Timenergy

Why You Have No Time or Energy

De: David McKerracher, Slavoj Žižek

Narrado por: Nance

Why are we so tired all the time? Why do our attempts to change habits and accomplish goals continuously fall apart? Why is everyone so anxious, stressed, and lonely? We normally don’t have any time, but when we finally do, we lack energy. On those rare occasions when we have energy outside of work, it is restless and difficult to harness towards meaningful goals. Starting from the realization that meaningful time is worthless without energy, the concept of “timenergy” points to something we all lack: large energy-infused blocks of repeatable time throughout the week. TIMENERGY: Why You Have No Time or Energy is a critique of our job-centric society and the schooling system that assumes we are nothing more than workers, professionals, or managers. This book challenges all political representatives, professors, and media figures to think deeper about the daily lives and needs of working people.

ABOUT AUTHOR: David McKerracher (M.A. in critical theory and B.A. in philosophy) is the sole founder and organizer of Theory Underground, an independent philosophy lecture course platform, publishing house, and social media APP. He is the author of Waypoint, and the co-editor of Underground Theory. Born in the city but raised on a homestead in the woods, McKerracher has always been an outsider looking in, trying to understand himself and the world. Loves cats, coffee, and timenergy!"

©2024 David McKerracher (P)2024 David McKerracher

Philosophy for dirty hands and clean consciences

Nobody I’ve ever worked with wants to listen to a punchable face say million-dollar words.

McKerracher insists at the start of this book that, in terms of style, “this work is neither academic nor popular.” By and large, I agree.

There is enough meat for the reader who considers themself seriously invested in philosophy to get a sense of the author’s core theme. At the same time, he obviously went to great lengths writing in a more conversational, less scholarly tone. Assuming he hopes that his primary audience will be workers–more likely than not listening to this book–that tone is incredibly important. As I write this in the year of our Bezos 2024, the fact I began this review with has been well and truly demonstrated by way of popular vote.

There are a large group of Americans who simply refuse to understand that their style of communication is why they fail in their political projects. As Benjamin Studebaker wrote in The Way is Shut, “the language is so important to their sense of self that political defeat is preferable to abandoning it.” There’s a reasonable logic to this, after all they spent years of their lives (and will probably spend decades more) paying for that language.

Then again, just like them, McKerracher took on debt and great amounts of academic effort developing that very language and nevertheless shows the courage and good-sense to drop it in favor of actually speaking. He has taken Ivan Illich to heart and separated his academic “fluency with the ability to say something new.”

There are a number of conclusions on which I differ with McKerracher, and I imagine many readers will find their own points of controversy in this work. In a text like this, that is an inevitable situation. This isn’t merely content. McKerracher isn’t simply pandering to an already-agreeable audience. Nor is he doing the scholarly-shuffle, appealing in bad-faith to the widest possible group by engaging with only those voices which have already proven socially acceptable and, of course, marketable.

His central theme, a concept he calls Timenergy, is coherent and developed; albeit not to the degree that I’d feel comfortable writing any kind of serious critique. That’s not a failing of the text, but a measure of respect in both directions. This isn’t a theoretical text, but a manifesto of sorts. He promises a more technical work in the future and I think it’s only fair to his theory and my own timenergy to wait for that before I have much else to say about it specifically.

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Side note: Nance’s voice makes my pants tight.

Nietzsche b**** slaps Bourdieu

I listened to this and thought I would hate it, because I hate listening to myself, but I was pleasantly surprised that the words themselves came through. This is one of my favorite books, for various reasons, but probably front and center I'd want to say it's because it's so accessible to the people in my life who matter most, the people who aren't obsessives like me and tend to believe that they are "too stupid" to read important books (they aren't, and this book gets into that!). I hope a whole bunch of people find this work and read it, or listen to it, or both, and they embark on their own journeys, or continue ones already started, into this whole examined life thing.