Upstream - Life Beyond the Clock with Jenny Odell

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing divisions — and ultimately, towards inevitable collapse? What if this particular perception of time contributes to our feelings of despair and hopelessness about our futures? What if it limits our ability to imagine and fight for a more just, equitable, and regenerative system? In this conversation, we’ve brought on Bay Area artist and author Jenny Odell to help us unpack and reimagine our experience of time and to foster hope and inspire action for a better future. We focus on insights and stories from Jenny’s two books, her 2019 New York Times Bestseller How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and most recently, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. In this conversation, we learn about the commodification and colonization of time under capitalism, how it happened, when it happened, and how the fungibility of time contributes to human and planetary suffering. We explore her unique reframe of classes to include those who time, those who are timed, and those who self-time. We also talk about a more ecological and place-based sense of time, a life beyond the clock, unbound from capitalism, that shows that neither our lives nor the life of our planet is a foregone conclusion, that we are not alone in our efforts to dismantle capitalism, and that the more-than-human world is actually an active participant in the endeavor — and here to help.  Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Bowerbirds for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns. Further Resources: Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock, by Jenny Odell How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell The Bureau of Suspended Objects Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify to leave us a review there too. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And also, Upstream is a labor of love. It's really important for us to keep our bi-weekly conversation series and quarterly documentaries free of charge and accessible to anyone who's interested. But it all takes a lot of time and resources. If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so. And if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable,

please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. I think for someone my age in particular, you know, when I was in elementary school, we were already learning about climate change. There's a feeling that you were born at the wrong time that was just something again I was observing among people I knew and students and it's just kind of like you were born at the end you were born at the wrong time you know everything could happen in the past which is like that really

depends on who you are if you're thinking that but that feeling of wrongness and then I there's a thought experiment that I would try to do which is instead imagine that I was born at the exact right time I was born exactly when I needed to be born and that my task in life is actually to respond to the situation that I've been born into and that is actually a very different way of thinking about what's in front of you and it involves some acceptance actually not acceptance of what is but an acceptance of the task, an acceptance that you were born at the time that you were born. You're listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Ring. And I'm Della Duncan. Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing divisions, and ultimately towards inevitable collapse?

What if this particular perception of time contributes to our feelings of despair and hopelessness about our futures? What if it closes down our ability to imagine and fight for a more just, equitable, and regenerative system? In this conversation, we've brought on Bay Area artist and author Jenny O'Dell to help us unpack and reimagine our experience of time and to foster hope and inspire action for a better future. We focus on insights and stories from Jenny's two books, her 2019 New York Times bestseller,

How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy, and most recently, Saving Time, Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. In this conversation with Jenny, we learn about the commodification and colonization of time under capitalism, how it happened, when it happened, and how the fungibility of time contributes to human and planetary suffering. We explore her unique reframe of classes to include those who time, those who are timed, and those who self-time. We also talk about a more ecological and place-based sense of time, a life beyond the clock, unbound from capitalism, which shows that neither our lives nor the life of our planet is a foregone conclusion, that we are not alone in our efforts to dismantle capitalism,

and that the more-than-human world is actually an active participant in the endeavor and here to help. And now, here's Della in conversation with Jenny O'Dell. All right, Jenny, thank you so much for joining me on Upstream. So happy to be in conversation with you. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. And yeah, I just want to share that I felt so many kind of connections or resonance as I was reading your books for this conversation. I'm currently in San Francisco. I grew up here, born here, and I spend a lot of time in the Santa Cruz mountains. I worked at UC Berkeley. So just a lot of familiarity, a lot of connections. I just want to appreciate you and say hello, neighbor. That's so nice. And yeah, let's start with an introduction. How might you

introduce yourself and to mix it up a bit, maybe what's a bird that you're noticing recently? Sure. So I never know whether to describe myself as an artist or a writer. I think of myself as both. And the way that I do both is very similar. So yeah, I'm an artist and writer based in Oakland. And I make work about acts of close attention. I think how I would summarize what I do. I also taught art for a long time to college students and a bird that I've been noticing lately is, so there's actually two, there are two juvenile red-tailed hawks that live basically across the street from me right now. I don't know exactly which tree their nest is, but all of us in the neighborhood are very excited about them. And if you go outside at a particular time of day, you can see them sort of like practicing flying. And it's just like been really nice to just be going about my business and look out the window

and there's this like majestic red-tailed hawk flying by. I don't know how long they're going to stick around, but they definitely feel like neighbors right now. Wonderful. Thank you. So this show is called Upstream and it's based on a metaphor that we had heard from public health, which is about going upstream from the challenges of our time to the root causes. And I definitely, in reading your work and seeing your art pieces, very much feel that you are an upstream journeyer. So just if you were to sense in right now to what is the heartbreak or the concern or the challenges of our time that are really touching you? You know, if you start there, the downstream kind of the challenges of our time, what is really breaking your heart right now or moving you? I mean, we're very lucky here in the Bay Area, weather wise right now, as you know, but it's been really hard for me not to think about the

