AFTERWORD: Read this before using “timenergy.” – 2021

As far as the theory I’m developing goes, “timenergy” has been the central concept. It has come a long way in my mind since its first articulation over the course of writing my thesis (the important parts of which are in Chapter Three). This is a concept I find useful because it helps me understand the world situation we are in better, and it also helps me develop strategies for navigating the world’s possibilities. My book is currently in its review stage and I’ve been meeting with my reviewers who all claim they also are getting a lot of mileage with this concept.

Before anyone gets carried away using this concept, critiquing it, or applying it to their lives and the world, I want to give it an important software update. I have resisted the urge to try to say everything that there is to say on so many things, because I want to both respect the time of my readers as well as the fact that “the saying always overflows the said” as Levinas would say. What he means is that there is always more to say on a matter. All of the work in this book is only provisional moments in the development of a theory, being only a waypoint along that journey. So while there is a lot more to this theory behind the scenes still in development, I nevertheless need to make sure to spell out a few important aspects of timenergy theory before releasing it into the wild.

I already know people who will publish books using this concept for their own purposes, as well as academics who want to be able to cite it for their own research. In either case, what follows are some fundamental aspects of timenergy that, without having a firm grasp on, could really lead one astray. So please, take time here on the last chapter—or commit to coming back and reviewing later, before using timenergy.

What I am going to do here is a quick recap of the concept itself, and then talk about how I’m thinking the words attention, interest, and recognition relate to timenergy. I’ll use a metaphor to drive the main point home, finishing on the “promise,” “trust,” and “future” aspects of timenergy.

Please forgive me, for I am writing this hastily. As I said, this book is already in its review stage. Moreover, I am about to go back to work—meaning I don’t have time to do justice to this piece.

So let’s go. If you’ve heard me talk about timenergy, or if you read the preceding chapters, then you know I almost always couple it with “attention.” What follows will focus largely on attention, interest, recognition, and passion, otherwise called “a calling.” Before going into attention deeper than we have previously, it is time for a quick summary of what has been covered so far in the theory’s development.

Summary so far

“Timenergy” is a concept that signifies what comes before modern society separates time from energy in an exchange economy where our labor power is a commodity. In other words, timenergy is time-with-energy and energy-with-time-with-the-potential-to-repeatedly-do-something. Instead of timenergy, the general situation in our society is one where most people, most of the time, have nothing but time-without-energy or energy-without-time-with-the-potential-to-repeat.

We only have so much time in a week, that’s obvious. We also only have so much energy we can muster to repeatedly do things we aren’t always immediately interested in. When it comes to time management, we have to always guestimate what degree of energy and emotionally exhausting focus any given task requires. Because our time, energy, and attention for focusing on anything difficult is limited, we have to be careful not to over-commit to too many obligations, whether that be volunteering for a non-profit, maintaining social standing in a social scene (requires going to things), or the various kinds of self-actualization or relationship-building activities one might feel pulled towards. Economics, as we normally think of it, reduces that timenergy potential to nothing more than labor power to serve the interests of businesses. Labor power is the commodified form of timenergy. Timenergy, then, is the existential pre-condition for labor power—labor power is what a capitalist needs to power any capital-building endeavor.

Marx saw that in the economic frame, we are all reduced to the resource labor power on standby, subject to market whims. Abstract structural imperatives thus work across human populations, pushing everyone to trade away our future potential in exchange for wages from the people who own the factories. In this day and age, though, we are not just labor power in the economy, we are also consumers—and our economy, as well as most profit-making endeavors, are more focused on us as consumers than as mere labor power. While it’s true that timenergy can be traded as labor power in exchange for wages to then purchase goods and services made possible by other peoples’ labor, timenergy is more importantly also the pre-condition for being able to do anything important in life. Not only is it a pre-economic condition of the economy, meaning that without it there would be no economy, but it is also not something that can be bought. We can buy the things made by the labor of others, but we cannot buy back timenergy.

“Timenergy” as a general concept is not something anyone has anymore—because timenergy, as a general concept, does not just mean an individual’s time and energy prior to its commodification. More importantly it is a communal resource that exists outside of any one individual: For example, in a hunter-gatherer tribe, only so much timenergy is used up to meet everyone’s needs; because people don’t have high rent costs or fancy food cravings, there’s only so much essential work to be done and that gets shared communally. Outside of those basic tasks and the daily kinds of chores one finds in any society, pre-technological mass societies have a surplus of timenergy that can be spent in all kinds of ways without ever considering clocks, calendars, or time-management. Songs, dancing, and story-telling are, for instance, not just a passive entertainment activity done at the end of a busy work day, but are instead a communal effort. You don’t just learn the stories and dances as a consumer, but as an active member of a community that gets to know you and what you have to offer over time—meaning that this community is what I call “a community of potential recognition.” It is that recognition, the fact that they get to know you and have a sense for your potential, that empowers you to live up to or let down the expectations of others. Not only can you earn the respect of your peers and elders, but you can, more importantly, gain proficiency and eventually mastery in the arts practiced by other respected members of the community.

