Nothing. I would simply enjoy the free time as that, for doing what I felt like in that particular moment. After all the moment we "do" something it stops becoming free time because we've scheduled it and/or committed to it in some way. Culturally this goes against the way we are taught to think and be in most of our current societies which value drive, motivation, purpose, achievement, influence, etc. Is it not enough just to "be" some of the time? Or must we call this "me-time" or "meditation" or "down time" or "holiday" or "spending more time with my family" to give ourselves permission just to be?
I spent most of my life rushing about. When I stopped being a school principal after 8.5 years in 2007, I promised myself I would only do work that was play for me and that I would do all the things I didn't have time to do as a principal. Whilst I did work hard, it never felt like work. I loved 95% of it - I became an education consultant specialising in learning and play outdoors and did substitute teaching.
Now I only have months to live, as I have a blood cancer (Acute Myeloid Leukaemia) which can no longer be treated. Aside from medical matters which take up too much of my precious time, it's "free" time and I continue to love every moment. I'm still busy but have freedom to choose. Whilst death is close - I'm in my mid fifties, I know I have a privileged life and grateful to have had the experiences, good fortune, deep friendships and capacity that have enabled me to have such a free life (alongside living in a wealthy country). I was the family breadwinner until very recently and deliberately paid myself a modest income which was usually slightly less than the UK average most years I was a consultant.
That's very kind of you to say so. I think I'm fortunate to have had sufficient time to reflect. Perhaps this is also a relevant concept - that of sufficiency when we all feel our time (one way or another) to be limited and that of choice. Do we feel we have choice or agency over how we use our time? Substitute the word "play" for "time" and I think it would be interesting to hear children's responses.
I'm in a slightly similar situation. Except my friends say I have five years. No prognosis from my, I think somewhat incompetent Drs. Congestive heart failure and pulmanary granulomas from sarcoidosis. I'm also fortunate -- A very loving partner and interesting foreign adventures. PhD from Keele, shot at during the aborted golpe de estado in Santiago, demonstrated labs at the U. of Nairobi, collected radioactive mushrooms in Sweden. Vacation in Moscow and Leningrad hosted by the woman who picked me up in Dresden(second time with partner Nancy); anyways enough. Yes! more time to clean up the huge clutter in the house, so I can go vacation in Cuba; French citizen, so no problem. If pleasant or so find New Zealand, sell house and partially settle -- would like to "pay back" England for my paid demonstrator ship by volunteering at a college. Or finally learn French beyond my baby French -- escaped occupied Paris in '41.
bc .... who had only two full time jobs: one year in 1961: computer company, and thirteen years: Physics Advanced Lab Mgr. at UC Sant Cruz retired in 1997.
I think I would spend more time with my family, practice the guitar more, set aside more time to read my growing backlog of books, go on more walks in new places, take a WSET Diploma in wine, learn to make cheese, brew beer and cure meat, and just generally spend more time in my kitchen cooking. There are probably other things, but these are the first things that came to mind.
I’m now sat here wondering, why don’t I just try and restructure my time so that I can do these things as much as possible.
I have 3 young kids and, although my husband tries his best, I'm not yet able to leave the kids alone. If suddenly that changed, I would go back to salsa dancing. It was something my Mum frowned upon when I first started as an 18 year old, compared to the other activities I did as a child (which she overly praised and tried to encourage - none of which I want to do anymore either). It was the one place I felt was 100% my choice, and the other salseras always made me feel welcome.
As a side note, my brain never stops thinking. Salsa is the only thing I've found which forces my brain to switch off, as I have to concentrate enough to follow the man's lead but, by following the lead, I am not in control of anything at all, so my brain is unable to think of other worries. It's also a social time and having moved around a lot, has been an easier way to get to know people than just randomly going upto people and trying to make small talk.
I was literally talking to my parents the other day about what activities switch our brains off and allow us to live in the moment (for those of us who have difficulty doing that). It’s so interesting to hear how it’s different for everyone. Dancing does it for me too.
In no particular order: read, guitar, spend 1:1 time w my wife, build home stuff in the yard (playground, gazebo), trailrun (more), bake bread (more), have unstructured/extended playtime w my kids (more!), drink beer (more), get a project car to work on. I guess some of this stuff I already get to do, which is nice to contemplate, but I’d just like more time for it all! Looking forward to the post! 🤙
I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently. In my late teens and early twenties, I used to frequently despair about how little of my time was "free." I was working 40-60 hours a week at minimum/low-wage jobs I didn't terribly enjoy and relying on a very limited, rural public transit system to get to work, the grocery store, etc.