heat wave that's going on. I know a lot of people in New York, but it's, you know, it's also happening in other parts of the world. And so just thinking about people experiencing that and not just the way that feels physically, but also the attendant feeling that I think a lot of people have that I remember, for example, having when we had the fires here in 2020, where the sun basically just didn't come out that day of like despair and really not feeling up to the task of responding, you know, emotionally or otherwise, like kind of feeling like, yeah, like sort of this is it or it's all over. So it's like a double suffering, I feel like. And so that's feels very present for me. Yeah, I hear that a double suffering. Yeah. And if you were to go upstream from that,

that heartbreak, those challenges, what do you see are some of the root causes? And maybe how do they tie into the work you've done recently? upstream from there you encounter an attitude toward the non-human world that has been prevalent for actually not that long in human history right but a sort of way of viewing the rest of the world as being inert it's a you know like a repository of resources it's something to be exploited extracted it has no intrinsic value doesn't speak back to you and so it's a very you know it's an extractive mentality that has led to the many other things that have led to the many other things that can explain this heat wave right that people are now experiencing in a very visceral way and yeah that's very much tied to what i write about in the book because that attitude that i just described is also the attitude towards time that you also see kind of happening along with that

the time is another resource to be sort of like mined and exploited and squeezed for productivity and it's a very it feels very inhumane right it's like an inhumane way of of looking at anything and it's also quite lonely i find right like that way of viewing the rest of right? It's like an inhumane way of looking at anything. And it's also quite lonely, I find, right? Like that way of viewing the rest of the world, it's like, as if like humans are the only actors in world history, and everything else is just kind of there. And not, it doesn't participate in the world with us. Yes, as you're speaking, I'm recalling the Thomas Berry quote, seeing the universe as a collection of objects or a communion of subjects. And that paradigm shift.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Well, maybe for folks who might not be familiar with Saving Time, but also your book before it, because I felt they were very connected, very related, How to Do Nothing. Could you maybe just introduce those two books and maybe share how you, the journey from one to the other? Yeah, sure. So when I wrote How to Do Nothing, I was teaching art at the time, and I was also, you know, making art and doing that whole thing. And so there were some things that I had been thinking about for a long time because i think because of that like if you're an artist and especially if you are someone who teaches art for example to non-art majors at a school that very much values engineering and um things outside

the humanities you're in a place where you have to argue a lot for the value of things that where the value is is not so cut and dried let's say right like the sort of question like what is the point of art or what is the point of beauty or right like that's something that I am very used to inhabiting and there's a lot of that kind of thinking in how to do nothing but it was all kind of touched off by a moment kind of following the 2016 election when I felt that I was just noticing in myself and others like a lot of despair, but also fragmented attention and kind of like inability to act or to reflect. And so that experience kind of congealed all this other stuff that I've been

thinking about for a long time into this book, How to Do Nothing, which originally was essentially an artist talk that I gave at a conference that it just ended up being more resonant than I expected. And so that's kind of the seed of that book. And the subtitle is Resisting the Attention Economy. So that's really How to Do Nothing. The title is like a little bit of a joke because the point ends up being that like all of the things that we think of as being nothing are actually like everything, right? Like maintenance and care and conviviality and all these things that can't really be put on a balance sheet. So that's how to do nothing. And in that book, there's also kind of an implicit argument that it would be lovely if not so much time seemed like money or if time just didn't seem like money,

but that that's a really big obstacle for someone who is trying to maybe live by these other kinds of values right and so sort of I think of it as like saving time the book was kind of living inside how to do nothing and then it just needed to be kind of coaxed out of it it's like the sibling book or something but saving time obviously has more specifically to do with time and it's more specifically i think trying to address a reader who is living kind of weirdly between the sense of of everyday urgency like never having enough time or never having control over your time or even if you do have control over your time feeling like you're your own inner boss so you so you're still not allowing yourself to rest and then on the other hand the sense of like climate despair and like living at the end of feeling like you're your own inner boss. So you're still not allowing yourself to rest.

And then on the other hand, the sense of like, climate despair and like living at the end of time and that there's like a type of person who's living between those two and can't reconcile them. And it's just very painful and confusing, which was informed by my own experience, but it was also informed by the experiences of my students. I've seen that language show up a lot in their projects and just things that they would say to me. So yeah. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, one way that I, when I was going back to some of your other work, even before the two books, I was really appreciating how you really think systemically. You kind of take an object or something and you kind of follow it through time and space and the history of it and the poetics of it. And in some examples, there was one project you did called, where almost everything I used, wore, ate, or bought on Monday, April 1st,

2013, that had a label was manufactured, to the best of my knowledge, where you trace these items back to where they were manufactured or created. And I know you also have the project you did at the dump around the suspended objects, again, inviting folks to go into a journey through each object. And so I really felt that part of saving time was a real meditation on time as a concept of historically and across place and time and culture. And just, yeah, really thinking systemically about it. It was really a beautiful journey. And I'm wondering if you can tell us about maybe the thingification of time or seeing time as a raw material and kind of the history of that. You said time as money just a few minutes ago. So where does this come from and why is that

problematic or how does that manifest as challenges of our time or contribute to our suffering human and planetary wise yeah so i think one thing that i always have to point out to myself really is that like the idea of of measuring time and even being very precise about time is not something that's that new. Like we are humans who live in a world with time. Like we need to be attentive to it and use it in certain ways. Right. Like that's a sort of broader concept than like time is money,

which I think sometimes when people say time is money or time is of the essence, they're, they're referring to that kind of more general sense, right? Like it's just timing is important but then there's like a more specific sense that time is made up of interchangeable units that can be filled with work or that are something like almost like property right like I have these time units you have these time units I sell my time units to you right like that's much more specific and that as you can imagine it really when i looked

at the history of it there were some kind of things precursors to it like monastic time where european monasteries were using time measurement to increase basically their economic productivity right like they were very into punctuality kind of for the sake of punctuality and that's basically a context in which like an extreme like attentiveness to like punctual measured time like it's already happening and then that you know gets picked up in towns that are commercializing that need a way to add and count hours of people's work, like labor hours that are being bought. And I mean, you can think of it almost like,