Long caveat: In a technological mass society where everyone’s future time and energy has already been factored into an economy governed by the law of exchange, you no longer are part of a community where timenergy is a communal resource. Now I don’t want anyone to get some idea that this theory, as I’ve developed it, nostalgizes the past. In no way have I ever proposed that we can put humpty-dumpty back together again now that pandora’s box is open and we live in this mass-scale society. Doing so would require taking away everyone’s air conditioning, internet, and nation-states, which would require a world war that would most likely end all life on this planet; even if we could do it, anyone who honestly wants to “go back” has a rosy-eyed view of how humanity used to live.

Some people who really think those days were better go and try to live in intentional communities, but they still live on this planet that is subject to all the same problems, so even if that lifestyle proves better, it’s only really a way of coping with modern life—and by the way, such reactively-based societies tend to turn into superstitious and authoritarian cults. That’s not to say that “coping” strategies that don’t change the whole social arrangement are pointless—coping matters, and new coping strategies are always worth trying.

Anyway, the point about timenergy being a communal resource that we have no more is not supposed to mean it doesn’t matter or that we should go back to some previous social arrangement, but instead is to serve as a useful way of understanding the fundamental basis of alienation in society today. I’m not saying we solve it by becoming un-alienated—I think the accelerationists have a point about alienation not being entirely bad (we’ll come back to that later, but I’ll just say that they focus on the liberating potential of your neighbor not caring about what you are up to, whereas they neglect other more essential aspects of alienation).

Now that we’ve gone over how timenergy is a general, communal, and pre-economic condition to our current economy that no individual is able to free up on their own, it nevertheless is still useful to have a relative version of this concept, seeing as you are able to free up relative time-energy in a week. If your job has you living life so that when you do have time you don’t have energy enough to muster for any serious commitments, or if when you do have energy it never comes with time that could be repeatedly invested towards a serious commitment, then it’s safe to say your job has monopolized your ability to commit sustained effort to anything beyond making a living. If you were to quit that job and do something part-time, then we could say you have freed up relative time-energy. Now, I always spell this kind of time-energy relative to the individual with a hyphen to set it apart from the kind of timenergy that is necessarily communal and pre-economic.

How we survive or thrive under the current world order rests largely on our ability to free up and strategically manage our relative time-energy. I’ll get into the symbolic function of the hyphen a little more in a bit, but first we need to be sure to drive home another point with some terminology I’ve been using throughout this book.

You may have noticed me using this word “conditions.” For anyone coming from a different background in the language, that might be meaningless or misleading. To me, questioning as to the conditions of any given thing is a fundamental aspect of philosophical thought. We might ask what the conditions must be for an atom to be considered an atom, or seek to understand the conditions that produce any kind of entity, state, concept, or system. Theory that is critical also seeks to understand the conditions that make possible the phenomena under analysis. But what does that mean? For instance, if we want to understand the limits of human reason, then we have to do a critique of reason, meaning a thoroughgoing analysis of the conditions that have to be met for “reasoning” to get underway.

That’s what Kant did with his Critique of Pure Reason; he sought to derive the conditions necessary for reason to operate, and, by understanding those conditions to establish the natural limits of reason. Likewise, Marx did his “critique of political economy,” meaning his analysis sought to unveil the conditions necessary for political economy to function—meaning his analysis did not restrict itself to what happens within the sphere of economics or politics, but instead the things that have to be a certain way for it to even function, e.g. property law enforced by a militaristic state, people without anything but their own time and energy to sell, and buyers of that labor power who seek to grow their personal profit with whatever surplus value gets created.

If we want to understand a thing, then we have to know what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for that thing to be possible and actual. So beyond asking what are the conditions that make this thing we are researching possible, we likewise have to ask what aspects of the thing we are analyzing are necessary and which aspects are unnecessary. For instance, we can ask what are the necessary conditions of a cup being called a cup. Does it just have to hold liquids and provide access to a mouth to drink? A fun example of a similar essentializing question is the argument about whether or not a hot dog counts as a sandwich.

Let’s use a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to enforce an important distinction philosophers mean when they say “necessary and sufficient conditions.” Peanut butter is a necessary condition for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it is not sufficient. Why is it not sufficient? Because there are other necessary conditions that must be met before we have the PB&J, specifically bread and jelly, which are also each necessary. Once you have all three conditions, then that’s sufficient ingredients for making the PB&J. If you have those three ingredients in your kitchen, then you can say you have potential PB&Js in there, but they remain only potential unless someone uses their labor to mix it all appropriately into the sandwich. That means that peanut butter, jelly, and bread are all three the necessary and sufficient conditions of a potential PB&J, but without human labor, the PB&J cannot be actualized. Therefore, we can say that though the three ingredients are “necessary and sufficient” conditions for a potential PB&J, those three conditions are not sufficient conditions for actualizing the sandwich—the actual sandwich requires necessary labor. Labor, peanut butter, jelly, and bread, then, are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an actual PB&J.

