Why We Never Have Enough Time
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
From what I understand, the article begins by explaining that the author initially wrote "How to Do Nothing", and book critics said the suggestions within it were unrealistic due to how our society is organized: Only those with money privilege can spend time "present in mountain cabins, to “witness” while spending afternoons in a rose garden, to “prefer not to” during summers off from teaching at Stanford!"
That's a fair enough point from the critics though, most of us have to work and a lot of us don't get fair wages to comfortably screw-off and do whatever (ie service industry workers, etc).
So a new book is written called "Saving Time" to address those points from the critics, but can anyone help me understand it?
> Very often, problems of style and pacing are actually problems of thinking, and here is where one difficulty of “Saving Time” lies. Odell is working with ideas that demand careful, persuasive articulation: the interrelation of so many injustices, how to translate grief into language and language into action.
It goes to give an example of wikipedia being a blob of regurgitated general information with no originality. But Wikipedia is a great time saver, it lets us loosely explore topics we ourselves are not experts in (and will never be experts in due to the limits of our personal time), and conveys that information in a way any layman can understand. What child learned math by first looking at a textbook of equations and proofs and said that's cool? We all started with, "If you have 2 balls and I take away 1 ball, how many balls do you have left?".
> In truth, every pleasure worth its name—music, sex, drugs, novel-reading—derives its particular rush from how it alters our sense of time, how it crumples it up or extends it into something long, lush, and strange.
> My sculptures are in a way analogous to time. The intrinsic nature of what they are made of is emerging: chemical changes in the paint on Gloucester and a characteristic of the poplar wood of which Valley Forge was constructed.
That's true, time is elastic when viewed subjectively. When we enjoy a hobby, time flies. But when doing a mundane task, time slows. Time can also be represented as an object too, time can feel long when looking and thinking about an 18th century painter painting the painting we now see in a museum.
But time is also limited for each of us, because the universal clock is ticking no matter how we're individually perceiving time: we're all gonna die one day. So even if time is elastic, time is still a static measure when measured against everyone in the world. So even if the author gives us mindhacks to help us save time by viewing time in a healthier way individually, it's still a static meter that's ticking. Time saved or time wasted, it's a unit of time that passed.
> Our struggle to behave responsibly and sanely with time—often labelled “distraction”—isn’t merely a matter of being manipulated. “We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly
But the book critics had a valid point: we don't control our time because we have to work. We spend most of our adult lives working, and if we stop, our livelihoods are threatened. With that context, how does one responsibly stay sane without distractions? We're literally locked into working and cannot stop, and the breaks we get is interspersed by a netflix show here and there. People in Japan, working insane hours for insane bosses, having no time for family resulting in nationwide low birthrates, how does time work for them within the author's framework? I still don't know what the author's framework even is at this paragraph in the article.
Relating distractions back to the article earlier stating that "problems of style and pacing are actually problems of thinking" (and Wikipedia), that's also how people get interested in subjects they later become experts in. Easy-to-Understand mediums like movies have inspired new generations of writers and actors, games like Minecraft can excite a child to become interested in game engines and ultimately gamedev or programming as a career. So many positive things can come from the cultural arts, the same arts that are designed to distract us.
The article ends with:
> The limits of Odell’s book, in turn, arise from a catechistic indexing of abstract forces, a harried sprint through familiar analyses that scarcely accommodates the waywardness of specific human experience. No moss grows under her feet, she can assure herself. But a book that spent less of its time reprising our era’s commonplaces would have made better use of ours.
But I'm not sure what the "catechistic indexing of abstract forces" are still, or how they relate to our modern living. And ultimately, how any of what was written answers the article's actual title: "Why We Never Have Enough Time"? I just ended up with so many confusing points at the end!
For instance, when the reviewer references Wikipedia, they are not making a criticism of Wikipedia's usefulness -- they are criticizing Odell's summary of other writers' ideas as being as shallowly researched as summarizing their ideas off of Wikipedia. When the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought-out lines on the page. If you read the review from the perspective of this adversarial framing, you could imagine the reviewer's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time."
Catechesis is a term often associated with the the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic ideological beliefs. This insruction is backed by a huge and famously boring book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" uses the connotation of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's post-structuralist rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the reviewer assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for a basic introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].
The Catechism is perhaps "famously" boring because of the number of people who identify as (culturally) "catholic", probably only go to Mass on Sundays because their grandmothers told them they have to and their mothers will refuse to talk to them at Sunday lunch if they don't; people who in some ways want some of the purported "privileges" of belonging to the faith (access to schools in the UK, for example) without actually being actively engaged or interested in the faith itself. To such people, occasionally being forced to plod through parts of the Catechism while jumping through various hoops in order to maintain membership, is what creates the reputation referenced here.
But to someone actually interested in the faith, what the Church teaches and why, this book is of course a fascinating (and very accessible) read. Dogmas (and doctrines) are not blindly asserted, but justified by reference to both scripture and a tradition of philosophy stretching back thousands of years. It's a nerdy read, and theology nerds will certainly get a kick out of it, but you don't need a degree in the subject to make sense of the contents.