How time became money—and what it should be instead
The moss spores arrived like an interloper, stealing slowly into the kitchen during the damp onset of spring. By the time Jenny Odell had discovered their entry, the moss had sprouted in her apartment, marking its tender terrain in a planter near the sill. But rather than remaining an unwelcome visitor, Odell’s moss became both curiosity and companion. In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she writes about how it threw her sense of time in relief.
“The moss made me consider very short timescales—like the minute-to-minute changes in moisture, or the moment of a spore growing in my planter—and very long evolutionary timescales, as mosses were some of the very first plants to live on land,” Odell writes.
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Odell’s bestselling book How To Do Nothing offered tools of resistance against what she termed the “attention economy,” directing our gaze away from screens and towards the natural world. In Saving Time, the artist and writer once again looks to nature as she swivels from attention to time, considering how our modern conceptions of time came to be commodified, and how we might imagine it anew.
Odell calls her work an “attempt to tell the story of how time became money,” or how a capitalist culture organized time into units—hours, minutes, seconds—that can be bought and sold. But in Odell’s temporal examination, time becomes more fluid and dynamic, enigmatic and complex.
What Odell finds in the moss becomes metaphor and meaning for a different understanding of time than a standard clock. In the timescales of nature, the branching of rhizoids and the assembling of sporophytes, she writes, time reveals itself as variable, able to expand and contract. And in an age marked by burnout and stress, where time feels scarce and the future uncertain, Odell’s moss offers lessons in how we might remake our own relationship to time.
“If you want to look at it, you have to crouch down and get into a position where you can see it and enter that world for a while,” she says over Zoom, leaning forward in her home office chair to mimic the crouch. “It takes a lot of things that you take for granted about time or space and throws them into contrast, even if only briefly. I think that interruption is really interesting.”
In Saving Time, Odell aims to offer more of those interruptions. She critiques the clocks we live and work on, suggesting new ways to sense and spend time. The hours she presents aren’t a finite resource for mining. They offer something more.
A more dynamic understanding of time
If time isn’t money, then what might it be? Odell’s title suggests time as something more ambiguous than measurable. One could read the coverline as an expression of saving time as if it’s their pennies, or as if it’s in danger. Perhaps they’re saving time like it’s stashable, or something to preserve like energy. And knowing Odell’s background as a digital artist, one might find the idea, too, that they could save time like it’s a document on your desktop. The ambiguity, Odell concedes, is by design.
“It’s an antidote to what I talked about in How To Do Nothing, which is this mentality of wanting to instantly grasp everything and not having patience for nuance,” she says. “Double meanings, slippery meanings, or metaphors have always been really useful to me for that reason.”
Inside, Odell provides no shortage of histories to examine for nuance. The book itself is expansive and eclectic, scaling centuries and geographies. Odell’s ideas gallop between twentieth-century time studies and ancient Chinese water clocks, Amazonian factory floors and Zoom rooms set adrift, mastery journals, Mojave poetry, second shifts, segregated leisure, Ice Age sea floors and present-day climate crisis. One begins to feel breathless as the book rushes through space at accelerating velocity. But while these histories offer compelling cases for how our time came to be a human construction, its most resonant notes hum as Odell returns to the quieter stirrings of the natural world.
Together, readers attune their ears to alternate rhythms murmuring through nature, from the eons of geologic history to the miniscule magic of moss spores sprouting. In nature, Odell points out, time ebbs; it’s triggered by cycles and seasons, not clocks and calendars. Flowers bloom; clouds drift; birds migrate overhead. Imposing clock time on these rhythms is an invention (one, she notes, carried by European conquesters, who brought their seasons and clocks with them around the globe).
In one case against a standard time, most places around the world didn’t always recognize four seasons. In what’s now Melbourne, the Kulin people mapped seasons around the appearance of various flora and fauna. Their time marked stages like “kangaroo-apple season,” “grass-flowering season,” and “eel season.” One might also think of Japanese sekki and kō, 72 agricultural seasons that mark time in measures of “first rainbow” and “frogs start singing.”
“As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self,” Odell writes in the early pages of the book. “Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.”
Reconsidering “time is money”
In contrast to the natural world are the commodities that mine it. Odell warns of how our time has become shaped by capitalism, becoming a for-profit venture; in the world of work, the more productivity that can be extracted from one’s time, then, the more value it creates. Measuring this time is “like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work,” Odell writes in the book. “In fact, there is a strong incentive to fill these units of time with as much work as possible.” But these time containers don’t hold up to nuance.
“Contrast them with the idea of timing,” she says. “That’s actually acknowledging that no moment is the same, that there’s a right time [or] better time to do things.” In that understanding, she says, time is a responsive force, one that shifts and scales.
Odell zags between labor histories and modern time management to point out how we came to buy and sell our time with work. Some time is valued more than others, in ways that often break along racial and gendered lines. In a compelling passage, she takes aim at the notion that we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day. Does the working mother, for example, have the same control of her hours when she comes home to a shift of childcare? Does the delivery driver whose drop-offs are timed have the same autonomy over how he spends his hours?
“There’s this pretty clear hierarchy that maps to…whose time is considered the most disposable,” Odell says. “And to me, when you say valuing time, there are obviously things like wages or salaries, but then there’s other things like whose time is considered most important.” Ultimately, time is a reflection of power.
“I would hope that someone would move away from that idea that if you don’t feel like you have control over your time, that’s sort of on you, and you need to be using your time units more efficiently,” she says. But if we reject time as uniform, then, one wonders what it may become.
Seeing time as something softer
By rejecting that time is money, Odell says, we can remake our time in the image of something less individualist and more shared. She points to an example of a working parent who dreams up a support network of other mothers, where they would rotate making dinner for the group one night a week. She underlines the power of unions, which “push back on structures that are coming down on everyone’s time.”
“Look around and see, who can I join up with where we’re thinking about our time [collectively], and how we can shape that? What kind of power can we amass?” Odell says. “I want someone to move beyond the boundaries of the individualist way of thinking about time.”
But perhaps the best expression of this idea is imparted when Odell, once again, returns to nature. In one passage in the book, she visits a septuagenarian friend while she is planting beans in her garden. The friend had gotten the beans some decades prior and shared them with friends; when her supply ran out, friends who had grown and saved the beans gave a portion back to her. The story, Odell writes, germinated into a half-joke among her friends: Time is not money. Time is beans.
“Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago,” Odell writes. “It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game and that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some would be to give it back to me.”
Perhaps, then, as we reexamine our relationship with time and what we want it to be, we can look to the branching of rhizoids and the assembling of sporophytes, the planting and passing of beans, the sweep of seasons and cycles. Coordinated energies thrum beneath the surface of everything. Looking at the expanse of the world, we might recognize our time to be like us: collective and communal, breathing, alive.
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