Ok, that may have seemed a little tedious—but I promise you that was nothing compared to any standard analytic philosophy piece of writing where they go so much more in depth into stripping concepts down to their most essential or rudimentary aspects. Whenever you really want to get to the bottom of what a thing really is, it requires going pretty deep. If the previous paragraph was all new to you, then revisit later for a refresher.

Understanding how to use “necessary and sufficient” and “potential vs actual” are a couple of those important distinctions worth coming back to until you feel confident using them because they are fundamental tools in every thinkers’ tool kit. Now let’s apply these concepts to timenergy so we can get into attention, recognition, and interest.

Timenergy theory comes from a lot of sources of inspiration, as have been discussed throughout this book. However, if I had to say it has one fundamental question as its source, it would be this: What are the conditions of The Good Life. If The Good Life has necessary and sufficient conditions in any general sense, then timenergy is one of those necessary conditions. Now that this has been said, we can turn to how the Other is a necessary condition of timenergy.

Remember Sherry Turkle’s “virtuous circle” from chapter three of this work? Being with oneself, solitude, and being with others, solicitude, are reciprocally reliant upon one another. Without genuine opportunities to be-with beyond superficial and ephemeral interchanges, the virtuous circle collapses (which is where I brought in Heidegger’s vicious cycle as “falling”. If you need a refresher, that section starts on page 49 of this edition.)

Timenergy is communal. If you suddenly go from working full time to being unemployed, the chances are you will sink into a hedonistic depressive spiral. “Hedonistic” means living your life for pleasure, and hedonistic depressives are people who do so without finding fulfillment. Mark Fisher uses this term to characterize the state of modern college students—which is accurate, but I’m using it to talk about the experience of being unemployed.

Whenever I tell normies in my life that I advocate for a society that would prioritize people having time-energy instead of just money, a frequent rebuttal is that unemployed people don’t seem a lot happier. Nowadays people would likely say they have more time freed up by the COVID stay-at-home culture. In either case, this is why timenergy has to be emphasized as a communal pre-economic condition. Just because you have found yourself with more relative time-energy in a week doesn’t mean you have a community of potential recognition that you can get plugged into, from which you would be able to earn respect for your unique contributions.

There are a lot of ways academics or philosophers talk about “recognition,” but usually it means either that people recognize you as a unique human with your own personal autonomy, desires, and potential, or it means the kind of esteem that can be won via some kind of achievement. There are other senses of the word, but we’ll go with the two main ones for now. A community of potential recognition is, therefore, a community from which respect and esteem can be won. Sometimes it is won because of sustained sacrifices made on your part to develop yourself into the kind of person the community respects, and other times a community will either respect or disrespect a person for factors that have nothing to do with anything earned—this can be because you are unfairly judged and written off on the basis of some superficial indicators such as skin color, ability, beauty, sex, etc.

In a technological mass society, we can’t expect to ever get to know everyone else in our society, much less in our own town. As accelerationists like the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto point out, this kind of alienation from everyone at least provides freedom from living under the constant judgment and rules of everyone around you—but with that acknowledged, it can also produce pretty intense feelings of isolation and smallness, meaning you feel irrelevant and replaceable in a global society with billions of people who are all preoccupied with their lives. If it feels like most people couldn’t care less about your well-being, then yeah, of course.

From the point of view of society itself, we are all individually replaceable. Most people will never know or genuinely care about you, not to mention the fact that most people you meet are the product of a society wherein every individual has grown up (been subjectivized as) their whole life under fire from thousands of competing forces vying for attention and sympathy. The fact of living in such a world, surrounded by such people, means we are each up against incredible odds to even make a positive or noticeable impact. If you wanted to be recognized as a valuable contributing member, or as a hero for that matter, you would have to do something pretty extreme with your habit development over the course of a lifetime, and even then, it would be a serious gamble. In a hunter-gatherer or small settled and insular community outside of a global “modern” context, you at least wouldn’t have as hard of a time finding acceptance, appreciation, and belonging. Once again, that should not be our goal, but this is the background against which modern alienation stands out.

Bringing this all back around to recognition, having “freed up” energy and time in a week doesn’t really give it the fusion and drive brought about when in relation to a community of plausibly obtainable recognition. Just because you free up relative time and energy doesn’t mean you see realistic ways of investing it towards the development of skills that would actually win you the respect or recognition you seek. In other words, you have “time and energy” but no “time-energy.”

