Everyday Lies

There's no schedule.

“Changing how we think about time is more than a means for confronting personal despair in a catastrophic meantime. It can also be a call to action in a world whose current state can’t be taken for granted any more than its actors can remain unnamed, exploited, or abandoned. I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its every day capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives, nor the life of the planet, is a foregone conclusion.” -Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

Untitled, color pencil on found paper, 2021

Dear reader,

I get anxious on Sundays, though I really enjoy Saturdays. Last Saturday, T. and I went to an estate sale in a shingled bungalow surrounded by coastal pines. It’s something we love doing together, picking through other people’s unwanted things. It was the first truly warm day of spring, and I walked away from the sale with two sheepskin rugs and a plastic book of a six-cassette audio session by Deepak Chopra called The Higher Self.

I didn’t know what to expect from the tapes, with promises like “Rejoin the stream of life through willingness and trust” and “Develop a quiet mind that can experience the truth of this new reality” written on the back of the case. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chopra talking about time.

Lately I’ve noticed time everywhere. In March, I finished Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a manifesto on our finitude and subsequent relationship to the concept of time, and how we decide to attach ourselves to it or not. I’m currently reading Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time. And now, I’m also listening to Chopra wax poetic about quantum physics and the time-space continuum whenever I leave the ranch.

I finished the first side of the first tape, and so far I’ve gathered that Chopra wanted to get one thing through the listeners head: that time is not real. It is a construct; it’s made up. But Chopra reminds us that even empty fabrications have control, and for the time being, time is still our master. “Time is a net,” Chopra explains, “and we're all caught in it.” The good thing about nets is that they have holes. I’ve been trying to find one to slip through.

I don’t get the feeling that people are excited or feel expansive about time. It seems that most of us feel pinched around how much time we have, how to “earn” it, and how to “spend” it. Chopra argues that our modern understanding of and relationship to time causes us to age our own bodies. The more we let the given standard of time control how we feel about our lives, the more stressed we generally become. When we let time dictate how we move through the world, we pitch ourselves against something bigger than us that isn't actually real, often creating anxiety and even a sense of victimhood.

But how much of a choice in the matter do we really have? In Saving Time, Odell is quick to suggest that most people see time as money not because they want to, but because they have to. She writes, “This modern view of time can’t be extricated from the wage relationship. The necessity of selling your time, which as common and unquestionable as it seems now, is as historically specific as any other method of valuing work and existence.”¹

When I say I don’t like Sundays, I mean I really get the “Sunday Scaries”. Though I try to hide them, they manifest in a myriad of ways, including but not limited to: depression, fatigue, relationship anxiety, hyper-sensitivity, and irritability. I really want to snap out of it. I don’t want to feel powerless over Sundays anymore. And I’m definitely not trying to speed up the aging process.

In theory, I understand that our dogma of clock and calendar time is contrived. Sunday is not real. Sunday is just a word that was given to a cycle of measured units that are also not real. Monday is not real, and so forth. But just because I see through the facade, doesn't mean I am spared of its illusions, especially considering that the entire world more or less operates under the belief that Sunday, and all of the other days of the week, are very real.

I get it. Time serves a purpose. If I want to do something with another human being, it's helpful if we have a shared idea of when to come together within a cycle of measured units, so that we arrive in the same place at the same measured unit. But time is more insidious than being just a simple planning device. Odell writes,

“It was European commercial activity and colonialism that occasioned our current system for measuring and keeping time, and with it, the valuing of time as interchangeable stuff that can be stacked up, traded, and moved around. The origins of the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet are inseparable from the history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth, or of labor time from people.”²

It feels like everything I need to do in order to keep myself alive runs on some form of extraction, production, and commodification, and all of it is measured in units of time. My life choices are weighed against each other using a formula of time and the arbitrary value that has been designated to it by men who came before me.

Whether I want to admit it or not, my personal values are unfortunately determined by this fiscal value. And thus, the barrier to entry for wholeness, and my tendency towards sharing, remains unsustainable at best, and unachievable at worst, even for someone as privileged as I am.

---

Sunday’s feel like loss; I often grieve at sundown. I’ve been reflecting on what my resistance is really about, because my aversion to Sundays doesn’t really hold up. I not only love my job, but I also don't keep a Monday through Friday schedule. As an artist and a writer, I allow myself to work at any given time, in sporadic bursts. I stop when there’s nothing there or when something else needs my attention. My work is rarely off limits because my work is creativity, a mystery I am uninterested in learning how to schedule. So why the Sunday malaise?

I’ve been conditioned by school calendars and the labor economy to associate Sundays with the end of something. Sundays are the last day before the stretch of days where I’ve learned I must earn my keep and prove myself. For many people, Sunday is the end of “free time” and the beginning of a period in which we sacrifice full agency and autonomy over how our minutes are spent in order to earn capital. We are lucky if we enjoy the way we give our minutes away during this cycle, but for many of us, the pursuits are a slog. For this reason, Sundays can also breed a sense of dread.