I think of it really as being like a language, right? Like there's like time languages. And you don't need to have a standardized language between two places unless they need to communicate. So you can see how with like commerce, right? And trade, you would need to have this like sort of system of like counting hours and time and systematizing things but i think it's just really important to remember that something that seems very familiar now which is like the idea of the hour the hour is like an abstract concept like a man hour for

example not like 2 p.m but just an hour is a concept that is very much tied to labor and being able to regulate the labor of other people yeah and obviously that's still relevant now right like uh one of the things that i talk about in the the first chapter of the book is uh all of those sort of time tracking and employee surveillance softwares that were used on remote workers' laptops, like during the pandemic, and I'm sure still now, right? This idea of like seeing a name followed by like a series of squares, right, that are that person's man hours. Yeah. And one thread that you carry on is around capitalism, particularly in time under capitalism and this idea that time is a frontier of capitalism, that capitalism has these frontiers capital only frees time to appropriate it for itself as profit. And the goal of capitalism is not free time, but economic growth. Any time freed

up goes right back to the machine to increase profits. So you say, you know, the only reward for working faster is more work. You quote that quote. Yeah. So yeah, do you want to say more about that? Just particularly under capitalism, how time is instrumentalized and utilized yeah i mean i think you can see a really i mean you know thinking about that concept of the frontier you can see a really good illustration of that relationship in some of those kind of scenes that i quote from the book the colonization of time which is about European colonists bringing this notion of time to places in Australia and South Africa, where you have like one group of people whose idea of not only what time is, but like what it means to have like a

modern sense of time, clashing with groups of people who have their own system of reckoning time that is not based on capitalist labor right and that is much more grounded in the place right like there are appropriate times to do things based on things that are happening in the ecology there is an economy but it's more of a social economy and that's just like clashing really hard with this idea of people being repositories of work hours that need to be basically held in this like very strict matrix of time and so there's just like yeah these really interesting interactions that people have where you realize that they're really not even speaking the same language of time and that the capitalist understanding of time is the one that contains the notion of abstract hours

that can be bought and sold and that that's what you have to sell. Yeah. And another frame I really appreciate around time under capitalism, which you've already alluded to, is the classification of classes or groups of working peoples. And you say there are those who time, those who are timed, and those who self-time. So can you tell us a little bit more? I love that differentiation. That was really an aha moment for me. What do those groups mean?

And what are their lived experiences like in those frames? So I think the first two can be really, really well exemplified in the beginning of Modern Times, the Charlie Chaplin film, because they're so contrasted, right? can be really really well exemplified in the beginning of modern times the charlie chaplin film because they're so contrasted right so the timer would be basically either the the boss or the guy who comes in later with the that machine that eliminates the lunch hour it's like this crazy inventor guy but basically these are people who like their experience of time, it's sort of quieter and slower. And it's, it's analytical, right? Like they're looking at, like, I think in the beginning of modern times, he like, he even has like a screen where he can like pull up, he can see different things happening in the factory, right?

And, or, you know, Frederick Taylor would be another example of this, right? example of this right like someone who's like in the business of timing other people slash making them work faster finding a system in which those people will work faster right so i would also maybe put in this category like someone who designs the interface for like uber lyft or something right like someone who's on that side of that equation and is not themselves subject to the same pressures that someone on the other end is experiencing and then the timed is the yeah it's basically charlie chaplin right like it cuts to the factory floor and he's on the assembly line and he's struggling to keep up and the assembly line like is his timer in a way like he clocks out to go to the bathroom and then he clocks back in

so those two are very contrasted like early on in that film and i think it's like a really brilliant way of showing that difference and then the self-timer it's almost like if you had both of those rolled up into one into one person so you could be for example self-employed or you're a contractor or something like that right but you've internalized that relationship so you have both the relaxed boss've internalized that relationship. So you have both the relaxed boss, maybe it's not relaxed, but you have there's a part of you that's timing the other part of you that's trying to get more productivity out of the other part of you. And I think the relationship is very similar. Yeah, yeah, thank you. And going back to the, the timed and the

people who time, I was thinking that the idea of somebody owning your hour, you know, someone owning that your hour of your life. And I have been in situations, maybe it's like a brief contract thing where it's like somebody hires me for one hour. And basically I do whatever they need me to do. Right. That's very much like they own my hour. And you want me to move boxes? You want me to do that? You want me to do that? Okay, like you own this hour of me. So what a fascinating idea. And then the self-timed, as you're saying, you may own your hour, but you need to squeeze as much financial value out of that hour as possible to be able to make money to meet your needs. Because under capitalism, we have so many of our needs that we must meet in financialized ways. So that idea of there's two parts of us,

the boss or the timer and the timed within ourselves is what an interesting view of how folks who are self-timed kind of operate. And you even bring in this idea of effective thought that like we can even be productive or effective in our thinking. And so it really can get so down to just every moment can be financialized, and we can squeeze value out of every moment. And you really you offer this frame, auto exploitation as a way of doing that. And it was that was really powerful to hear about. Yeah, I think that's from Byung-Chul Han. I quote several of his books, it might be the burnout society. But yeah, that note that term right for I think that's from Byung-Chul Han. I quote several of his books. It might be the Burnout Society. But yeah, that note, that term, right? I think he describes it as like, always jumping over your own shadow or something like that. It's kind of like inability to rest.