Without feeling pulled forward by a calling or purpose bigger than yourself, you sink into a hedonistic spiral spent consuming for immediate gratification and entertainment. The sphere of immediate gratification revolves around our animal appetites for food, sleep, and sex—desires that usually control most of our waking life unless our safety is jeopardized or unless we feel the intense pull of a calling from beyond all that. That intense pull towards something beyond immediacy makes us plan forward—so if you want to be a rockstar, you have to start learning music. If you want to become an athlete, then you have to start training. A lot of times people feel interested in something like that before realizing they really don’t have the time-energy to seriously follow through on the necessary requirements for achieving mastery in whatever the calling is. We can also find ourselves deep into someone else’s fantasy, only discovering late into the game that we are living someone else’s goal—maybe because a parent or teacher instilled this goal to become something you didn’t really feel called to do.

The point is, we can spend our lives too busy working, wishing we were doing something else that, if we had the time-energy to actually pursue a little deeper, we might realize it is actually only something really important to us, but not necessarily in the sense where we have to live it out and be that. I can realize music is a huge part of my life and relate to the musicians I listen to in various ways without needing to become a rock star. Having spent a lot of time around music and trying my hand at it, I can learn how it fits into my life without it remaining that unattainable dream that haunted my waking life while previously at work. However, that realization only follows from almost a decade of experimentation with other things like painting, code, foreign languages, science, spirituality, philosophy, etc.

Spirituality is another way you might hear people talk about their higher purpose or calling. For instance, a person might, after a near death experience, realize that their lifestyle of constant consumerism in the sphere of immediate gratification was selfish and limiting, so now they feel called to sacrifice immediate pleasures and instead focus on peace-building efforts in society, providing help to the elderly, etc.

If a person feels called to do something beyond a lifestyle that will be rewarded substantially by the economy, then becoming unemployed, or finding oneself with more time-energy freed up by COVID lock-down orders might prove to be a real blessing. “Oh my god, I have so much more time to dedicate to my calling—wonderful!” However, even then, if you are not able to sacrifice that relative time-energy in meaningful contributions to others because of whatever your situation is, then impatience and frustration with the current deadlock is likely to prevail.

Bringing it all back around to timenergy and attention, I want to drive home that relative time-energy is a necessary condition for self-actualization, relationship building, and community, but it is, however, not sufficient. A calling, or what we also call a passion, is also a necessary condition for self-actualization. That calling might be something that comes from outside of this life, from God, or it might just be the potential respect you seek to gain from a community of potential recognition, the big Other, or maybe you just want to make your mom proud. The point is, it’s not just you that matters when it comes to self-actualization, but there is something outside of yourself that you need to connect with. Before that outside connection turns into an all-consuming passion, it starts with interest.

Interest, in the way we are using the term, has nothing to do with financial interest, like the kind applied to a loan. We mean the kind of interest that usually starts with something first catching your attention in a way that makes you curious to learn more. In the same way that time-energy is a necessary condition for actually putting sustained effort into a calling, attention is a necessary condition for interest. Once something gets a foothold in your consciousness, it might become more interesting. Sometimes that interest can develop into a passion. In order for this to work, though, we need to find out what our potential is and develop it in a way that empowers us to pursue our callings. The problem posed on us all now is that we live in an attention economy, meaning social science and psychology are largely funded by the business world. While the ultimate aim of the attention economy is to collect “data” (ever refined psychological profiles of every user) the main strategy, for now, is to seduce us. Rather than exploring the world to find oneself and a calling, we stay distracted by a world of marketing and propaganda experts who seek to frame the referential field of our consciousness.

This takes us back to the point about how we are currently not simply seen as labor power in the economy, but moreover as consumers. In our society consumerism implies individuals exchanging hard won cash for commodities that either meet our basic needs or attempt to satisfy our desires; while our “basic needs” aren’t really that complicated, marketing invests most of its efforts trying to make us feel like we need things we don’t; the manufacturing of desires is ultimately its sole prerogative. Of course, there are advertisers who help us discover things that genuinely empower us on our journeys, but the tendency is for our subjectivation over time to develop in such a way where your ego and its outward signs (identity) gets its sense for what’s real or what matters informed by what it consumes. For example, I am the kind of person who likes my sandwiches cut this way instead of that way, my favorite color for commodities is this color, and I dress in this way that means I’m like whatever. How we consume is supposed to say something about us to the world, to the point of helping us select our friends even—that’s literally what fashion in high school is all about. Whose respect are you trying to win?

What the advertisers don’t tell us is that fashion can’t buy a personality. Identarian expression is a sad stand-in for a flimsy character. Character is something built over time with serious effort to be reliable, trustworthy, considerate, etc., whereas identity is a performance that simulates (stands in for) character. If you feel like you can know a person by how they look, or judge a book by its cover, then you’ve fallen for the identarian deception. Beyond the obvious fact that your shoes are not a personality, though, there is the fact that consumerism and the online version of the attention economy have developed increasingly niche ways to help each one of us feel like our desires are special and that they select for us a meaningful community of others (communities that are actually only constructed consumer demographics that were built by and now targeted by competing marketing and propaganda interests).

