Leisure submitted to metrics becomes impossible to justify as worthless

Evidence

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 86

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘cruel confluence’ — simultaneous loss of noncommercial space and of noncommercial time — is central to the book’s core claim; dense and stays with you.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier soundscape literature on quantified noise exposure: both are metric-driven colonization of a felt dimension. — connects to: Quantitative inventories miss the lived quality that makes a place meaningful — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 258