And the effective thought thing is from one of my favorite hate reads that I did for this book. It's a book from the 20s called increasing personal efficiency and it's like i read it after i had read a lot of sort of factory magazines of the same era that are addressed to factory managers and it is it's very similar language but it's addressed to a person who would then apply them to themselves so he's he's like asking all these questions and it like are you thinking as efficiently as you can like you know there's like speed reading tests in the book you know so it's just like it's it's amazing how granular he wanted to make it and that that still sounds actually quite familiar now like I think there's a lot of time-related self-help that

addresses that kind of like personal factory manager hate read I think I understand what you mean kind of in in to Do Nothing. You talk about like standing aside and being able to participate in something, but taking kind of an approach to viewing it while you're participating in it and kind of being able to then notice what it does to you or what it means for you. And so is that what you mean by a hate read? It's like that, but it's also the like, so bad, it's good. Ah, yes. You know, like F Boy Island was one of those for me. hate read it's like that but it's also the like so bad it's good ah yes you know like f boy island

was one of those for me oh yeah yeah like right like it's like because like someone asked me about it recently and i about whether i enjoyed reading it and i was like i did enjoy reading it but i enjoyed reading it because it was such an encapsulation of everything I disagree with. Yeah. Yeah. No, I once virtually participated in an Ayn Rand conference for the same reason, just to be like, what? Just tell me more about this ideology, this view of who we are as humans and what it means for economics. I hear you. Yeah. Yeah. Another trend that really surprised me in your book was the trend of the commodification and consumption of slowness. And you also bring in the frame, the experience economy. And this was so interesting to me because I am totally guilty of really encouraging folks to slow down in like retreats or coaching sessions. And also I bring up the Bayo Akumalafi quote, these times are urgent, let us slow down often. And so I love that, that it's like,

actually that too can be commodified and even consumed in a way and problematic when it's related to privilege and who is doing the labor when one is doing that slowing down or that retreating. So tell us more about this experience economy and the commodification of slowness. Yeah, so I think it's amazing that the experience economy as a term that was coined by two economists long before Instagram ever

existed. And I would love to see an update of their paper about it taking Instagram into account because I think Instagram just as an example represents kind of like an extreme version of what they are talking about which was there's an economy of goods right like things that you buy products that you buy and things like that and then there's you know separately there's this idea of buying experiences which in some ways we are already familiar with from tourism. And they were just kind of like wanting to take that to the next level, like talking about, you know, shopping experiences that people where people would have to pay to even just

be there. Right. Like that you're, you're really paying for an amount of time having a certain experience. And the reason I feel like Instagram is reveals an even more extreme version of that is because it encourages an attitude toward the world and experience that I feel can be very consumption based like the whole world becomes a potential backdrop for an Instagram post and it's very acquisitive right like you see someone have this experience and then you want to go consume

that experience as well. And that's like, turns out to be a really effective business model. So I think in that category, these kinds of performances or images of slowness perform really well, right? Like in that kind of framework, like conspicuous slowness, you could call it, right? Like someone, and it would, like if anyone who spent any amount of time on instagram has seen these kinds of posts right and you know not to say that it can't be hard sometimes to distinguish the sincere from the insincere but there's definitely like a presentation of the experience of slowness as a kind of product that oftentimes you could buy either by you know going somewhere or buying some sort of product that implies some kind of lifestyle, but that you're going to pay for it and you're going to experience it like a

product, not so much as like, for example, like an encounter or something less capitalist, right? Yeah. And just to then again, highlight some quotes from the book related to this, you write, slowness becomes a product that you can buy off the backs of others. When sold as a product, slowness is just another part of the logic of increase. And then you also say that really slowness and the experience economy is really a community of privileged individuals who can not only afford such accessories, but more importantly, who can adopt a different temporal reading of clock time where punctuality and exactness are negligible. Oh, yeah, I think that last one is

is a quote from that paper that I cite about the slow watch. Yeah, it's an amazing critique of this of this notion, but he uses there's this slow watch. I think it has like no numbers on it. It either has no numbers on it it either has no numbers on it or some other kind of like it's not exactly practical and the marketing copy is amazing it's like talking about how you will learn to be slow you know and with like by using this watch and he goes on to say that like this watch would be not exactly useful for people who need to live on clock time you're listening to an upstreamstream Conversation with Jenny O'Dell, author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time,

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. We'll be right back. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh My sweetheart and I will retire We'll retire to the tide And we'll shed Our skin

For a shell From a wise old snail Who is singing slow Slow Slow Slow down, slow down At the base of the dunes With the algae bloom And the harem Here we sit all day

And wait and wait For the tide to come crashing And we'll shed our skin Because we know where it's been We'll shed our skin Because we know where it's been And we know this hymn Slow down Slow down

Lost, lost in this torrent Drown in the deep of this over sweet voyage Sober sweet poise Blown to all of the blood and cotton Slow down Slow down Slow down down slow down That was Slow Down by Bowerbirds. Now, back to our conversation with Jenny O'Dell.