So not only is our time and energy divided and directed towards the profit-building endeavors of others, but our attention is a finite and valuable resource being competed for by warring interests in the political, business, and religious recruitment realms. That means your desire to be a rock star or celebrity YouTuber is likely a desire that has been inculcated in you by myriad outside interests that have a vested stake in you finding yourself strongly identifying with this or that consumer demographic. I suspect this is a big part of why, when a person starts to feel like their current lifestyle is unfulfilling, they will often go on some kind of quest of self-discovery, trying out a lot of new things—it’s not enough to ask Google what you’re missing. Most people find a way to break out of their lived patterns, usually by traveling, experimenting with psychedelics, or even studying philosophy. Sometimes one does all of the above before finding God or, in the case of Steve Jobs who had dropped out of Reed to wander India, coming back to be a capitalist. Getting away from it all or reconfiguring the software your mind is running on are just possible tools in the tool kit for self-discovery—which in the context of this means discovering what your talents are worth building on, which is a question unanswerable without a strong sense of calling.

So when you feel distracted by a thousand competing images and voices pulling you this way and that, the question should be: Are any of those seriously worth sacrificing most of my pleasures to pursue? Even if it’s technically “worth it,” do I actually feel called to do so? Probably not. The things you want to eat, the people you want to fuck, the friends you want to win, and the career that might unlock security and societal esteem—none of this is necessarily what can be kindled into the kind of passion worth pursuing.

While time, energy, and attention are all relative ingredients (or necessary conditions) for self-actualization, we more importantly need to cultivate our abilities and interests until our talents align with a calling that brings a sense of purpose to life. If you haven’t found that yet, then you need to ask yourself what it is about your current lifestyle that is either helping you explore your potential, or else obstructing your ability to discover what matters most.

Part of the problem posed to each of us when it comes to potential and purpose is that we need to be able to follow our interests further than consumption in the sphere of immediate gratification allows. It’s not enough to try some shoes on. You have to walk with them for a while. Likewise, just because you are interested in philosophy doesn’t mean it’s your calling—but you can’t know by just watching a few videos. You have to follow that interest further, and put serious effort into it, before discovering how it will serve you—or whether you are meant to serve it. I guess the only practical advice I want to leave you with, then, is to start going deeper with your interests, to see if that kindles the fire into a true passion. Going with this metaphor about the fire, though, a fire dies without fuel and oxygen—I claim that the fuel is time-energy, whereas the oxygen is the Other—a community you are able to uniquely contribute to and potentially win recognition from, God, or whatever. It’s something outside you that grows until it takes over, but the calling is not enough to drown out the competing voices of every marketing or propaganda firm in the society: We have to surround ourselves with reminders of our own, followed through with time and energy sacrificed even when it’s not immediately gratifying. Only by doing so will any of us ever find something that matters more than the kinds of things money can buy.

On that hyphen, or the practical fusion of time and energy

Going with the metaphor introduced above, time and energy as wood plus the Other as oxygen equals potential fire. But these are only the necessary conditions for potential self-actualization or recognition. Like the PB&J with ingredients minus labor, it is only possible as potential—those necessary components, all their potential, are wasted without getting actualized by labor mobilized towards a useful or meaningful creative end. Likewise, interest with time and energy freed up in a week vis-a-vis some others or the Other are only sufficient for potential—sustained effort actualizes, and is therefore as necessary as any of the other necessary elements of self-actualization. However, what is sustained effort? It is follow-through on commitment to oneself or others. Do you trust yourself to follow through on the promises you make to yourself? Do others trust you to follow through on your promises? Whether in the sphere of solicitude or solitude, character and a sense of self develop as you learn to trust your own ability to sustain the development of previously sacrificed effort towards a greater cause. It is not enough to have strong feelings about a calling, you also have to trust that you will show up on the rainy days to put in the effort necessary to accomplish the tasks you feel called to perform. However, you cannot go from zero to eighty. Anyone who has experienced biting off more than they can chew with New Year’s resolutions knows what I’m talking about. Our appetite for new challenges can so far exceed the current calibration of our habitual routines and other commitments that we burn out fast. We end up breaking promises to ourselves or others, undermining all the intensity and effort initially unleashed—all due to a failure to calculate, commit to actualizing realistic potential, and work our way up through realistic goals.

Big goals need to be broken down into smaller goals that, though smaller, have value and meaning on their own. For instance, on your way to becoming a violin virtuoso, long before you have ever reached 10,000 hours of sustained and focused effort, there are myriad more obtainable and independently meaningful benchmarks to measure one’s follow-through, i.e. learning chords, playing favorite songs, writing one’s first piece of music, playing a live show, etc.

