I've gone. She thinks about the kinds of things one thinks about when visiting those places.
Anyhow: yeah, interesting. Check it out. Leave some time for recovery, it does get heavy.