And so one kind of antidote or other way of working with time and slowness, you describe and you bring in this quote from Joseph Pieper, who writes, little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work, that that's the view of leisure. And you say, let's move from that to something that we can imbue in anything we do so we can bring leisure into going for a walk or washing the dishes. And I love that invitation to see leisure not as something that I need to escape to do and needs to be really financialized and commodified and very expensive and very privileged but instead can be something I can infuse into my day-to-day really going back to attention

and presence but maybe tell us a little bit more about what are all the ways that we can cultivate a post-capitalist relationship to leisure yeah Yeah, I mean, that chapter was really hard to write because on the one hand, so Josef Pieper, you know, he's talking about the fact that leisure should be more than, right, these little gaps, right? And I think he would also probably say, you know, it's more than buying a slow watch that has no numbers on it, right? And I do mention that I have experienced something like what he describes as true leisure which is like a kind of interruption in horizontal time like a feeling of expansiveness let's say that I've had those moments while doing the dishes and sort of like waiting in line for things right but I would never want to suggest that as a substitute for actual like free time you know what I mean I guess like

I think both can be true like I think that you can notice that there are times when you're doing something that maybe feels like very you know rote or not something that you associate with leisure just because of the content of whatever it is that there is a way of becoming more aware in that moment of what you're doing or the other people that you're doing it with and things like that that can feel like you're a little bit more awake or a little bit more alive and and that like as it has happened for me that that can be something like what he's describing but I think it's still a really really big problem that most people don't have leisure time so that's why I just have to you know know, as a caveat, that both things are true, that there's the mindset part of it. But there's also

the fact that like, as I put it in the book, one of the reasons that I could experience a sort of leisured mindset while waiting in line in one of those pandemic lines for groceries was that I wasn't worried about paying for them. So it's both. Yes, I hear you. And I'm thinking of Mick Mindfulness and Ron Purser's book and how, yeah, it's not to feel better within capitalism and the alienation and exploitation. We need to bring mindfulness into everything we do, right? That's that only that mindset shift. Absolutely not, right? It is the structural interventions that are necessary so that we have actually leisure

time and free time and even, you know, a more cooperative or solidaristic economy where we move beyond the boss, the timed and the person timing. Yeah. So I absolutely hear you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, another invitation from both the books is into a real sense of bioregionalism and placemaking or connection with place. And I think of in permaculture, we invite folks to do sit spots, you know, to go to a place and to sit and to allow the more than human world to kind of emerge once we've quieted and they notice that we're, you know, an okay being to be around. And what we can learn over time through a sit spot or through visiting a place

over and over again and really coming into relationship with a place and placemaking and bioregionalism. So tell us more about how does bioregionalism, which I saw you return to in both conclusions. It was really fascinating. This idea is really alive for you. So tell us about bioregionalism. Where does that come from? And why is that a useful invitation or something that you're really excited about? Yeah. I mean, one thing I'll say is that I'm partial to the idea of having a deep relationship to a place because I've been lucky enough to live in the same place for my whole life. And I, I know that's increasingly not a common experience and not just live in the same place, but like

live in a really like wonderful and beautiful place where access to the outdoors is easier than in a lot of other places. But I have like very strong feelings of attachment to the Bay Area because of growing up here and spending a lot of time in the mountains. And just even you know where I live in Oakland you know I live in the city but compared to other places you know just walking around I mentioned those hawks already right like there's the there's a lot of signs of life like around me as I'm just going about my day so it's very natural for me to value something like that but you know I think bioreionalism, like if you were to look it up, you know, as a concept is sort of articulated in the 70s, but it really reflects something that, you know, for example, indigenous communities have exhibited for a long time, like a way of

relating to a place in the way that I think about it, almost as if it were a person, like that a place could have a personality which i think means right that it's it's not like other places like it means something to be here and not over there that place is not abstract and that it has characteristics and that being in relationship to it and being in a relationship of stewardship for example would meet would have to mean understanding it well enough to be able to participate in and take care of it and help it to flourish. But that that's not, it feels very different to me from the sense of like, you know, when people say like, save the earth, the earth still feels very kind of inert in that formulation. And this is much more like the place almost like as a conversation partner or something

that has its own identity that shapes your identity and being related to it. Like that's just something that's had an appeal for me for a really long time and still does. And yeah, as you mentioned with like the sit spot, like one of the really important ways to actually get to know a bioregion is just time, right? Like whatever size of a place you choose, whether that's, you know, I talk about a specific tree in saving time

that I walked past hundreds of times during the pandemic, but, you know, it could be like a watershed or, you know, specific hillside or some kind of like ecosystem, right? Watching it through time, which includes, you know, cyclical changes like seasons, but also increasingly, like the ways that it's changing away from those cycles, right? Like what's happening with seasons right now, that you have to be able to hold your attention on one place long enough to see those changes, to see and appreciate them. Like I'm thinking about some folks that I know who have lived in the same town in the Santa Cruz mountains for 50 years. They can tell you about changes that have happened, like these changes that are, have been too slow for someone like me who's visiting to notice. And it's that

kind of, yeah, long temporal awareness that I think, you know, when I wrote about bioregionalism and how to do nothing, it felt much more spatial. Like it was about like knowing about like, you know, what grows where, what are the, what are the entities that live here? And this was much more like, okay, once you know that, what does it mean to bring in this time dimension? What does that help you understand about, for example, the birds? What are the birds doing right now? What are they doing in the season? Like, are there fewer of them migrating here, et cetera?

