Time is Beans

In Saving Time, Jenny Odell tells the story of a gardener who collects and trades bean seeds.  She finds herself captured in standard ways of thinking about exchange and sharing.

There had been a give-and-take between her and her friends, it was not exactly transactional-she wasn't taking back the things she had given them, though the two were certainly related.

She moved on to some lettuce beds, telling me I should take some lettuce. I thought she was just being polite, but she told me that she actually needed to get rid of the outside leaves so that the inside leaves would keep growing, before the plant reached maturity. She was constantly giving bags of lettuce to people, she said. This simple gesture, and the story of the beans, made me realize how broken my mental mechanisms were for thinking about anything beyond the transactional exchange. In part, this is because I've never lived anywhere I could garden. I'd sort of forgotten that a plant keeps growing, assuming that more lettuce leaves for me would mean fewer lettuce leaves for her.

But that wasn't the only thing I'd forgotten. Philosopher Ivan Illich worried in 1978 that "innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed," leaving a barren social landscape of "huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both."

As I told more friends about this story, it became an inside joke, a new familect: Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else's time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game and that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some would be to it back to me. If time was not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world.  (224-225)