A thick haze of ominous red smoke covered the expanse of sky at a beach near Pescadero, California. It was the late summer of 2020, and Governor Gavin Newsom had just declared a state of emergency due to the concerning California wildfire season. Nearly 4.5 million acres of the state’s land went up in flames in what became the first-ever classified “giga-fire.” Afterwards the air was so toxic that residents had to check the quality before confirming it was safe to leave their homes, making the depressing isolation of pandemic times somehow even more unbearable.
On this particular beach, on this particular day, sat Jenny Odell, best-selling author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. She was doing what she does best: nothing—or more accurately, sitting, observing, noticing the orange-y poison air that hung over the landscape like an unwelcome omen. She considered the state of the world: the innumerable climate crises, disappointing political leadership, growing socioeconomic chasms under neoliberal capitalism, enduring racial violence, white collar workers diametrically opposed to pushes for unionized workplaces. The list goes on. With a growing pit in her stomach, Jenny thought: Earth is a heartbreaking place.
“I’m trying to figure out a way to exist in the world without hardening over, without becoming cynical, without becoming nihilist,” She tells me today over video chat, crispy brown leaves and feather plumages fastened to her office wall. “Because that is one possible response as a survival mechanism.” Several disasters cycled through the news media around our time of speaking in late March—environmental carnage due to corporate railway neglect, yet another school shooting, the war in Ukraine, a former president’s looming indictment. But on that fateful beach day, she accepted that for her, nihilism will never be fulfilling. “It felt very deadening,” Jenny says, and perhaps more importantly: “I felt like I was giving up before I had to. I had this moment of exasperation with myself where I was like, you’re either in or you’re out. I either had to fully try or fully give up,” Jenny explains.
It was this realization, the choosing to “fully try,” that solidified the message of her newest work, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Building on concepts from her first release, Jenny explores time in a world rife with crisis and doubt, tackling hefty conflicts like the capitalist construction of numerical time and the systemic erasure of time’s historical nuance. “Sometimes the best muse is the thing you’re so afraid of you cannot speak it. For me, that is nihilism,” she writes in the introduction. So she asks readers, and by proxy, herself: How do you combat nihilism in a world that makes such a strong case for it? And what do we do with the time we have left?
She wants her book to be a comfort, but also, a force that unsticks you from the inhumane mouse trap of hopelessness. “I often think of it as being similar to getting your appetite back after you’re sick. I’m trying to move someone out of a state of inertia,” Jenny says. “I want to reawaken people’s appetite for thinking about the future and what they can do for it.” This mission, however, is not an easy feat. It feels like so many people are buying into the determinist belief that it is inevitable for the planet to suffer. In the book, Jenny refers to this mindset “declinism, the belief that a once-stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom.”
Jenny notes she has witnessed such despair while teaching in her Stanford classroom, where students make end times and mass extinction art as if they are depicting a necessary future. This outlook exists in tandem with a slew of cultural frustrations that characterise daily life for many today: “having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing another, having to build yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, having to ignore everything and everyone whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore,” Jenny writes. None of this has to be our reality—but we are taught that to hope for anything otherwise is futile, she explains.
And while hopelessness can feel like slipping under a familiar weighted blanket, the comfort of the devil you know, Jenny argues that declinism is dangerous, making us look at the future with the “grim amorality” of a video game. Thus, this book is her “assault on nihilism,” she says. And while sections may read dense or tedious, it’s likely because this is the sheer volume of information and perspective necessary for Jenny to execute her attack. Her first battle is knowing her enemy: What is determinism but a “close relative of nostalgia,” our desire to see the future as atemporal and static? This assessment can feel more digestible, at times, than a world malleable and capable of change—if we execute deliberate effort and activism, riding the wave of successes and failures as we do so.
For some, making a change in the world may start with “dialling down personal ambition” in the traditional sense, and perhaps reframing ambition altogether. “An enthusiastic ladder climber is, in another sense, unambitious,” Jenny writes, invoking women’s movement and anti-racist activist Selma James. Rather, it is far more ambitious to fight for all to inhabit a free, liveable world. And instead of clawing for a longer, more productive life, Jenny echoes the argument of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, calling for people to “be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track,” that hoards natural resources, wealth, and time for a privileged few.
Jenny’s research is thorough in its inclusion of not only philosophers and activists, but also decades-old union organising periodicals, historically-erased time practices of indigenous peoples, local community infrastructure meeting minutes, and more. Her analysis is also interspersed with gorgeous descriptions of a Bay Area road trip, a Zelda Breath of the Wild-inspired story within a story you are regularly dropped in and pulled out of as you read. It’s a real-time practice in slowing down time or rethinking how we experience it. However, despite her breadth of archival knowledge and a propensity for synthesising and applying it, Jenny is clear in stating that this book isn’t necessarily a definitive answer to questions of measuring our time and how to use it wisely, but rather a philosophical and history-grounded collection of her findings on the matter. “This can be frustrating for some people, but I see it more as that I respect my reader enough to be in those questions with me,” she says.
“Every piece of writing is a time capsule,” she writes at the end of the book. “It assembles fragments of its own world and sends them onward to a reader who exists in a different one, not just in space but also in time.” To write, she asserts, is an exercise in hope. “Even writing privately in a journal presupposes a future self who will be reading it—and a future at all.” This book, it seems, is Jenny’s attempt at shaking our shoulders, waking us up, thrusting us into a future where, thank god, we have one.