Yeah, thank you. And yeah, I hear that distinction of the ability to get to know a place very deeply when we don't have to move often. And when it's a place that really allows for, you know, ease of mobility or public transportation, parks and things like that. And not all spaces and places have that. And particularly as we are in this time, like you're saying of really intense heat waves around the world. So I hear that. And you did also bring in though that even when you travel to a place that your approach to getting to know that place that you travel to, you said something about like walking around the space and getting to know the beings of that place. So

maybe there's something to in even in travel, like less as a consumption or again as the commodification of objects and rather getting to know a place even when we do travel as a consumption or again as the commodification of objects and and rather getting to know a place even when we do travel as as a being or the personality of place too yeah absolutely and i think it's funny because so much of tourism seems geared towards replicating what is comfortable for the traveler in a place that is unfamiliar to them i mean you can see that now right if you go a lot of cities kind of seem the same or certain districts of a lot of cities seem the same whereas like i feel like what i am seeking is the opposite of that which is like i want to know all of the ways in which this place is not like like i want to know like what is the character of this place

you know and so i really appreciate like you know when I go places that have, where there's some kind of like infrastructure around that, like, you know, parks or like even just things like signage, like just seemingly small things that are like little sort of orienting devices that assume that one would want to get to know the character of a place when they arrive. Yeah. And this is also important for economics too, right? Strengthening local economies to, And this is also important for economics too, right? Strengthening local economies to, you know, to figure out what is in season, right? And what is produced locally and what are the dishes, right? All of that can be a delicious part of supporting local economies too. And more local and independent businesses as well. Yeah, totally. Totally. So you talked about seasons, you brought in seasons. And so you say most places did not and do not have four seasons. Wow. I was like, mind blown by that idea. And as I'm in San Francisco right now, and it's, you know, gray, cloudy skies, and it's been this way for a long time, and it will be this way until maybe September, October, when all of a sudden, it's going to be very warm.

time and it will be this way until maybe September, October, when all of a sudden it's going to be very warm. Wow. This idea of seasons is part of the colonization of time. And so tell us more about that realization and also, you know, what you've noticed about seasons where you are. Yeah. I mean, it's funny you should mention, like I'm in Oakland, I'm not that far from you and it's sunny outside. So there like like, it's, it can be extremely granular, right? Like the, the way the seasons, what I think of as seasons, like play out in any given place. Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned in the book is that I grew up, I was like kind of overly influenced by the idea that the Bay area has no seasons, which I don't think anyone would say now, maybe because there's been sort of more storms and

things like that. But when I was growing up, that was like a thing that people would say is the Bay Area has no seasons, by which they meant it didn't have four seasons. So it was like, because it didn't have four kind of like cartoon, like spring, summer, fall, winter seasons, like the changes were sort of illegible as seasons.

And that weirdly enough, that framing actually rendered me insensitive to the seasons that were actually happening because I wasn't using that kind of framework. And then, you know, I talked to someone who lives in the Santa Cruz mountains and he, I asked him about that concept that the Bay Area has no seasons. And he said, you know, it's sort of true that because what we have is more of, and he called it an unfolding, like a gradual unfolding. And I think that's true in most places, right? It's like there is a, again, it's being disrupted right now, but there is an order that things happen in,

in the Bay Area. I think of it largely in this part of the year based on like flowers. There's always like the few flowers that show up early. And then there's one that's literally called Farewell to Spring that happens at the end of spring, you know. And, you know, in San Francisco, you get the marine layer during part of the year and then it goes away. And so there's just the there's like a kind of a procession of things happening. And that's kind of more how I think of as seasons now. of more how I think of as seasons now. But yeah, this idea of four seasons really shows how certain ideas about time that happen in a really specific context can get exported to other places. And then it can sort of distort your perception of the changes that are actually happening in those places. Like one of the examples from that Colonization of Time book, he lists out in this one part of Australia,

all of the seasons that were recognized there by Aboriginal people, and the names of the seasons are basically names, they're named after things that are happening at that time, like when this particular plant flowers or when this fruit is happening, which makes sense, right? That is literally what a season is. It's just like whatever is happening in that part of the year. Yeah, absolutely. So an invitation for all of us is while we're doing our connecting with place, our noticing our sit spots, perhaps to also notice the unfolding of seasons and the ecotones between seasons, the over layer. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah. Well, it was just reminding me of something um i was hiking yesterday actually and i was thinking about how it's kind of similar to how in a bird like a bird guidebook when they show

the range of a bird it's always like this one solid color kind of blob right but then like the truth is that it's much more that obviously like the birds are not uniformly spread over that area right like they have their kind of favorite little places and and like little niches and in a way this like unfolding of time is really similar like I was noticing on this hill that on like you know one side of the hill this one particular kind of plant was not flowering yet and then maybe like 20-30 minutes later I'm on a different side of the hill and they were all flowering and then you go a little bit further and they're done flowering. Right. And it's like that's in one place.

