Why do you still feel wasted in the free time you wanted to do after work?

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Updated on: 16-0-0 0:0:0

I want to lie down but can't lie down completely, I want to quit my job and don't go to work and feel anxious, and I have a lot of things I want to do but choose to do nothing in the end...... Broken bodies, high-intensity emotional labor, take-out and pre-made dishes, housework outsourcing, compensatory consumption, when work has taken over our lives, do we have any other options?

David Frayne's "Say No to Work" analyzes the social reasons behind these emotions and phenomena, pointing out that work-life balance is just an ideological ruse, and it's not your fault!

When exactly does the day's work end?

I start with a simple-sounding question: When exactly does the day's work really end? While we may be in a position where we are contractually required to work a certain number of hours a day, it is clear that we don't simply step out of the workplace and enter a free world after hours. This was revealed by Theodore Adorno in a short but sharp article "Free Time", published back in the 1970s. Adorno questioned the extent to which people are truly autonomous in their time outside of work. He argues that the underlying purpose of non-working time is simply to prepare people for a return to work: free time is not free at all, but simply "a continuation of a profit-oriented form of social life".

This is because the activities involved are often of a similar nature to work (e.g., looking at screens, doing household chores), but also because alienation can lead to a strong need for rest and recovery after work. By depleting people's physical and mental strength, alienated forms of work ensure that most of the worker's non-working time is spent relaxing, retreating to escapist forms of entertainment, or compensating for the day's fatigue through consumption.

If these restorative or compensatory activities that we do in our free time are always pleasant, Adorno would say that these pleasures are only a superficial expression of freedom. He argues that as long as free time is still determined by the forces that people are trying to escape, then it is not true freedom. He insisted that there was a need to further separate free time from better genuine leisure. If free time is merely a continuation of work, then true leisure represents a sweet "oasis of unmediated life": a place in which people experience the world and its culture in real freedom, detached from economic needs.

Adorno argues that what prevails in affluent societies is a degenerate form of free time, rather than real leisure. In this depraved free time, the self-defined activities are often confined to "hobbies": trivial activities to pass the time that belongs to us. Adorno vehemently objected to the term hobby, arguing that it devalued unpaid activities. In a memorable passage, he proudly says:

I don't have a hobby. It's not that I'm the kind of workaholic who can't do anything with my time other than diligently complete the mandated tasks. Rather, as far as activities outside of my professional sphere are concerned, I also take them very seriously without exception...... Making music, listening to music, and reading intently are an integral part of my life; To call them hobbies is to make a mockery of them.

Adorno is often accused of elitism because he makes a rather radical distinction between "high" and "low" cultures. In the above quotation, his serious interest in reading, composing, and listening to music (rest assured, it must be classical) is faintly contrasted with "lower," more escapist forms of culture. I will not defend this distinction here, but I would like to point out that Adorno's universal assertion that people's time is under siege is of great contemporary significance.

We can think about the extent to which the standard eight-hour workday divides free time into pieces. The time experience of a full-time worker writer is a series of rapidly discrete fragments of time: working hours and free time alternate, and free time is limited to evenings, weekends, and holidays. When free time is divided in this way, the sloppy hobbies that Adorno condemns may become the only thing we can do in our limited time.

The small amount of free time we have gives us very little space to engage in more substantive, self-defined activities that often require a steady investment of time and energy, whether it's focus, dedication, community building, or learning new skills. The biggest victims of this situation are today's typical busy workers: they only get home in transit after dark, still have emails to reply, often feel so exhausted that they can't communicate emotionally with their families, and they are reluctant to do anything other than drink and watch TV before bed. The point here is not that drinking or watching TV is a "low-level" activity, but that workers have been deprived of the time and energy to choose other activities.

