Self-Help and the Miseries of Capitalism: On Caleb Smith’s “Thoreau’s Axe” and Jenny Odell’s “Saving Time”

IN 1852, Henry David Thoreau reflected on the results of his experiment in self-discipline at Walden Pond with some ambivalence. He found himself so preoccupied with developing new habits of attention, with transcending worldly distractions he attributed to the rise of industrial capitalism, that his regimen of self-improvement had become a bit oppressive. “I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest,” he journaled.

Literary critic Caleb Smith draws our attention, as it were, to this paradoxical reflection in his new book Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. What I find compelling about this image of someone exhausted by his own self-discipline is how it subverts popular if inaccurate caricatures of Thoreau as a self-assured white guy cloistered away in the woods. Thoreau went to Walden to develop more wakeful ways of being in a world full of distractions linked to larger economic shifts in American life, but this journal entry suggests that he reflected on his individual exercises in self-improvement with uncertainty and fatigue. Why?

At Walden, “he had hoped to free himself from the degrading cycle of labor and consumption that organized middle-class life under market capitalism,” Smith writes. “In the long run, though, he found that this very effort exhausted his senses and trapped him in a ‘habit of attention.’ Thoreau did not quite say so, but he had begun to feel the similarities between his self-discipline and other, more coercive disciplines that he had hoped to leave behind.”

This scene from the 19th century not only shows that anxieties over attention and distraction are nothing new but also, and more to the point, raises an enduring cultural contradiction: like Thoreau, many of us feel distracted by shifts and accelerations in collective life—by new media, to be sure, but also by capitalism and its myriad crises—and yet, to combat these collective distractions, we turn inward and desperately try to become more disciplined, attentive individuals. (Granted—and Smith makes this point too—Thoreau participated in acts of civil disobedience and protested unjust collective conditions throughout his life.)

Smith is not the first to name this tension, though his “genealogy of distraction and the disciplines of attention” might be the first to unearth its deep cultural roots. He examines a haunting archive of documents from Thoreau’s time that focus on three ways people tried to regulate attention: social reform within institutions, spiritual revivals, and private practices of devotion. Some of these techniques, such as hard labor and moral retraining within penitentiaries, were more compulsory and punishing than others. However, Smith makes the point that top-down social reform and voluntary exercises in self-discipline had something unexpected in common: “Instead of striking against the true sources of distraction—the exploitations and manipulations of industrial capitalism—disciplines of attention were often used to keep the machinery running smoothly.” This happens today too. Without moralizing, Smith reflects on why,

 

even after we understand that distraction’s real causes are in the large-scale economic systems and technologies that shape our world, we keep trying to solve the problem with personal, moral remedies. For instance, we adjust our consumption habits, or we make efforts to ensure that our leisure time is quality time, spent mindfully.

Jenny Odell takes aim at a similar cultural tension, and specifically focuses on time discipline, in her new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Many of us feel distracted in a world that seems to be constantly speeding up due to changes in how we work and the proliferation of media technologies. Most of us respond to these feelings of distraction and time scarcity, however, by trying to manage our own time better rather than questioning how we came to see and experience time the way we do, Odell says.

How did we come to see time as something that could be productive, saved, or wasted? Odell begins by unpacking the conventional wisdom that time is money. She traces the origins of this idea back to the rise of wage labor, when it became the norm for laborers to rent their time to their employers. Marx drew attention to how wage labor relied on conceptualizing time as something fungible, something that could be abstracted and commodified, specifically by workers who could rent their time for a certain hourly wage. As Odell observes, “Time discipline was and is a tool used both inside and outside the factory to render a more docile and productive workforce, whether by directing and intensifying work or generally instilling a pious ‘habit of industry’ in would-be workers.”

Where did Americans’ obsession with the idea of hard work come from? Both Odell and Smith approach this question by building on classic social theories that connect the sanctification of work and productivity to the spread of Protestantism, considering how traditional forms of economic surveillance and control over modes of production—manifest not only in the factory but also in plantation slavery—gave way to forms of self-discipline as the economy shifted toward wage labor.

Time discipline, originally demanded by factory managers and overseers and the keepers of penitentiaries, has morphed into cultural forms that are more voluntary. Odell points to bootstrapper ideology and the seemingly ubiquitous message that “Busy = good.” “Now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labor time,” Odell writes, “it’s you, too, when you look in the mirror.” Some of our most powerful myths encourage this kind of self-discipline and busyness, even when we are technically off the clock: the so-called American Dream, for example, and its cruelly optimistic view about the possibility of individual achievement, or the conservative fetish for “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.”