So it was just really making me appreciate how like extremely local those kinds of changes are. Like because I think the other idea of the season, right, like of the four canonical seasons is this kind of like uniformity, like that it's the same everywhere. And then it shifts over to the next thing. Whereas it's like really something in between, like there is an overall order. And, but then within that, there's so much variation, just even like on one hill. Absolutely. Yeah. And let's move now to the thinking about future and time. Cause you, you mentioned working with working with students while you were writing How to Do Nothing. You found that their work after 2016 was just more and more increasingly maybe a sense of hopelessness or climate grief, despair. And you bring in this frame of, I think it's called declinism or determinism, this way that one can feel that time is unfolding in a particular way, in a particular direction.

We have no way to kind of change it. And you really offer alternative views on that, kind of demystifying that, breaking that down. So maybe tell us about this. What is this perception of time that may be unhelpful for the climate crisis that we're in? And what are other ways to view time that might be more hopeful or helpful? Yeah, I mean, I think one way I could illustrate it is with something in the middle of the book that I describe. It's a nightmare that I had while the fires were happening here in 2020, which was that I would frequently have nightmares

about fire. And in some of them, the fire would kind of be, it would be like a little bit off in the distance, but it would be coming towards me in kind of almost like a wall. And I describe it as like the same way, like the line like on a video playhead just goes forward. Like it just only goes forward and it's a line and it's, there's like sort of no variation in that and so there's this like finality to it and then it's also uh yeah that lack of variation that i

think contributes to this feeling that it's almost as if it might as well already be here is the feeling that you get from that it's like you see it and you understand what that means because it's moving at this uniform speed towards you with nothing in its way. And you're just sort of like, well, the time and the space between me and that is arbitrary. And therefore, like that, you know, obviously doesn't have great implications for trying to think about ways that you could respond, ways that you could change the situation, ways that time in between you and that thing could turn out to be quite different. It just kind of like liquidates that space, which is the future, liquidates the future. And so one of the things that I found really helpful that I kind of described later on in that chapter as like a thought experiment is to kind of shift the way I think about the future.

I think for someone my age in particular, when I was in elementary school, we were already learning about climate change. There's a feeling that you were born at the wrong time. I mean, that was just something, again, I was observing among people I knew and students. And it's just kind of like you were born at the end. You were born at the wrong time.

Everything could happen in the past, which is like that really depends on who you are, if you're thinking that, but that feeling of wrongness. And then I, as I put it in that chapter, there's a thought experiment that I would try to do, which is instead, imagine that I was born at the exact right time, I was born exactly when I needed to be born. And that my task in life is actually to respond to the situation that I've been born into. And that is actually a very different way of thinking about what's in front of you. And it involves some acceptance, actually, not acceptance of what is, but an acceptance of the task, an acceptance that you were born at the time that you were born. And I actually, I just wrote

for the Sydney Book Festival, I wrote this letter to the future they had a bunch of writers write letters to the future and I wrote mine kind of about this around this Tagalog phrase that I just learned from another Filipino artist which is bahala na and it means depends on who you ask what it means my I asked my mom and she said it means whatever happens happens the artist who told me about it said it means like it's kind of like like fuck it i'm gonna go for it like kind of like i'm not i'm not entirely prepared and in control but i'm gonna go into the situation and i and while i'm in the situation i'm gonna draw on all of my resources and my improvisational abilities and ingenuity to like bring my full self to this situation that's what it means and i put that in this letter to the future basically being like every moment in history including this future moment that i'm addressing right

has been a moment of uncertainty that in the middle of every historical moment has been uncertainty right and that will continue to be it has been true and it will continue to be true and i think the danger of declinism and not feeling up to the task is that you don't recognize your own moment as a moment of uncertainty. That like the things you do now will determine the things of the future. That it's not a foregone conclusion. That you are actually like in, you're just in the present as a moment of uncertainty in the middle of the whole thing. And that like bahala na is the attitude that you should bring to that moment. Beautiful. Yeah, no, I definitely as I read that, I was thinking that I do think of

global temperature rise and, you know, parts per million of carbon rising as this kind of declinism, like it's inevitable. It's this march of progress in this really dark way. And your reframe is so helpful. And you're making me think of Joanna Macy, eco-justice, Buddhist philosopher and activist. She has this practice where she has folks line up and she says, I want you to step into your parents. Like imagine you're before your birth and you're choosing your parents. Now take a step. I want you to imagine you're choosing your place of birth. Now take a step. Imagine

you're choosing the identities that you hold and your intersectionalities, your whole self, and step into that place. And then I want you to imagine this time on earth that you're born into. Now step into that place. And it's a very powerful activity. It can be very hard for folks in many different ways, but it really evokes that same feeling that you're describing of like, what if this is the right time? Or what if this was a time I am choosing to be a part of? And I'm also thinking of Martin Shaw, a mythologist. He says, stop saying the earth is doomed. If we stay that the earth is doomed, it's like we're walking out of a movie 15 minutes early, you know, 15 minutes before the end

and just positing dominion over the miraculous. That's what he says. It's like, could we hold the potential of possibility a little bit more? And as Joanna says, practice active hope, you know, something that we do rather than something that we have. And as Joanna says, practice active hope, you know, something that we do rather than something that we have. And another way that you illustrate this point, which I love was something like you imagine a conversation that you're going to have with a friend tomorrow, let's say, and that you can imagine how the conversation might go, right? You can sense from your history and the previous conversations and maybe the topic that you need to touch on what possibly could happen. But you really have no way of predicting what's going to actually happen in the magic of that interchange between two, you know, the communion of subjects between two beings.