Now I have a car, a 30 minute round-trip daily commute, I work 35-40 hours a week doing work that I (usually) genuinely enjoy, and I get paid---well, still significantly less than a "living wage" for my area, but enough that I can afford to regularly do fun things that cost a bit of money and I'm not constantly stressed about my finances.
I have a lot more "free" waking hours now than I used to, and my hours spent at work don't feel as depressingly un-free as they used to. I don't feel like I work too much anymore. The old refrain of "I don't have enough time to do everything" admittedly still runs through my mind on a regular basis, but what I've noticed from the recent time periods when I've had the option to work less than 35 hrs/wk and have more free time is that I'm not actually happier.
Important details about my lifestyle: I have no kids, I don't have family or a religious community, and I have a partner but we haven't moved in together. I get along with my housemates, but we're not particularly close and all have different schedules. Even when I have more free time, pretty much everyone I know is busy working. I can't spend my extra free time with the people I care about, so that free time actually makes me feel lonelier.
What I've found makes me feel happiest about the amount of time I have is when I'm able to do my "must do" tasks together with someone I care about. The occasions when I've been able to do my household chores alongside a friend (e.g. cooking together, cleaning together, folding/ironing our laundry together) have had some of the biggest impact on my satisfaction with how I spend my time. It's rare that I have the opportunity to actually do these things in-person with someone else, so whenever possible, I call a long-distance friend on the phone while I do these tasks.
In this society, the only typical avenue for a semblance of communal living is the nuclear family. As someone who grew up in an environment of neglect/isolation and then moved out at the age of 16, not having a family has meant that I've had to spend much of my "free" time alone against my wishes. Consequently, one of the big things that feels missing from life for me is a communal rhythm to our time. I wish our time off was more synchronised---that we had more frequent communal days of celebration and/or rest (like Sabbath) that we couldn't be compelled to opt out of by the pressures of capitalism. I feel the same about unpaid work I have to do: when I get grumpy about having to do laundry because it precludes me from spending time with people, I think about how my village-dwelling ancestors might have walked to the river together to wash clothes. I long for that.
That's my long answer, and probably my more accurate answer. But here are some of the things that I often think, "I'd like to do that if I had more time..." (although I'd most like to do them with other people!)
* Practice my fiddle more
* Go hiking and camping more
* Learn Tagalog and Arabic
* Learn how to cook all my favourite foods from scratch - I'd especially like to make my own tortillas fully from scratch, starting with the nixtamalisation process
I had not thought on "hospitality"... this resonates for me. I would really like to invite people to my home more often, without worrying about the house being messy, etc.
I was recently fired and haven’t been looking for another job yet. What I’ve actually been doing with more free time is Zumba classes and watching tiktok more. If you asked while i was working i would have said more indie game development. Turns out that’s not true 🤣
As a western, consumerist culture we do not know the worth of free time, so much so that this question can seem paradoxical.
I retired four years ago, and immediately plunged into home maintenance, caring for relatives, community projects, family projects and learning new skills.
Nearly all of these are motivated by a sense of obligation or moral pressure, and a need to demonstrate my worth through continual accomplishment - reiterating patterns I had mastered over 50 years of working.
Becoming aware of the insanity of this, I have been having counseling, exploring the Tao( of Pooh) and getting a really good massage once a month with the idea of establishing a new, fully present life. Sometimes I sit in the garden and think, and sometimes I just sits (thank you Pooh) - something about a garden regulates the breathing, the heart rhythm and the mind becomes clearer, more aware.
It is HARD!! to 'take time out', but hugely rewarding to discover a different sense of time and my place in it.
I am finding that the best use of 'free time' is to transform oneself, or at least to step out of the bindings of our Work! Consume! Die! culture. Only the brave ... 😉
If you had asked that of people 200 years ago, 50 years ago, 10 years ago they would have imagined all sorts of wonderful things. But we have seen the truth of it. We have machines that do so much of our work for us, ovens, electric mixers, computers, robotic vacuums to name just a very very very few. But how do we use that additional time? With family? Learning? Imagining? No. We are just as busy as humans have ever been. It's not busy with life-or-death running from animals or enemies. It's not busy with planting/harvesting/grinding/kneading/baking. It's a million things we "have time for" which all lead to feeling overwhelmed, overbooked and unable to enjoy rest and play.
