TIMENERGY: Exhaustion is the spirit of our age

Section 1 of TIMENERGY: Why You Have No Time or Energy

We’re working harder than ever. Even when it comes to “taking a break” we work harder than ever. How much stress goes into trying to enjoy some leisure time? Recent events have made it obvious we are incapable of doing so.

Ours is a time of exhaustion. Exhausted time is garbage time. Time-without-energy is worthless when measured by almost any standard of personal value. Fleeting bursts of energy that cannot be reliably harnessed into the sustained development of talents, relationships, and culture are impulses that insult and obstruct our higher aspirations. This theory starts from the fact that time and energy are useless when apart, which indicates that they have a shared basis in something. I call that something timenergy.

We are all deprived of timenergy: Our society revolves around the commodification, or exchange, of “labor power,” which is what timenergy becomes in a world based around jobs and consumerism. Timenergy is existentially prior to the economic divorce and separation of time from energy.

Timenergy is not just time and energy mashed together, because this word represents the phenomenon that exists prior to the compartmentalization of both. Timenergy is energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly sacrifice towards building sustained symbolic and material value for oneself and communities of recognition or care. In other words, timenergy is reliable, reusable, and routinely available large blocks of energy-infused-time throughout the week.

One of my fellow travelers recently pushed back on the idea that “throughout the week” is a part of the definition, arguing that timenergy would also be repeatable time throughout the month, year, and even decades. This is true, but the week-to-two-week span of time is the base unit for repetition. It is what we experience more directly, which is why it gets emphasized. The hardest learning curves posed by almost any worthwhile pursuit have to be conquered in a week or two in order to make a habit out of the practice in question. So timenergy can be talked about “ontologically” (how things fundamentally are) using broader spans of repeatable time, but from the standpoint of a worker, timenergy’s “pragmatic” (use-based) definition puts what matters closest: the week itself.

For most of us the week is the battleground in which we must fight to still have a life outside of work. Without a strong sense for what timenergy is, that “fight” to make and maintain relationships beyond the workplace  happens in the dark. No amount of self-help or business success literature, positive mental attitude, or hustle and grind will succeed in salvaging from work a life worth living without timenergy.  

I’ve worked a lot of jobs at this point. I wrote most of this book during lunch and bathroom breaks at my graveyard shift warehouse job at Amazon, but the experiences that inform this work come from a life spent working dead end jobs in construction (drywall, insulation, foundations, roofs, floors) restaurants (Schlotzsky’s Deli, Pizza Pipeline, Olive Garden), as a gas station clerk, room service at an Inn, multiple failed attempts to be self-employed, and two years doing a graveyard shift at a grocery store. All of these workplaces were very different, and the coworkers even more so, but certain similarities cannot be unseen.

The diversity of jobs I’ve worked has given me a pretty strong sense for what it is we all lack. Everyone’s biggest complaints, outside of low pay, asshole managers, and costly unforeseen expenses, always come back to timenergy. “I just don’t have the time.” “I just don’t have the energy.” “I just don’t have the time or energy.” These proclamations of lack unite us. Even more impactful on me growing up, something so many of you can relate to, was seeing how much my parents had to work just to make ends meet. My father worked from before sunup until after sun down to provide for us. When he was finally home, he was exhausted.

Change-makers who care about the working class tend to focus on better jobs and higher wages. They used to fight for shorter workdays. But without the concept of timenergy, slightly shortened workdays or weeks will not make the difference (for reasons I will get into).

This book develops the theoretical nuances of timenergy, focusing in large part on how this concept reveals a fundamental problem in how society is structured, as well as a critique of how change-makers (politicians, activists, professionals, and managers) try to change it, and why political organizations and ideologies of today fail without a fleshed-out concept of timenergy.

Thanks for reading!

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Author bio:

David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.