While works of popular self-help tend to focus a lot on the kind of mindset or attitudes necessary for success, along with vision boards or other ways of focusing one’s intention towards big goals, something that tends to get left out is the power of old habits and the distracting loudness of competing interests that drown out the voice of one’s calling. Wanting something strongly, or believing in oneself by reciting affirmations in a mirror, is simply not the same as making deliberate plans subjected to strategic time and energy management. Without baby steps to get towards your goal, willpower will burn out. Without concrete and measurable proof of previous efforts paying off, trust in oneself will fizzle out. Say whatever affirmations of belief or potential you want as many times as you like, but it is the proof of following through on promises that makes that “belief” into something more than a delusion. In effect, the fulfillment of promises to yourself and others turns your time and energy you’ve freed up into something new, a reliable resource. Fractured time and energy thus, through habit and fulfilment, become fused into time-energy, i.e. energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly sacrifice sustained effort towards some goal. It doesn’t happen in a night, or in a week, or in one big push, but over time as we try and fail, experiment and readjust our strategies. Time-energy forms and gains value only through the trials of practice.

The Promise, Trust, and Future aspects of Timenergy

Before closing this book out, I just need to crystallize an aspect of timenergy in the minds of people who think with this concept: Timenergy is only the potential to give attention and sustained effort to a project or relationship. Without being sacrificed in the form of sustained effort, timenergy goes unactualized—it rarely counts as sacrifice if only done when convenient. This is not just applicable to labor under capitalism, but I suspect it is true of value regardless of social configuration. More importantly, thinking of it in these terms has helped me break out of an immature consumer presentist mindset, as well as understand serious issues posed on organizers doing any kind of cooperative effort with others.

In a technological-mass-society wherein timenergy is subjected to the law of exchange value on the market as “labor power,” the tendency is for people to still think of what they exchange for wages to be the act of labor itself. But if, for example, you work at a coffee shop, or on a construction crew, you are probably aware that sometimes you get paid to stand around (look busy, damnit!). Are you doing labor when just standing there? In a sense, not really—you are being paid to, instead, not do other things. So why do you get paid to stand there? Because it is not your labor, but labor power itself that is the commodity.

Labor power is not just the labor itself, but is rather the potential to do labor. It goes beyond that though. Even Marxists who echo Engels, saying “labor power” is Marx’s most profound insight and is fundamentally different from labor, one will look at me strangely (or argue on occasion) when I say that labor power is a promise. Not just the promise of your capacity today, but more importantly it is the promise of future potential. I know that sounds weird, and sometimes people still don’t get it. I’ve been challenged on this by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, so I want to make sure to unpack this in a more elaborated form than anything previously said. I’ll use a lot of examples to prove my point in a moment, but first I need to say…

Disclaimer: There is this whole question of whether I am adding to Marx’s theory. Orthodox Marxists will care, and academics will likely want to see my sources… but this theory is just how I understand something right now, and it is not Marxist™ or something I am using to make a name for myself in academia (I do not aim to be a certified Marxist, nor a professional academic). With that said, though, I do aim to understand for myself how much of what I’m about to say comes from Marx vs. how much I might be projecting Nietzsche and insights from David Graeber’s DEBT: The First 5,000 Years onto my reading of Marx’s early and later economic writings. There was a time when I said Marx definitely thought about labor power in these terms, but then after reviewing Capital: Volume One and a few of his manuscripts that have most influenced how I think about labor power, I am less confident that Marx is my fundamental source for this insight. It might be just something synthesized between Engels’ summary combined with stuff I’ve thought about in light of things said by Nietzsche and Graeber, as well as other sources I may have forgotten. I’ll get more into how Nietzsche and Graeber factor into this elaboration of the concept in the future. It doesn’t really matter for our purposes here, because really, regardless of which thinkers have contributed to the following insights, the theory itself—how I use it—developed from experiences working, living, studying, and organizing. For now, because I don’t have time to give this academic question its due, I’m just going to talk about timenergy and labor power in the way I currently understand them in light of the phenomena of trust and promise.

The “power” in labor power is in its promise. If not fulfilled, that promise is undermined and so is the project or relationship. In the case of a project, consider the fact that if you were to volunteer for some organization on a couple of occasions, and then made a promise to do something for a big event but then failed to follow through on that promise, you can cause more damage to the operation than if you had never helped at all. Likewise, if you only give time-energy and attention to a relationship when it’s convenient, but then prove over the years to never be willing to go out of your way when it’s inconvenient, that undermines the relationship. If one weekend you try to get to know a person, followed by another weekend where you try to learn the violin, followed by another weekend where you try to learn Spanish, followed by another weekend where you try to get into prepping your food for the week, followed by another weekend where you try to learn to code—well then obviously none of these projects or relationships really get off the ground, or gain traction, or some other metaphor for progressive development.

With labor power in the job market, you are not being paid for the physical exertion alone, but rather the promise to be on call in case you are needed. Salary positions especially prove this point, because you are being paid to basically trade most of your waking moments to being on call. If you remember in Chapter 2, my description of Heidegger’s concept “Bestand,” i.e. how enframing puts the world and its resources (including “human resources” on call or standby), I don’t think this is just a coincidence. The promise aspect of value, especially considered in the global economy—especially factored into our sense of debt within a credit-driven economy—these are all fundamental aspects of what Heidegger is getting at in “The Question Concerning Technology.” But let’s put that aside for now and focus on some more concrete examples.

