Free time

What do you like to do in your free time?

This question’s been floating around in my head over the past few days. Maybe it’s because I have quite a bit of this ‘so called free time’, or maybe it’s just my head. Irrespective of what it is, I let the question marinate for a bit inside my head and it gave me interesting results.

Here’s a bit of a taste, if you’d like some.

The idea of free time denotes two things - the concept of time as we humans define our existence, that is pockets of days, and months, and hours, and minutes. And the idea that any pocket of time that is not used in ‘productive activity’, read: anything that has a monetary value attached to it, is quite simply, free.

But if my free time is the time that was originally already allocated to me, then is that actually free time or is that just my time?

It’s such an interesting concept that capitalism and human greed has made us believe in. That as adults any time we have should be spent in the pursuit of something better, greater, richer. Something that makes us more prosperous than we currently are. But if you sit back and think about it, isn’t prosperity itself defined differently by different people?

When anything confuses me or intrigues me, they both end up leading me to the same place - to the little version of me from long, long ago.

Many of the answers we’re looking for were already with us when we were children. Nobody ever asks a child what they like to do in their free time. Or wait, the question is framed differently then. It’s often posed as, ‘what are your hobbies?’

When I was a child, I had a long list of hobbies that kept growing with every summer vacation. I always loved to read, so that didn’t count as a hobby per se, but painting, poetry, crafts of every kind, stamps and coin collections, even foraging for leaves and stones and shiny pieces of paper (yes, I was quite the ragamuffin) fell into the category of hobbies. I always had something I was interested in doing that wasn’t previously in the list.

Maybe that’s why getting good grades wasn’t much of a priority in school. This isn’t to say that I fared poorly in school, but that I just did enough to be out of trouble. Aspiring to be right on the top never appealed to me, it still doesn’t.

The past few months have been revelatory in so many ways. I realized how much of my self worth was attached to my work, to being appreciated at work. Strangely, that’s so much in contrast to who I was as a child. So, when I quit my job in a huff, and struggled to be placed almost immediately as I always do, it bothered me. But because I had the time, I went back to that child-version of me to discover who I was right now. I realized that I love to cook, to sew, to paint, to read, to write. So many facets of my personality that I’d forgotten because I’d been busy and confused about what to do with my ‘free time’, and so had wilfully ignored.

My time is my own.

Anything that I do professionally, I am paid to do it. I am paid for my time. That is a part of who I am and not the entirety of who I am. I have no free time, because everything I do is my own and of my own volition. There are things I do with my time, I am paid for some of those things. But most of them are my own.

So, the next time you ask someone what they do in their free time, maybe think for a moment and rephrase that question and see how they respond. It might make all the difference.