"One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The [[Catholic]] legal scholar [[Cathleen Kaveny]] has argued that **the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients**. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. "So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. **It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all**. "As [[Cathleen Kaveny|Kaveny]] writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” **When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford**. There may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d care to admit." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[law-firm-business]], [[efficiencies]], **Source** --[[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]