We can see in The Lego Movie in 2014 that Adorno called the modern manifestation of the depravity of leisure time. The film's main character, an ordinary man named Emmett, spends most of his time not working sitting on the couch, listening to the brainless pop song "Everything Great" (the equivalent of Farrell Williams' "Happy" in the Lego world), watching TV commercials, and seriously tuning into a movie called "Where Are My Pants?" comedy. Emmett showers, brushes his teeth, and exercises at the same time every day, gets stuck in the same traffic jams on his commute, has the same empty conversations with his co-workers, and then returns home to his best and only friend, a potted plant. If we are willing to ignore the ironic fact that this critique is the product of capitalism's own cultural industry (because it is essentially a multi-million dollar Lego commercial), we will gain insight into the nature of modern life being managed in The Lego Movie.

Adorno's argument that free time is a continuation of work also took a literal turn in the 21th century: with the rise of online technologies such as laptops and smartphones, work seeped into the previously non-existent and undesirable areas of life.

Melissa Greg explores how for many of today's employees, work breaks free from the time and space constraints of the workday and takes the form of a restless, ever-present "to-do" list. Through interviews with office workers, Greg reveals that technologies such as e-mail or instant messaging, which are best designed for non-synchronic communication, have the exact opposite effect on people – they feel pressured to be online, responsive, and reachable in the office. An article on the career counseling website "Whetstone" suggests that many professionals are now accustomed to the idea of being on call. One reader wrote:

Staying in touch with customers who are struggling or having questions via mobile or Skype can turn a potential crisis into a minor bump in the road. Customers won't tolerate excuses like "I'm on vacation." If we can't do it, my next vacation will be to take a hot shower at home with my rubber duck.

Just like their laptops, employees in today's highly engaged organizations seem to have to be "plugged in" at all times.

Free time to sit still

When Microsoft's latest console, the Xbox One, was launched, it was heavily marketed with speed as a selling point. Gone are the days when players plugged in disks, waited for them to load, and then spent hours playing the game. The game now loads almost instantly. Tired of the game? With the push of a button (or a wave of your hand for those who are spending a fortune on a more expensive model), you can split the display in two, allowing you to watch TV while playing games. Achieved a fairly fast lap time in a driving game? Seamlessly exit the game and enter the social media app to share your achievements with friends online. Want to get a behind-the-scenes look at your favorite TV show? Sync your tablet with your Xbox One and use it as a second screen to browse the latest behind-the-scenes information as you watch. Xbox One is a high-speed entertainment system built for the high-speed generation. It brought the same fate to video games as modern pop music. Walter Kerr wrote in his book The Decline of Pleasure:

We have music for reading, music for falling asleep, and, as one humorist said, music for listening to music. What's interesting about these titles is that they so candidly describe the place of pop art in our time. They begin by admitting that, for God's sake, no one should sit down and listen to music. Everyone thinks that when the music is playing, everyone who can hear it is going to do something else.

The Xbox One, like "music for reading" or "dinner shows" in Kerr's books, is a product for what Staffan Lind calls the "busy leisure class". When there is not enough free time, the few free time that we have can become stressful and anxious, and we are more and more inclined to take leisure with the same sense of efficiency and productivity as we do at work. The appeal of a futuristic product like the Xbox One is its ability to compact our pleasure time and even allow us to enjoy multiple activities at the same time.

In other words, it allows us to get the most pleasure out of a small amount of leisure time. However, marketing pitches ignore the fact that no matter how we organize and arrange our enjoyment, it's never enough to combat the overwhelming tension that comes with having too little free time (not to mention the clutter that comes with trying to focus on two things at once). The general point of Staffan Lind's book, written in the 1970s, is that affluent societies have developed to a point where leisure time is no longer leisure. The busy class is spending faster than they can actually enjoy goods. In his trademark sarcastic tone, Linde wrote:

After dinner, [a person] might sip Brazilian coffee, smoke a Dutch cigar, sip French brandy, read the New York Times, listen to the Brandenburg Concerto, amuse his Swedish wife – all at the same time, with varying degrees of success.

Today, wealthy workers come home from a hard day's work and find their homes full of objects inviting them to an activity. In my own home, all I found was a Netflix account popping up with countless viewing recommendations, a set of bookshelves crammed with CDs, a pile of impulsively bought books waiting for me to read, and a refrigerator full of ingredients that needed to be cooked before they went bad. These are a lot of sources of joy when I'm not as busy, but when I'm too busy to enjoy them, they're nothing more than a source of frustration. It's easy to feel anxious about these possessions, and they serve as a reminder of how scarce free time is. Trapped by too many options and frustrated by the lack of free time, we often choose what seems to be the only thing that works—doing nothing.

