Description
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.
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!
Contents
- Foreword: Workers of the world, read TIMENERGY! by Slavoj Žižek
- Preface to the 2nd Edition
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One: Exhaustion is the spirit of our age
- Energy-without-time and time-without-energy
- Why so triggered?
- Addicts love company
- Chapter Two: The curse that keeps on giving
- You keep shoving your face full of pleasure and distraction but the void only grows
- Timenergy is existential, i.e. not reducible to physics, chemistry, etc.
- “Get back to work and find fulfillment in doing so or else you’re going to need to take these pills for the rest of your life to cope with the meaninglessness of your workaholic life!”
- Chapter Three: Humanistically qualified life vs. social Darwinism
- Schooling vs. Scholē
- Economic necessity and “essential labor”
- Chapter Four: The structural stultification of timenergy .26 Future Horizons Foreclosed
- Chapter Five: The American Dream betrayed: Slavery for All
- Bildung as prerequisite to The Pursuit of Happiness?
- Chapter Six: Being-in-the-world
- So-called “Subjective Time”
- Chapter Seven: What schooling does to timenergy
- Schooling as a response to labor organizing
- Chapter Eight: Timenergy fragility vs. Robin DiAngelo
- Imagination stomachs and frustration
- Chapter Nine: Without timenergy, drive is only self- destruction
- Jouissance defined
- Desire is desire of the Other
- Chapter Ten: Your desire-drive economy vs. timenergy
- Partial drives are in relation to one another
- “Sticking it to the man” vs. being critical of the PMC
- Class categories aren’t moral, or slurs
- Cancel culture and influencership
- Chapter Eleven: From buzzwords to material analysis….82
- The material and political history of the invention of the PMC
- What, when, how, and why schooling
- It’s all just part of “discursive Taylorism”
- Chapter Twelve: Should we just focus on “the ruling class”?
- TIMENERGY: Why You Have No Time or Energy
- Chapter Thirteen: Not exhausted or restless at all! Just cool, calm, and collected
- Chapter Fourteen: Is homeschool the answer?
- Chapter Fifteen: Is this the end, or just the beginning?
- Afterword: Labor Saving Devices – From Descartes to Keynes and Gorz
- About Author
- Bibliography