And also that you are not that same person tomorrow that you are right now when you're imagining it. And you won't be the same person at the end of that conversation. So that was another really helpful way of thinking about really breaking down this idea of declinism. Yeah, right. It's like, it's just, I think that that was really key for me that it's not just that things will be different, but that you will also be different, right? Like, because I think that kind of melancholy contemplation of the future that may as well have already arrived, like you're always imagining yourself as you currently are in that, like you're just transposing yourself rather than all of the ways in which you grow and change in response to every single thing that happens and that you're in conversation with.

Yeah. And as you're saying that, you're reminding me of the importance of being kind of open, being curious, being willing to be changed, right? That too, like being, yeah, like responsive and relational. Because I think if we're not, then actually we could go into a conversation thinking I'm going to tell them like it is or whatever, you know, but no openness to learn or to listen or to ask a question, no curiosity, then it might be a little bit of declinism or determinism in some ways. So, and you talk about this in How to Do Nothing, just our curiosity and just being open to, yeah, being changed and to learning. Yeah, which I have to to say I do recognize like how difficult it is like I think you know there's that part in how to do nothing where I describe

you know going to the elkhorn slough and seeing the shorebirds and just like crying basically because I am thinking about how fragile the whole thing is um and that like it doesn't instrumentally make sense to love anything like because it's everything is endangered right like i mean everything's like really endangered right now and that it's like yeah one one sort of logical response that is to not love anything and to just be sort of like yeah i give up it's all over and like i understand the logic behind that and I and that it's a protective it's someone it's like someone protecting like their heart you know and so I think like I would rather be open and curious and responsive but like it does come with that cost of like it also means that you're

vulnerable to like deep grief about the things that you're losing or the things you stand to lose I would still rather be on that side you know losing or the things you stand to lose, I would still rather be on that side, you know, because I think it means that I'm like, I'm alive. But it like, it's so challenging right now. And I just, I always feel like I have to acknowledge how challenging that is. And that it's like, you know, I think people shut down not because they're lazy, but because it's too painful. Absolutely. And that speaks to the importance of holding it collectively, right? Not just individually. And so collective grief spaces or ritual, right? Ways of connecting.

Yeah. Thank you for adding that. Well, we're almost at time here. And I just want to say we focused a little bit more on the paradigm shifts or the invitations of the ways we can see relationship to time or place differently. Just to end, are there any kind of like structural changes that would lead to a more collective, realistic or expansive version of time? Just any last invitations for the structural sense and any final invitations for the listeners as they go forth after this conversation? Yeah, I guess, you know, there's all this stuff. It's like we've had the answers to these things for so long, right? It's kind of obvious things like

workplace organizing, childcare subsidies, like these kinds of like things that translate to money and time and like freedom for people are obviously huge. I mean, I've been really interested in the strike going on in Hollywood right now. And just how much that illustrates interested in the strike going on in hollywood right now and just how much that illustrates so many reasons why it's important for like what will happen if people don't collectively get together and make demands about a certain amount of like dignity and that also has to do with their time and their freedom right so i'm really happy that that's been you know like in the news but the other thing that i think about honestly that I don't really mention that much in saving time, but I think you had Kristen Godsey on recently, is thinking about the built environment. I mean, that's literally structural, right? But we live in the Bay Area,

you've seen the freeways, and the idea of people spending, you know, two hours in traffic, each way to go to work and our sort of crumbling public transportation system and also how depending on where you live it's not easy to get to a park you know or to just to observe these seasons right like there are all these things about the way living spaces and the kind of like urban environment is structured that I think are huge actually for how people experience time on a day-to-day level and that in a real concrete way like how long does it take you to do that thing or to go see that person or you know things like that and I find that to be it's a frustrating thing to think

about but it's also really exciting because I think there's a lot of creativity and kind of art in rethinking like how things could be designed while also being you know i have a very good friend who who runs a basically a critical architecture firm that thinks a lot about kind of communal housing and ways that we could organize our lives and i i know it's very beautiful and creative but i also know from him that like how much resistance there is to doing things in any different way right like we definitely live in a culture that prioritizes nuclear family units, who are like units basically produce work and produce workers like we that is where we live. So there's a lot of obstacles to trying to change that. But I do think that that's kind of not

something that immediately occurred to me when I was writing Saving Time is how much the built environment and the kind of urban environment influence our experience of time. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jenny O'Dell, author of how to do nothing and saving time, discovering a life Beyond the Clock. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Carolyn Rader for this episode's cover art and to Bowerbirds for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Ravi. Support for this episode was provided by

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