A subset of participants in my study knew this feeling very well. Lucy reminds her husband, Matthew, of the anxious inertia he experienced while working at a local magazine:

A lot of times, when you come home from there, you'll just sit back and don't know what to do, and you'll be very annoyed that you're wasting your time. Or that you won't do anything other than that you absolutely want to do – like you won't watch a movie with me because it's kind of like a waste of time when you could have done something better. But in the end, you often don't do anything.

Lucy said she experienced similar tension during her breaks while working at a budget store. Her free time during that time, she said, was almost worthless: "On Saturday I would work from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m., which was terrible because it was four p.m., and I couldn't do anything until then because I would be frustrated that I had to go to work that night." And when Lucy's turn to start the shift at 11 a.m., "a lot of people will say, 'Aren't you happy if you can sleep in?'" I would think, no, I can't do anything because I'm going to work at eleven o'clock. Until then, you can't just go out and do what you like."

These fidgeting experiences are common throughout my research. Larry (our frustrated social worker) said he loves to read novels, but usually feels too tired to read after work: "I've had enough of that screen. At one point, Jack said, he felt completely "burned," "physically and mentally overdrawn" in his old full-time job, and was "always in a state of recovering from work." Participants came to realize that most of their free time had been spent in a state of preparation or recovery in their previous lives as full-time workers, and therefore that time still belonged to their employer in some sense.

If the lack of quality free time is one of the main pains of the work lifestyle, what new joys are found in slowing down and working less? For Sheriel, she believes that having more free time allows her to do a lot of things more spontaneously. She rediscovers the unplanned pleasures that are often not accepted in the prescribed schedule of the work week.

In her argument for alternative hedonism, Kate Soper argues that as life becomes busier, what is often lost is the "aesthetic or ritual dimension of consumption." We need only look at the changing practices around mealtimes to understand this. According to Soper, mealtime has personal and cultural value, as a "shared, joyful activity that has its own intrinsic value...... To promote human communication, to provide food for thinking and body renewal". Mealtime is an opportunity for extreme enjoyment and social interaction, but the speed of modern culture, with its ready-to-eat meals and pathetic desk lunches, has weakened its ritual.

This primitive pleasure, which has a deep psychological dimension, is reduced to an activity that is merely for the maintenance of biological functions. This is because the time it takes to get the necessary calories and vitamins must be used efficiently by reading the newspaper or watching TV at the same time.

Sorper describes such a phenomenon as the "despiritualization of consumption," and we can also note how supporters of today's "slow food" movement are rebelling against this despiritualization by celebrating the joy of cooking and eating. By emphasizing the more ritualistic or sublime pleasures that come from cooking, plating, and sharing food, the Slow Food movement seeks to rediscover the notion that eating is not just about replenishing the body. For some of the people I interviewed, slowing down seems to mean trying to save or re-invest in some "endangered" pleasures. Sherrill likes to find time to cook with her children, Matthew loves to "talk around the table", Samantha "sets the plate and makes the meal a little special", and Gerald loves to buy some good ingredients and "enjoy a nice evening at home".

Today's typical consumer is always looking for new desires immediately after the foot decoration, and the people I meet seem to embody and celebrate the ability to savor their pleasure. Matthew and Lucy talk at length about their love of computer games and explain how to enjoy this expensive hobby for a relatively small fee, that is, get the most out of each game. Lucy says it's important to "play through the game you have" before buying the next one, and it's reasonable to assume that playing the game this way doesn't reduce the couple's overall satisfaction. Stuffing leisure time with toys is a futile way to try to increase the fun, because the more luxury goods people buy, the less satisfaction they get from each item in a limited time.

As Lind said, "One person may buy more, but one cannot do more at everything." "Despite their love of video games, it's perhaps no surprise that Matthew and Lucy have expressed no interest in buying an Xbox One.

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