Sometimes the coffee shop is not busy, or the construction workers wait around for an inspection or for supplies. In either case, you are paid for being available on standby, for your capacities being at the disposal of the manager. Fortune 500 companies today still pay annual salaries to people just to be on call at the drop of a dime—like how Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, was on standby as a consultant for Bank of America and Columbia Rope Company. The $60,000 annual retainer paid by the latter was $10,000 more than what the company paid its own president. Such are the costs of a top expert’s potential devoted focus being reliably at one’s disposal. But this is not just true of experts; it applies to day laborers who are more replaceable.

The thing about day laborers and low-skilled workers, though, is that we are made replaceable through technological gains that ought to benefit everyone. Our replaceability is the essence of industrial capitalist surplus value—meaning that as workers are overworked and under-paid, we become exhausted as human resources more quickly; that high turnover would sabotage operations if not made more replaceable by the simplification (lowering-skill thresholds) of mechanized industry.

Because mechanized industry makes more high-skill labor positions superfluous, lower-skill workers are better able to compete. The army of the unemployed becomes a looming threat at the back of low-skill workers who know they are easily exchanged for other bodies. So while it is still true that the “promise” aspect of labor power applies to low-skill labor, such workers do not need to be compensated like salaried positions because there is a line of applicants ready to replace them at the drop of a hat.

In the case of mechanized industry, the power of promises in labor power comes to light in the unification of the workers to strike. The strike is a reminder that while any one lower-skilled worker is replaceable by the next applicant in line, the workers say loud and clear: “We know the value of our promised labor power, and those promises can be revoked when not compensated fairly.”

A point like this might sound a little pedantic or pointless outside of an immediate economic or political-economic sense. But I think it matters for more reasons than just that. Why does this matter in your immediate daily life? One reason is because, after years spent organizing, I have seen how people think they “added value” to something because they showed up once or twice to volunteer some sporadic labor. In a sort of sense that is true, but in a more important sense, no worthwhile community can be built on such shaky ground.

Labor power is the basis of value under the dominion of exchange value, but even outside of a capitalist society it would still be true that one’s time-energy in a week does not build value on the basis of sporadic and unreliable contributions of effort. Effort must be sustained to add value for longer-term projects. Being reliable, following through on promises, and developing trust—what are relationships, a community, or any kind of cooperative effort without making oneself available even when things get difficult? In other words, value is not just made because people show up when they feel convenient in unreliable ways. Value comes from sacrifice of effort on the rainy days too.

In our world today, the majority of our current and future time-with-energy is traded away in exchange for positions at institutions that pay wages or salaries. And obviously we have to do so if we want to not be homeless, meaning that “consensual trade” is done under a pretty significant form of coercion. Community and relationship building, as well as the skill development necessary to self-actualize in ways that make us unique, non-replaceable citizens, thus get undermined by a society wherein the majority of our current and future time-energy is put on call—promised to the boss and landlord who literally take those promises to the bank.

Funny how we already say one “banks on a promise,” meaning that if one is depended on, their contribution presumed or taken for granted, then, so long as those promises are being fulfilled, they are either being “taken to the bank” in the sense of making someone else a profit—or else we can say that dependency is “banked on” metaphorically, meaning it is presumed to add value to some pre or non-economic effort.

We can only follow through on so many promises made in a week reliably, and in our society, the majority of these are not made to loved ones. Skill development towards self-actualization gets sidelined by consumer activities—passion projects replaced by “hobbies.” Instead of building community, we show up to events like entitled consumers. Even if we “volunteer,” it is done as sporadic labor more often than reliable effort that can be depended on and factored into the development of longer-term projects. With enough participants in a population doing so, it might work, but not without a core group of organizers who can dedicate serious (reliable) time-energy to orchestrating the effort.

Speaking of dependency, consider how this theoretical insight might be applied to parenting. When a parent cannot be depended on, they feel like a stranger—more of an apparent than a parent. Maybe a parent came to one game in the season or took you fishing once, but that’s not the time necessary to build trust to the point where you could open up and actually talk about what matters most. Similar to how people in my life who went to high school report that substitute teachers try to pack their vision and personality into a day or week of class, the part-time parent feels a tremendous pressure within a small time-frame to prove or make-up for something that can only be developed through sustained sacrifice over time.

Character is not understood in a moment, but comes as a comprehension built over the course of times both good and bad outside the parameters of singular events. Perhaps this is why in our consumer presentist era “identity” takes precedence over character?

While I pose immediately unanswerable questions that call for future research, I suspect that people whose role models or mentors proved unreliable themselves can become flaky friends—though the opposite often proves true. Knowing the feeling of betrayal or abandonment, we can over-do the opposite by becoming always on call for others who take advantage of our own low self-estimation. I’m talking about people who make themselves available to others who wouldn’t do the same when it’s not convenient.

