I Had the Time of My Life, and I Owe it All to You
Industrial capitalism caused many ruptures. One of the most profound was the change to our sense of time. Seasonal time, festival time, cosmological time, spiritual time all became subservient to work-time and the clock of labor and productivity. The economics of capitalist time penetrate our psyches, as people strive for maximal efficiency. Productivity apps like Todoist, TickTick, and Habitica “gamify” our to-do lists, and Fitbit allows us to “close the circle” on our daily activity goals. In this way, capitalist time permeates most of our waking hours, while sleep tracking apps monitor us even at night. These works illustrate such claustrophobic aspects of time, while also exploring avenues for breaking free of these restrictions to access “deep” time.