“The wage relationship,” Odell writes, “reflects those same patterns of empowerment and disempowerment that touch everything else in our lives. Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose? And whose time is considered disposable? These are not individual questions but cultural, historical ones, and there are few ways to liberate your time, or anyone else’s, without considering them.”³

Odell’s questions help me understand that the function of time is to create capital and bring order and control to society, but I’m not sure if they can inch me closer to liberation. Awareness doesn’t mean I can slip through the net of compulsively organizing my life around time. Even if I did find a way to remove myself, how well would I fare?

I may not be able to outsmart the confines of time as we currently accept it, but I can flag that right now, it feels like every “day” is a lie, especially when I notice my irrational relationship to units of Sundays. I can ask myself how much I let time impact my energy and how I walk through life. What activities do I pick up or ignore? How much does time regulate my openness and generosity to others? How big or small does time make me feel? Would my values change if time wasn’t a factor?

I’m not interested in building a new structure of time, as I don’t believe in progress when its modeled after a given framework that utilizes the same tools as the oppressor. As Charles Eisenstein reminds us in his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, “The reason to avoid the master’s tools…is not to distance ourselves from those who wield power and to demonstrate to one and all that we abstain from using the same methods as the oppressors. Rather, it is that these tools are in the end ineffective.”⁴

Instead, I wonder about the possibilities I have yet to consider regarding the ways I can simply be alive and breathing, without thinking about time at all. Would ignoring time create more or less resistance in my life? Outside of calendar time, would it be hard to sustain relationships? Would it be possible to make appointments with specialists to care for my mind and body? Would I be able to feed or secure housing for myself?

I’m curious, without the stress caused by my relationship to time, if my needs would diminish and I might discover that I could take care of myself, no longer requiring the help of specialists to do so. Without measuring my availability against predetermined units of value, what would “availability” even mean? I like to imagine that perhaps my relationships would find a way to blossom in their own way.

My perspective is widening, showing me that it's insignificant what day it is. When it feels significant, I remind myself that I’m the one attributing significance to it. I question whose ideas I’ve pulled from in order to enforce the meaning of time, and why they were engineered in the first place.

My desire is for every day to be exactly what it is, which is nothing at all and a complete awe-inducing miracle at the same time. I want to live my life according to the reality of the cosmos as we understand it so far, and nothing more. I want to feel that I am simply awake on a giant ball, floating around in space. As the ball turns, the sun comes up and then it goes down. No names, no units, no seconds, no minutes. I don’t want to freak out on Sundays just because I was brainwashed.

Perhaps the next time I lose myself over what day it is, I can zoom out and remember that though the structures that contain us are loaded, they were at one point merely conceptual. I love the following passage from Odell’s book, where she illustrates the impracticality and worthlessness that people used to attribute to clocks:

“For most of human history, there has been no need to divide the day into equal, numerical units, much less to know the hour at any particular moment. For example, when in the 16th Century, an Italian Jesuit brought mechanical clocks to China, which had a long tradition of astronomical clocks driven by water, but did not organize life or work around anything more numerically specific than calendar dates, they were not embraced. Even in the 18th century, a Chinese reference book called western clocks “simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses, objects that fulfilled no basic needs.””⁵

We might find ourselves in the orbit of time or encircled by it, but can we soften even 1% towards an alternative? At family meeting tonight, Lucia talked about the expansiveness possible when we recognize the fragility of things, instead of the worry or fear we usually attribute to such realizations. Changes are happening where I live at Rainbow Creek, as one of our landmates is moving to Colorado for a job opportunity. This landmate is a pillar of our community; none of us can imagine life here without her.

For Lucia, walls she thought were made out of concrete, impenetrable and unchanging, have revealed themselves to be more like curtains, or even paper thin. We never thought that Haley would leave, but now we understand that of course Haley was always going to leave. The precarity of our relationships to one another as landmates in this time and place feels immobilizing, and yet we emerge hopeful. It is painful to witness change and behold transformation, but how sure can we be that what’s on the other side of it isn’t any good?

Odell writes, “In any moment we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the sight of unpredictability and potential, rather than inevitability and helplessness.”⁶

At first, when truths are revealed that shift our perspective or confidence in something, it can feel like a shock. For example, we might not like to consider that time, a mechanism of control that enslaves us and contributes to the way we monetize our lives and worth as human beings is, like most oppressive structures, a construct of the imagination. Clearly it frustrates me that something so transparent wields so much power; time rules everything around me.

And yet the very transparent nature of time is what gives me hope that we might slowly find ourselves outside of it, even just a little bit. We can look behind the curtain, and realize that it was just a man who invented the clock, and that there’s no reason to let one tell the story of our lives. Just now while finishing this essay, the following conversation transpired between T. and I:

Love,

Anna

1

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Random House, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023.

2

Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

3

Odell, Saving Time.

4

Eisenstein, Charles. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. North Atlantic Books, 2013.

5

Odell, Saving Time.

6

Odell, Saving Time.