Free time reflects an entirely civilized thoughtform. The uncivilized don’t have free time. The idea would make no sense in a hunter-gatherer context. For free time to have any meaning whatsoever, it is necessary that we endure some proportion of our lived experience in which we are not free.
According to Theodor Adorno, “free time is shackled to its opposite.” Inmates in prison are granted “free time,” and yet there is never a moment of time in which they are free. And the same is no less true of those who happen to live on the other side of the prison walls.
Adorno makes a distinction between free time and leisure time. One of the primary differences is that when a person is acting leisurely, they are under no obligation to act in any specific way at all. That is not the case with free time, however.
Free time, as an idea, is a creation of modern civilization (specifically what Adorno calls “the culture industry”), and involves the commercial cooption of recreation, the commoditizing of whatever time a person has available that is not already committed to wage labor and biological necessity. It is not enough to simply rest and recover between periods of work, but we are expected to seek out commoditized forms of distraction and entertainment as well.
Consider how the average civilized person populates their so-called free time. Consider how much time is typically spent interacting with various internet-connected devices, much of which boils down to the seeking out of simple distraction. All forms of electronic distraction, however, are fully saturated consumer spaces. And even in those rare cases where you are not being marketed to directly, your online activity is being exploited for profit.
But even prior to the internet, so-called free time was never meant to be leisure time. It has always meant to be filled with activities linked to consumable products: sports, entertainment, camping, hobbies, beach vacations. Free time is free only in that that there is a deceptive sense that free choice is involved: we are free to choose from a wide and ever-expanding array of consumable products and activities to fill our time, but the options come to us preformulated—we do not have the ability (or the psychological tools) to stock this array of options ourselves from scratch. And the idea of doing nothing, of not “filling our time,” is anathema, with boredom looming just around the corner as a pernicious side effect to be avoided at all cost.
We need to see free time for what it really is, and to understand that if there is any portion of life that is not free, then there is no portion of life that is truly free.
We need to reclaim our time—all of our time. We don’t need to increase our free time, or whatever you choose to call the temporal space between obligatory bouts of coerced labor. Instead, we need to truly free our time, we need to reoccupy the present moment and begin to dislodge it from its civilized fetters.
