it’s 50F in january in new york city — a fact that is paradoxically bleak (climate change) and fantastic (it’s sunny and my will to live is higher than it’s been in months — so high that I’ve revived this newsletter after 1.5 years of inactivity).
that’s not to say I haven’t tried writing: the multiple half-assed drafts in my substack suggest otherwise. what has stopped me, besides a general lack of discipline, is the ever-present fear of ‘wasting time.’ being solidly in my mid-20’s, moving to new york, and the world generally reviving again despite covid very much still around have all coalesced into a question that drives me to distraction daily:
is this the best use of my time right now, out of all the other options available to me?
‘free’ time as a concept has been haunting my conversations and thoughts recently. for me, free time is taken to mean any time outside of my job (hence, the quotations), which in itself is already kind of fucked up since it implies that there is no freedom to choose to spend most of my conscious time working. an obviously true statement, but still depressing.
having free time also pairs with access to convenience, which is a slippery slope to exploitation in the hellscape that is capitalism. for example, those with enough resources may ‘optimize’ the amount of free time they have by outsourcing necessary tasks, such as getting their groceries delivered; their laundry washed; the apartment cleaned by someone else; their children taken care of; getting driven around instead of walking or taking public transportation; the list continues. this is not to say that these practices are inherently exploitative, but it’s worth mentioning that the pursuit of ‘free’ time for one often comes at the expense of others’ time, resources, or experience. an extreme example of convenience enabling free time for one at the detriment of many is seen in the lavish lifestyles of billionaires who take private jets at tiny distances just to save themselves time (and the onerous experience of being near other people).
not only is free time is a bit of a misnomer, i often feel a lack of free will in choosing what to do with my free time. a peek behind the curtains at any marketing operation reveals why this is: companies are spending billions in a zero-sum competition for our attention and precious ‘free’ time. and i, hapless consumer being farmed for every bit of my data, fall prey to the lowest common denominator: my comfort content of choice that i turn to when faced with the overwhelming prospect of endless possibilities.
the array of options available on the phone and the internet feel inevitably overwhelming, and this feeling is largely intentional: not through the fault of a random seo marketing team but rather through the goals of capitalism, which are always to accumulate more users which equals more growth which equals more investment, profit, stock value, etc. so how much free will do i really have in controlling my free time as long as i am reliant on my phone as a way to communicate, navigate, do work, read, listen, organize, and more? (great read suggested by anson: is the internet inevitable?)
said differently: how does one actually wrest back control of their free will, and thus their free time, from the large corporations vying for their attention? i’m not the only one grappling with this: on tiktok, people describe their ‘5-9 before their 9-5’ or their ‘5-9 after their 9-5’ with all sorts of ideas on how to ‘hack’ the precious free time before and after work.
when trying to answer this question myself, i’ve come across a lot of content that feels like those tiktoks; there is of course a ted talk on the topic in addition to endless self-help books. most of the tips can be distilled into the following: to gain control of your free time, you need to track it, schedule it, and optimize it.
these solutions seem plausible as someone who has a literal kitchen timer on her desk to keep on task during work, but still feel a little #girlbossy as they put the onus of both finding free time and using it well entirely on the individual (vs. addressing the systems that limit our free time and our free will). however, when thinking about the billions of dollars spent trying to get me to do anything and everything besides things i want to do, maybe a schedule and a tracker are necessary tools to bring to the fight for my time and attention. i find it difficult to separate traditionally good habits (discipline) with their warped ‘boot-strappy’ extremes, but it’s good to remember that not every ‘hack’ is a bad hack, and not every schedule and attempt at self-efficiency is a manifestation of capitalism.
another tactic i have considered and used to varying degrees of success is developing a clear understanding of what i want to do with my time vs. what i actually end up doing: ‘scrolling on my phone’ is low on the list of things i want to do, whereas ‘staying in touch with my friends’ is high on that list. sometimes, scrolling feels suspiciously close to ‘staying in touch,’ when in reality a screen-free phone call accomplishes the job much better. similarly, i might want to read more long-form content and learn things, but what i actually do is look at twitter and reddit instead of reading a book.
upon reflection, this is a very meta newsletter: 10 paragraphs explaining that the reason i haven’t written a newsletter in 1.5 years is NOT laziness but rather a lack of free time caused by a lack of free will in capitalist america 💅
the system is the root cause of rot
things in common between the shootings in california and the police killing of tyre nichols: the perpetrators were the same race as the victims. while some will use these as an example of ‘it’s not white people it’s [fill-in-the-blank]’, it’s not very difficult to understand that: 1) most of the time it is white people and 2) all of the time it’s a symptom of our carceral society: one that punishes and punishes and punishes — a society with roots in slavery.
reads, both recent and not
why do rich people love quiet? the sound of gentrification is silence.