Odell draws attention to how these myths reinforce the mistaken idea of “equal clock hours,” or the notion that everyone has the same ability to control their time, do what they want when they want, and, therefore, achieve their dreams if they work hard enough. Yet, the persistent gender pay gap shows that women in the United States earn less for full-time work than men. Women have tended to take on more unpaid labor at home too, such as childcare and managing healthcare when family members are ill. Race also shapes experiences of time. Odell quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates, who famously observed that time is one of the most fundamental things white people have stolen from Black people through slavery, policing, mass incarceration, and other contemporary forms of anti-Black racism: “It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the Black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.”

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Unequal experiences of time and precarity justify scrutinizing the proliferation of self-help and personal-development content. But isn’t it possible, as all the bumper stickers suggest, that we really can be the change we wish to see in the world? And what’s wrong with trying to become more disciplined to achieve your goals anyway? “Self-help has generally promised to revolutionize your life, not the social or economic hierarchy—and you can’t really blame anyone for not fulfilling a promise they never made,” Odell acknowledges. “At the same time, even seemingly practical self-help can read as an invitation to find a niche in a brutal world and wait for the storm to pass you over.”

We might consider the journey of Neil Yaniky, an eager participant at a Tony Robbins–style self-help seminar in one of my favorite short stories by George Saunders. In a darkened meeting room at the Hyatt, Neil listens to Tom Rodgers, the “founder of the Seminars,” share the secret to achieving inner peace: we’re all born good, Rodgers says, like a simple, nourishing bowl of oatmeal; however, “in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time—friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids!” Rodgers shares a story about someone who was crapping in his oatmeal: his disabled brother Gene, who was always “demanding round-the-clock attention,” until Rodgers found the “inner strength” to say no more and offloaded his brother’s care onto their sister.

Like Rodgers, Neil has a sister who always seems to be demanding too much of his attention, time, and care. After this sermon of sorts, Neil takes his place in a line of other attendees waiting to enter “Personal Change Centers, small white tents set up in a row near the fire door” of the Hyatt. This scene evokes the 19th-century camp meetings and tent revivals that Smith writes about. As Neil waits to enter one of the tents, he chews on his mustache and considers why he needs to change: he is shrimpy and balding before his thirties, and “he had no career, really, and no business, but only soldered little triangular things in his basement, for forty-seven cents a little triangular thing, for CompuParts, although he had high hopes for something better, which was why he was here.”

Consider how Neil internalizes a social problem—the misery of low-wage, exploitative work in a capitalist market society. Economic precarity is a big source of his unhappiness. However, when Neil enters Personal Change Center 4, he does not mention his job. Rodgers’s assistants ask Neil to write the name of someone crapping in his oatmeal on a dummy in a smock. “Winky: Crazy-looking and too religious and needs her own place.” The flunkies walk him through how to confront his sister Winky (i.e., kick her out), and he leaves with instructions to repeat a mantra the whole way home: “Now Is the Time for Me to Win!”

This story tracks a pervasive tendency in American life to identify problem individuals, including oneself, rather than collective social problems, such as class structures, income inequality, and exploitative work. Neil’s sister Winky might be annoying, but she isn’t the thing keeping him down. This becomes clear on his walk home, as he prepares to confront her. He mentally reviews what Rodgers’s book says successful, powerful guys do in moments like this:

 

Those guys knew how to find and occupy their Power Places, and he did too, like when he sometimes had to solder a thousand triangular things in a night to make the rent, and drink coffee till dawn and crank WMDX full blast to stay psyched. On those nights, when Winky came up making small talk, he boldly waved her away.

Neil conflates navigating the manipulations of low-wage labor with achieving inner strength, and it is poignant that he summons the memories of these Pyrrhic victories to muster the courage to ditch the one human being keeping him company and caring for him on those nights when he would otherwise be soldering triangular things alone in his basement.

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Self-help and self-care can feel like zero-sum games (after all, it’s called self-care, not self-and-everybody-else-care). For that reason, it is easy to dismiss these movements as new formations of American individualism. However, Smith encourages readers to adopt a more curious and less judgmental orientation in Thoreau’s Axe:

 

You can say that therapeutic self-care distracts people from the true, structural causes of human misery, but when you talk this way, you are doing your own moralizing about attention. The real question is whether disciplines of attention can be linked up with programs for economic and social—not just personal—transformation.

