Michael: The phrase 'time is money' is probably the most destructive idea we've ever collectively agreed on. It's not a timeless truth; it's a piece of 18th-century marketing that’s now hardwired into our anxiety, our jobs, and even how we see the future. Kevin: That’s so true. It feels like this fundamental law of the universe, like gravity. But when you say it’s just marketing, it suddenly sounds so… cheap. And yet, it runs our lives. We feel guilty for resting, we optimize our hobbies, we schedule our kids’ playtime down to the minute. It’s exhausting. Michael: It is. And that's the central nerve that Jenny Odell exposes in her incredible book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Kevin: Right, this is the author who wrote How to Do Nothing, which was a huge hit. What's fascinating is that she's not a productivity guru or a historian; she's a multidisciplinary artist. That perspective, looking at time with an artist's eye, changes everything. Michael: Exactly. She wrote this book as a direct response to the overwhelming despair so many feel, especially about climate change. It's not a time management guide; it's what she calls a 'panoramic assault on nihilism,' and it's a New York Times Bestseller for a reason. She’s trying to give us a new language to talk about time itself. Kevin: An assault on nihilism. I like that. So where does she start? How do you even begin to dismantle an idea as big as 'time is money'? Michael: Well, you start by showing that it’s not a natural law at all. It was built. This idea of time as a fungible, sellable, perfectly divisible thing is surprisingly new, and it was designed for a very specific purpose.

Kevin: Okay, so if it's not natural, where did it come from? I assume people have always had deadlines and seasons to follow. Farmers had to plant and harvest. What’s so different about our clock-based world? Michael: The difference is the abstraction and the control. Odell kicks off with a perfect, almost comical story from 1998. The Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics—we're talking about top-tier scientists exploring the fundamental nature of the universe—decided to install a time-clock system. Researchers had to clock in and clock out. Kevin: Hold on. You’re telling me they tried to make particle physicists punch a timecard? That’s insane! You can't schedule a 'eureka' moment for 2:15 PM. "Sorry, universe, gotta clock out for lunch, can you hold that groundbreaking discovery?" Michael: Precisely! The global scientific community was outraged. The former director of the American Institute of Physics wrote a letter saying, "Good science can’t be measured by the clock." And that’s the core of it. Odell introduces the Ancient Greek concepts of chronos and kairos. Chronos is the time we know: linear, quantitative, measurable seconds, minutes, hours. It’s the clock on the wall. Kevin: The one that gives me anxiety every Monday morning. Got it. Michael: But kairos is different. It’s qualitative time. It’s the opportune moment, the right time, the time of inspiration, or grief, or connection. It’s the time that a scientist needs for a breakthrough, or an artist needs for inspiration, or that we need to heal from a loss. You can’t put kairos on a timesheet. The physicists were living in kairos, but the administration was trying to force them into chronos. Kevin: That makes so much sense. And it feels like our entire modern work culture is a war on kairos. Everything has to fit into the neat little boxes of chronos. So where did this obsession with chronos come from? Michael: It was built, piece by piece, to serve industry and empire. Odell traces it back to the monasteries, but it really took off with industrial capitalism. Think of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, frantically tightening bolts on an assembly line that just keeps speeding up. His body is forced to sync with the machine's time, not his own. Kevin: Right, he becomes a cog in the clock, literally. Michael: And it gets darker. Odell shows how these time-control techniques were perfected in even more brutal systems. On 18th-century slave plantations, owners used detailed accounting logs to calculate the maximum amount of work an enslaved person could do in a day. They treated human lives as a pool of "labor days" to be extracted, just like a natural resource. Kevin: Wow. So the roots of our modern Outlook calendar are in something that horrific. That’s a chilling thought. Michael: It is. And it was also a tool of colonialism. Missionaries and colonial officials went to places like Africa and Australia and saw cultures that lived by ecological time—the rhythm of seasons, tides, and social events. They viewed this as "primitive" and actively sought to impose Western clock time to "civilize" them, which really meant making them available for regimented labor. Historian Giordano Nanni called it one of the most significant manifestations of "Europe’s universalizing will." Kevin: So it’s a form of control. If I can control your clock, I can control your life. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about power. Michael: Exactly. And that brings us to the lie we're all sold today. If the system is built on this flawed, controlling idea of time, what's the modern solution we're always given? Kevin: Oh, I know this one. "Just manage your time better!" You know, buy a planner, download an app, wake up at 4 AM. The whole 'Beyoncé has the same 24 hours as you' guilt trip. Michael: And that's precisely the myth Odell is determined to bust.