Speaking for myself, there was a time for the better part of a decade where I made myself always available and at the disposal of people whose love I hoped to win—more often than not, they took that for granted without reciprocation. This was a difficult lesson to learn, but eventually I learned the hard way that my time-energy and attention was being taken for granted by people who would not do the same for me unless convenient.

Having learned from certain past mistakes, I now have to sometimes ask myself: Would this person go out of their way for me? Who calls to check in on who? Is sacrifice present—ever!?—and if so, is it a one-way street? Can the other be relied on and, if so, for what, exactly? Yet, with all that said, I caution the reader against a tremendous risk: While it is true that any real relationship has both give and take aspects, there is a danger in over-analyzing micro “transactions” in relationships. One can become too short-term economical about such things, always weighing the moment rather than actually being there with the other. For instance, sometimes your friend just needs you there, or a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes it is their turn. They are going through a lot and you are not.

The whole “tit for tat” thinking that thinks every interaction must be an equal exchange can not only undermine trust in a relationship, but it can also forget that sometimes the other is going through a lot while you are not—or, on the flip side, when I am going through a lot, it’s important to remember that many of my friends have dependents now, whether that be a spouse, children, or a full-throttle career that ultimately means the very nature of our friendship, and with it what can be depended on, has now become something different than what it was. That does not devalue what was, it just means things are different—maybe we are just growing up? (Does anyone really “grow up” in the age of consumerism? Parents, kind of, sometimes… maybe?)

In summary, I want to close this chapter out by returning to the broader economic aspect of this theory of promise. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche said “To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—Isn’t that the real problem of human beings?” Michel Foucault ran with this question for the length of his Discipline and Punish (really, one could argue he “ran” with this for his whole intellectual project, in a sense). His “archaeology” delved into the ways in which the pre-industrial-to-modern subject was subjectivized, or domesticated, to become the creatures capable of producing industrial civilization. In a future work I will go a lot more in depth into how Foucault’s analysis in the third division of that work contributes to time-energy theory.

After the small hunter-gatherer “stage,” human subjects needed pretty hardcore disciplinary processes to make way for technological-mass-society. Obviously this comes with its pros and cons that we don’t need to get into for now. What I’m interested in exploring soon is Deleuze’s argument that disciplinary society has already more or less given way to societies of control, and industrialization to corporatist finance capital. In what ways has this altered or intensified everything talked about in this chapter?

I think mass-society paves the way for population-thinking, something I’ll have to develop in future work. For the time being, I think there are new business and ideological models that could not have worked in previous centuries that rely on big data analytics and that these, in profound ways, make it possible to not just exploit deskilled labor more than ever, but more importantly to undermine the unionization of labor power in what we now call the “gig economy.” Uber doesn’t rely on reliability, it just plans for statistical averages that are fostered towards desired ends using certain incentive structures. But then again, companies like Uber don’t so much make a profit right now as take on incredible risks with the hope of eventually gaining some kind of monopoly that can be leveraged towards future profit.

As I said though, I’ve got to get back to work. These are just a few of the myriad questions that plague me. By the way, Deleuze’s Postscript on Societies of Control is only fourteen paragraphs long and can be found for free online. I think it is time to read, re-read, and then keep re-reading it while asking how the game has changed from previous centuries. What are the implications of these changes for organizing human emancipation efforts that break from what Amber Lee Frost calls “The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag Activism.”¹

In many ways, I think even capital itself has already more or less moved into a post-trust phase of development. I have no idea what the implications of that statement are, but I hope to hear your thoughts. To that end, my contact info is in the “About Author” section at the end. Sorry folks, no Discord channel though. That kind of immediate mass contact wilts my brain. I don’t want to be a momentary urge away from a mass of strangers, which the internet already is in general. It just compounds and is worse on group-chat or forum-esque sites like Discord.

I aim to filter for people who are forward-thinking and longer-term planning because I suspect these correlate strongly with maturity while filtering out impulsive people who will fall away when the initial incitement of curiosity redirects on to other things. So to the people who have stopped along this waypoint in their own deliberate journeys, especially those who will find themselves thinking with some of the concepts developed herein—write to me any time.

Everyone is, of course, welcome to send me criticism, questions, or insights. One thing I really want to put out there, though, for any budding researchers in history, sociology, economics, political science or other fields related to this work: If you want to contribute to timenergy theory and already have to do research for a degree or something, and if you would like to bounce some ideas off me or get some help formulating a research question, I have a ton of questions that might prove useful for some qualitative or quantitative research. These are the kinds of questions a philosopher or theorist like myself can only really speculate about without institutional means, time-energy, and the discipline necessary to derive useful discoveries. There’s a whole field of such discoveries at the intersections between us.

1 Frost, Amber Lee. “The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag Activism.” 2020. https://catalyst-journal.com/2020/09/the-poisoned-chalice-of-hashtag-activism