In fact, individual transformations stoked some of the fieriest uprisings against social injustice in the 19th century. Smith points to the “rebel prophet” Nat Turner, who led an insurrection against Virginia slaveholders in 1831, only after he began to “direct [his] attention” to resisting slavery. Smith recounts how Turner gathered his accomplices in the woods on the night of a solar eclipse. This moment resembles a revival meeting, but not the kind we would expect: “There, in the open air, he reveals his prophesies and speaks his exhortations. […] Turner’s plot unfolded in this sequence: devotion, revival, insurrection.” Smith pushes us to consider how revivals and other disciplines of attention need not be seen only as dominating or coercive but also as potentially liberating: “Revivals bring a Christian ethic of sober living to the working classes and the disenfranchised, but they can also become festivals of democratic intimacy, fiery and uncontained,” he writes. “Ascetic devotion mortifies improper desires, yet it occasionally prepares dissenters for resistance, even rebellion.”

The problem seems to arise when our attempts to become more self-disciplined distract us from imagining more equitable distributions of the things all humans need to lead good-enough lives. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel makes this point in her most recent graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021). Each section of the book follows a fitness fad that marked a decade of her life: in the 1970s, she jogged; in the ’80s, she took martial arts classes, bought a home rowing machine, and watched her “fad-resistant mother” become a Jane Fonda devotee. “The boom of workout videos and home exercise equipment offered a compelling mix of privacy and communal experience that would reach its apotheosis decades later with Peloton, the stationary bike that livestreams classes,” Bechdel writes. On one hand, she relished the physical and mental strength each of these phases afforded. On the other hand, her narrative ends on an extremely ambivalent note. Written during the Trump presidency and published after the killing of George Floyd, Bechdel’s memoir could not help but question what the American obsession with individualism, independence, and transcendence has done to collective life: “I see now that my yearning for self-transcendence is in some ways an attempt to avoid the strain of relating to other people.”

This impulse to turn inward and focus on ourselves might have something to do with a pervasive sense of mistrust in American life today. Even when the people we know or the brands we love direct our attention to collective concerns, it can sometimes feel inauthentic and self-aggrandizing. Comedian Chris Rock talks about this extensively in his new Netflix stand-up special, Selective Outrage, which streamed live in early March. Rock draws attention to the way making hollow gestures at social justice and wokeness has become a new form of self-discipline that encourages us to “cancel” and alienate one another rather than imagine more inclusive and just systems. Rock (a Black man) says, I have no problem with the wokeness. […] I’m all for social justice. […] The thing I have a problem with is the selective outrage. That’s right, selective outrage. […] One person does something, they get canceled. Somebody else does the exact same thing—nothing.” He’s not the first to critique “cancel culture,” but he brings an important contradiction on the left into stark relief: attention often feels directed toward disciplining and shaming toxic individuals rather than on alleviating toxic conditions, up to and including the subtle manipulations of tech capitalists whose digital platforms direct the attention of users to engage in online shaming.

Rock’s performance ingeniously pushes the audience to reflect on both the right and left’s encouragement of forms of self-discipline that pit humans against one another: “In the old days, if somebody wanted your job, they just worked harder than you,” Rock says, alluding to conservative bootstrapper ideology. “Now, somebody wants your job, they just wait for you to say some dumb shit. […] Try to get you with one of them woke traps. Say, ‘Hey, we going to a gay wedding tomorrow. How do you feel about that?’ Oh, ho, ho, ho! ‘It’s good!’ […] Don’t fall into the woke trap at all now.” It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. Rock could plausibly be parodying the right’s moral panic over wokeness or genuinely critiquing the left. The brilliance of it, though, is in how he allows us to consider the way that both the right’s bootstrap mentality and the left’s tendency to set “woke traps” encourage antagonism and competition between individuals.

The people in this sketch are not paying attention to the large-scale conditions that create competition in the first place. Their own forms of self-discipline distract them from imagining collective gains that might feel genuinely liberating. That could mean universal healthcare or universal basic income, but right now in the United States, we have yet to ensure that everyone has what Thoreau calls in Walden the “necessaries of life,” meaning food, shelter, clothing, and fuel—“for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.”

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Chelsea Fitzgerald is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Yale and an assistant editor at The Yale Review.