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time-sovereignty,
If you don’t know what’s coming down the line, preparing for the future becomes an infinite task. There are certain forms of work (creative, freelance, or adjunct) that make it especially unclear
In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han suggests something even more general: that “the drive to maximize production inhabits the social unconscious,” producing what he calls “the achievement-subject.” Rather than be disciplined by something or someone external to them, achievement-subjects are “entrepreneurs of themselves,” DIY bosses propelled from within.
Han observes that “the positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should” and that “the achievement-subject is faster and more productive than the obedience-subject.”
One response to a system of timing and grading is cynical: You game the system, as if with a cheat code (echoing the life-hacking approach of the productivity bros). My response was to internalize it.
the grading system I had both used and been subjected to had taken shape within the early-twentieth-century “social efficiency” movement in education, influenced, in turn, by Taylorism. A socially efficient curriculum meant a more vocational, less strictly academic one that would be legible to employers or the military and would help shunt people into the jobs they were going to do. As a form of evaluation, grading requires you to invoke some kind of standardized scale on which qualities can be reduced to quantities—something
In a study of “conspicuous busyness,” the sociologist Michelle Shir-Wise finds that irrespective of work-life balance, busyness can become a lifelong performance of productivity, where “not presenting oneself as [busy] may be construed as evidence of an inadequate and unworthy self”
Brittney Cooper’s argument that “white people own time.”
Where a non-Linda is controlled and surveilled directly by external circumstances, Linda perceives herself to be controlled and surveilled by the cultural “logic of expansion.” If Linda does not participate, she will be judged and have to pay a cost, whether it is social or financial.
The difference between the Linda and the precarious person is that the Linda can afford to pay that social cost. The similarity between the Linda and the non-Linda is that her “timer” (the culture of busyness) and the non-Linda’s “timer” (wage labor and structural disadvantage) have common roots. They uphold the same system, one in which time can be only a means for profit and where someone else can appear only as your competition.
Burkeman, who made that observation about our “frenetic doing,” has suggested that as we work for policy changes, someone like the achievement-subject should accept their mortality and give up the impossible quest for total control and optimization. I would add that the “giving up” part is most true for those who can afford to do so, which means an honest and possibly painful reckoning with one’s privilege.
experimenting with what looks like mediocrity in some parts of your life.
most pay increases happen before the age of forty-five.
On Twitter, “lie-flatters” replied to the article in acid tones. “It’s just wild to me that everyday [sic] we read headlines about pandemics, climate change, famine, drought, fires, hurricanes, weapons programs and war, and folks at Bloomberg just want us to work through it for $36k a year,” wrote one user.
Another summed up Schrager’s article this way: “Billionaire: ‘Quick, newspaper that I own. Write a story about how young people are lazy for realising that they’re just making me even more money while they can barely support themselves, will never own a house, and will need both parents working full time to support a family.’ ” Yet another asked, “Why work hard? I don’t own my work.”
But it is also a safeguard against the reaction that privileged people sometimes have to their own burnout: fortifying walled gardens of slowness, minimalism, and authenticity.
At best, such a reaction makes it easier for people to forsake the world and leave the status quo untouched. At worst, it actually deepens the status quo, creating a scenario in which slowness becomes a product that you buy off the backs of others.
“experience economy.” B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore coined the term in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article in which they theorized that “commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable,”
Papers in the Journal of Travel Research have detailed the many uses of “social media envy” and “incidental vicarious travel consumption (IVTC),” noting that people with low self-esteem are especially susceptible and should be of special interest to marketers.
“Peace as a new luxury,”
I can’t think of a better description of commercial social media, where the “stuff” is a sense of belonging.
Images and experiences are the leisure time counterpart of time management self-help. The same individual who is encouraged to buy time from others instead of having a mutual support network is also encouraged to consume periodic experiences of slowness instead of acting in ways that might reclaim her time—or help others reclaim theirs.
“Consumption, rather than savings alone, emerged as an essential economic practice; as opposed to mere idleness, nonwork time was recognized as an economically relevant time, time to create new reasons to work more.”
But that is just the issue with social media: It’s never clear where an individual ends and the individual-as-entrepreneur begins.
There, I associate free time with public space, writing of a situation where “the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.”
“[in] a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.”
These projects reflected the idea that it was the state’s responsibility to provide leisure resources to citizens, a notion informed by progressivism, the budding social sciences, and—something that sounds ridiculous now—concerns about more people having too much time.
In general, leisure paid dividends in “health, happiness, and increased efficiency.”
W.E.B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness”: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
In leisure, there is more to be free from than just the clock.
leisure as a public good
The historian Victoria W. Wolcott writes that “even before the codification of Jim Crow in the 1890s, whites were more likely to enforce racial separation in recreational spaces than anywhere else.”
The town leaders had hastily buried the pool in the early 1970s rather than allow local blacks to swim alongside their white children.”
In other words, the situation would have to have been a postcard—and I the buyer of the postcard—rather than a living, breathing time and place subject to the same pain and injustice found anywhere else.
my visit could not be characterized as that of a consumer buying a product, nor even of an untroubled patron to a public park, but of a troubled being meeting a troubled world. And, crucially, this encounter occurred in time.
If the concept of leisure has any utility, for me it has to be this: an interruption, an apprehension, a glimpse both of the truth and of something completely different from what we normally see. This leisure is alien not just to the world of work, but also to the habitual, everyday world. Given the opportunity to slow down, what I find is not slowness per se, but simply what has been happening all along, just outside my perception.
If leisure has been an apolitical sanctuary for the people who are favored by such norms, it has always been political for those who are disfavored and for whom access to an enjoyable, dignified life is inescapably an issue of justice.
If these are sanctuaries, they are less places to bury your head in the sand than places where different languages of time and being are kept alive.
“Rest is not some cute lil luxury item you grant to yourself as an extra treat after you’ve worked like a machine and are now burned out,” Hersey tweeted in October 2020. “Rest is our path to liberation. A portal for healing. A right.”
It’s an especially cruel irony, given that The Nap Ministry specifically addresses the sleep deprivation of enslaved people and their status as commodified bodies. For Hersey, rest is simultaneously “a spiritual practice, a racial justice issue and a social justice issue.”
Whereas the source of boredom for the leisure class was free time, the source of boredom for everyone else was work, and working people had no problem deciding what to do with whatever leisure time they were allotted.
To demand leisure in the nineteenth century was also to ask a fundamental question about whether workers existed for capitalists or for themselves. How much of this one precious life was owed to capital?
they wanted not to have to sell their time in the first place.
Barbara Luck’s 1982 poem “The Thing That Is Missed” articulates the absurdity of this “freedom”: The thing that is missed is time without plans, time that invents itself like children with summer vacation, day after day of it, not one free square on your mark get set go Have FUN-dammit-FUN RUN-dammit-RUN Time’s up. Back on the line. Well did you have fun? Not too much fun? Too hectic? More relaxing to work isn’t it… heh heh heh heh
At its most useful, however, leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it. Like a stent in a culture that can’t stand what looks like emptiness, it might provide that vertical crack in the horizontal scale of work and not-work—that critical pause during which the worker wonders why she works so much, where collective grief is processed, and where the edges of something new start to become visible.
Pieper’s vertical time “run[ning] at right angles to work,”
