What If Instead of Trying to Manage Your Time, You Set It Free?

The cultural critic Jenny Odell sees a way out of our obsession with personal efficiency.

[Meaning of life?]

The closest thing that I have to an answer is that I want to be in contact with things, people, contexts that make me feel alive. I have a specific definition of alive, which is I want to feel like I am being changed. Someone who's completely habitual, is set in their ways of thinking and doing, that type of person is liable to see days in a calendar as being pieces of material that you use to achieve your goals. There's all kinds of degrees between that and someone who's so completely open to every moment that they're dysfunctional or something, but I want to live closer to that second pole. I think about things that are enlivening to me, and they tend to be encounters, conversations — that "My Dinner With Andre" [The director Louis Malle's 1981 cult classic film, which consists almost entirely of a conversation between the theater director Andre Gregory and the actor-playwright Wallace Shawn. "Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans," Gregory says at one point. "Which in themselves are not reality."] type of conversation where you and your conversation partner are changed by the end, you've covered new ground, you are both now somewhere else. But it's also encounters with nonhuman life that is growing and changing, and realizing that I am also changing and evolving. To me those are the reminders that, yeah, I'm alive, today is not the same as yesterday, I will be different in the future, therefore I have a reason to live, which is to find out what that change is going to be.

That's a pretty good on-the-spot answer for "tell me the meaning of life." [Laughs.] Well, it's what's working for now.

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