Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. 

If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to? It would seem to make sense to look in the first section, which is more directly concerned with everyday life and practical reality. Ironically, there never seems to be enough time to do something as idle as contemplate the very nature of time. But what I want to suggest is that some of the answers we might seek in the first section live in the second. That’s because, without exploring the social and material roots of the idea that “time is money,” we risk entrenching a language about time that is itself part of the problem.

Consider the difference between work-life balance and the notion of leisure outlined by the German-Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his 1948 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. In work, he writes, time is horizontal, a pattern of forward-leaning labour time punctuated by little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work.