Jenny Odell – författare

After the American presidental election of 2016, Jenny Odell felt so overstimunated and disoriented by information, misinformation, and the expressions of others, that reality itself seemed to slip away. How To Do Nothing is her action plan for resistance. Drawing on the ethos of tech culture, a background in the arts, and personal storytelling, Jenny Odell makes a powerful argument for refusal: refusal to believe that our lives are instruments to be optimised. She argues that nothing can be quite so radical as doing... nothing.

After the American presidental election of 2016, Jenny Odell felt so overstimunated and disoriented by information, misinformation, and the expressions of others, that reality itself seemed to slip away. How To Do Nothing is her action plan for resistance. Drawing on the ethos of tech culture, a background in the arts, and personal storytelling, Jenny Odell makes a powerful argument for refusal: refusal to believe that our lives are instruments to be optimised. She argues that nothing can be quite so radical as doing... nothing.

We're living on the wrong clock. Now is our moment to rethink.In this provocative follow-up to How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell challenges our cultural obsession with productivity. Drawing on philosophy, ecology and art, Saving Time argues that time is not money – it’s life itself.Odell explores how the ‘clock of capitalism’ dictates our days and disconnects us from natural rhythms, proposing instead a more humane, ecological understanding of time rooted in seasons, community and care. This Sunday Times-bestselling thinker offers both critique and comfort, inviting readers to pause, breathe and imagine freer ways of living.‘To read it is … to experience how freedom might feel’ Oliver Burkeman‘Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing’ Esquire

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that ‘time is money.’ . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing.”—Esquire “One of the most important books I’ve read in my life.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense WorldA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Public Library, Electric LitIn her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time?In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.

We all live in a state of tension due to the large number of appointments and the lack of time available, we run in different directions between meetings, interviews and rides that must be accomplished. When was the last time I sat down to do nothing? When was the last time I felt relaxed and inner calm

We're living on the wrong clock. Now is our moment to rethink.In this provocative follow-up to How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell challenges our cultural obsession with productivity. Drawing on philosophy, ecology and art, Saving Time argues that time is not money – it’s life itself.Odell explores how the ‘clock of capitalism’ dictates our days and disconnects us from natural rhythms, proposing instead a more humane, ecological understanding of time rooted in seasons, community and care. This Sunday Times-bestselling thinker offers both critique and comfort, inviting readers to pause, breathe and imagine freer ways of living.‘To read it is … to experience how freedom might feel’ Oliver Burkeman‘Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing’ Esquire