Kevin: I have to say, that "same 24 hours" line has always felt like a personal attack. It completely ignores the reality of most people's lives. It’s easy to say when you have a team of assistants managing your schedule. Michael: Odell argues it's not just unhelpful, it's a dangerous fiction that hides a deeper, political reality. To explain this, she uses this brilliant, slightly edgy metaphor: the card game "Asshole." Kevin: I think I played a version of this in college! Isn't that the one where the winner becomes the 'President' and the loser is the... well, the 'Asshole'? Michael: That's the one. And the rules are what make it a perfect metaphor for structural inequality. After the first round, the winner—the President—gets to take the Asshole's two best cards and give them back two of their worst cards. The Vice President and Vice Asshole trade one card. Kevin: Right! So before the next round even starts, the game is already rigged. The President is almost guaranteed to win again, and the Asshole is stuck with a terrible hand. It's incredibly hard to climb out of that hole. Michael: Exactly. And Odell says this is what our society is like with time. The self-help industry tells us to just "play our cards right." But it ignores that some people are systemically forced to give away their best cards—their time, their energy, their focus—before they even get to play. Kevin: That’s such a powerful way to put it. It’s not about playing your hand; it’s about the rules of the game itself. Can you give an example of who is forced to give away their "best cards"? Michael: Absolutely. Think about caregivers, who are disproportionately women. Their time is constantly interrupted and dictated by the needs of others. It's not their own. Odell cites studies showing that in the workplace, both men and women expect women to say "yes" to requests more often. Men in a group will wait longer to volunteer for a task if a woman is present, assuming she’ll do it. Kevin: So women are expected to give up their time card. What about in other areas? Michael: Think about low-wage workers in the gig economy. Their lives are ruled by an algorithm. Emily Guendelsberger, in her book On the Clock, described walking up to sixteen miles a day in an Amazon warehouse, with every second of her bathroom breaks tracked. Her time isn't a resource she manages; it's a commodity that is relentlessly extracted from her. The idea that she has the "same 24 hours" as Jeff Bezos is a cruel joke. Kevin: It's the difference between having a schedule and being scheduled. One is a tool for freedom, the other is a tool for control. Michael: That's a perfect way to phrase it. So this whole culture of self-optimization, the "productivity bros" waking up at 3:57 AM to "crush their goals," is built on this illusion of a level playing field. It turns a systemic problem—the unequal distribution of temporal power—into a personal failing. You're not burnt out because the system is exploitative; you're burnt out because you didn't try the right morning routine. Kevin: It’s a trap. It makes you focus on optimizing your own little cage instead of questioning why you're in a cage to begin with. So if individual time management is a dead end, what's the alternative? How do we get out of the cage? Michael: This is where the book becomes so hopeful. After deconstructing the problem, Odell offers a way out. It’s not about finding a better system to manage the clock; it’s about finding life beyond the clock.

Kevin: Okay, I'm ready for some hope. 'Life beyond the clock' sounds great, but it also sounds a bit abstract. What does that actually mean? Michael: It means shifting our core metaphor for time. If time isn't money to be saved, spent, and hoarded, what is it? And Odell finds the answer in a beautiful, personal story about her friend's garden. Kevin: I like where this is going. Less economics, more nature. Michael: Exactly. She's visiting her friend, who gives her some scarlet runner beans. The friend explains that these beans are descended from beans she got twenty years ago. Every year, she shares them, people grow them, save some of the new beans, and give them back. The supply isn't finite; it’s regenerative. Kevin: Huh. So the beans aren't a resource you 'spend.' They're something you cultivate and that creates more of itself. Michael: Precisely. And then the friend gives her some lettuce, explaining she has to pick the outer leaves so the inner leaves will keep growing. Giving the lettuce away is what allows the plant to produce more. This is a complete revelation for Odell. She realizes her mind is so broken by transactional thinking that she assumed giving lettuce away meant her friend would have less. Kevin: Wow. I can feel that. My brain would do the exact same thing. It’s a zero-sum mindset. If I give you an hour of my time, I've lost an hour. Michael: But what if that's not true? This experience leads Odell and her friends to create a new mantra, an inside joke that becomes the heart of the book's solution. She says: "Time is not money. Time is beans." Kevin: Time is beans. I love that. It’s quirky, but it’s so profound. What does it mean to them? Michael: It means everything the money metaphor isn't. It means you can take time and give time, but you can also plant time and grow more of it. It means your time grows out of someone else's time, from something planted long ago. It means time is not the currency of a zero-sum game. Sometimes, the best way for me to get more time is to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some is to give it back to me. Kevin: That’s a powerful shift. It moves from scarcity to abundance, from transaction to relationship, from individual hoarding to collective cultivation. So what does 'gardening time' look like in practice? Michael: It means paying attention to the other clocks that are always running. The ecological clock of a plant growing, the geological clock of a coastline changing, the communal clock of a neighborhood gathering. It means finding and protecting what Odell, borrowing from others, calls "temporal commons"—shared rhythms like a weekly potluck, a city's siesta, or even the "quiet time" experiment at that software company, where people agree to protect a certain kind of time together. Kevin: So it’s about recognizing and stewarding all these different, overlapping rhythms of life, instead of letting the single, monotonous rhythm of the factory clock drown everything else out. Michael: You've got it. It's about unfreezing our perception. Seeing a tree not as a static object, but as the ongoing materialization of time itself. It’s about recognizing the agency in the world around us—that the moss, the birds, the rivers have their own temporalities that we can learn from. It’s a much richer, more alive, and ultimately more human way to exist.

Kevin: So, when you put it all together, it’s a pretty radical journey. We start with the clock as a tool of industrial control, see how the self-help industry sells us a lie to keep us running on that clock, and then we land in a garden, holding a handful of beans. Michael: That's a perfect summary. Odell shows us that our feeling of being "out of time" isn't a personal failure; it's the logical outcome of a system designed to devalue life in favor of profit. The constant pressure, the climate dread, the burnout—they are all connected to this impoverished, linear, and ultimately inhuman way of measuring our existence. Kevin: And the solution isn't a new app or a better calendar. It’s a change of heart, a change of metaphor. Moving from the cold, hard logic of money to the living, breathing logic of a garden. Michael: Exactly. It's about reclaiming the idea that our time has a quality, a texture, a purpose that can't be quantified. It's about finding the kairos in the midst of chronos. And that's not just a nice thought; Odell argues it's essential for our survival. To face the challenges ahead, we need the kind of time that allows for creativity, for solidarity, for care, for grief, and for hope. We need the time that a garden gives, not the time a factory takes. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what 'beans' are we planting with our time, and what could we be growing together if we started sharing them? Michael: That's the perfect question. And it’s a beautiful place to leave it. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What's one 'bean' of time you'd like to plant this week? Let us know on our social channels. It could be anything from five minutes of watching the clouds to an hour of uninterrupted conversation with a friend. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.