So. If we had more free time, we'd have more expectations of our time.
One thing I see about to happen is the "free time" we will have once we are all traveling by self-driving cars. Will we sleep during the commute? Will we read Shakespeare or chat with friends? No. We will use that "extra" time for work. We will read emails, contact customers, get a leg up on the work day. We already do that on our phones all weekend, all vacation. We are never away from work. And we (the cultural "we") are ok with that, it's expected and feels normal already.
So, I don't think free time will equate to free time at all.
And all that from me, who is a glass-half-full/rose-colored glasses gal.
A lot of people are saying that they would use the free time for slower “work,” though, like baking, having a hobby farm, gardening and preserving food, knitting, etc.
We can turn work into play just as well as we can turn play into work.
I'm in my 50s. I've discovered I really like gardening. I am very happy spending a whole day on a garden project. At the end of a garden day, I have the same great feeling you get after a really good hike in the woods. Energized and an uplifted mood.
I'm in my mid-forties, moved from Singapore to Australia, and only just discovered the joy of plants and growing things in the garden. There is something soulful about doing so...
I think the key to more time is that You have more time but others don’t. Because if everyone had more time everyone will expect more and set demands higher. The other issue is the additional time has to be shared with the people who also want to spend it with you. Having more time just for yourself is one but I think many of us want to have more time to spend with loved ones. So THEY have to have to have the extra time AND commit to spending it with you.
I don’t think more time is the answer. We are the stewards of our own mortality. If we hadn’t made something property now, how would we manage more time any better?
Except for those with terminal illnesses that have a concrete goal, such as desperately wanting to see their child get married.
Nothing. I would simply enjoy the free time as that, for doing what I felt like in that particular moment. After all the moment we "do" something it stops becoming free time because we've scheduled it and/or committed to it in some way. Culturally this goes against the way we are taught to think and be in most of our current societies which value drive, motivation, purpose, achievement, influence, etc. Is it not enough just to "be" some of the time? Or must we call this "me-time" or "meditation" or "down time" or "holiday" or "spending more time with my family" to give ourselves permission just to be?
I spent most of my life rushing about. When I stopped being a school principal after 8.5 years in 2007, I promised myself I would only do work that was play for me and that I would do all the things I didn't have time to do as a principal. Whilst I did work hard, it never felt like work. I loved 95% of it - I became an education consultant specialising in learning and play outdoors and did substitute teaching.
Now I only have months to live, as I have a blood cancer (Acute Myeloid Leukaemia) which can no longer be treated. Aside from medical matters which take up too much of my precious time, it's "free" time and I continue to love every moment. I'm still busy but have freedom to choose. Whilst death is close - I'm in my mid fifties, I know I have a privileged life and grateful to have had the experiences, good fortune, deep friendships and capacity that have enabled me to have such a free life (alongside living in a wealthy country). I was the family breadwinner until very recently and deliberately paid myself a modest income which was usually slightly less than the UK average most years I was a consultant.
Thank you for sharing this. Your perspective in the face of a terminal prognosis is truly inspiring
That's very kind of you to say so. I think I'm fortunate to have had sufficient time to reflect. Perhaps this is also a relevant concept - that of sufficiency when we all feel our time (one way or another) to be limited and that of choice. Do we feel we have choice or agency over how we use our time? Substitute the word "play" for "time" and I think it would be interesting to hear children's responses.
wow!
I'm in a slightly similar situation. Except my friends say I have five years. No prognosis from my, I think somewhat incompetent Drs. Congestive heart failure and pulmanary granulomas from sarcoidosis. I'm also fortunate -- A very loving partner and interesting foreign adventures. PhD from Keele, shot at during the aborted golpe de estado in Santiago, demonstrated labs at the U. of Nairobi, collected radioactive mushrooms in Sweden. Vacation in Moscow and Leningrad hosted by the woman who picked me up in Dresden(second time with partner Nancy); anyways enough. Yes! more time to clean up the huge clutter in the house, so I can go vacation in Cuba; French citizen, so no problem. If pleasant or so find New Zealand, sell house and partially settle -- would like to "pay back" England for my paid demonstrator ship by volunteering at a college. Or finally learn French beyond my baby French -- escaped occupied Paris in '41.
bc .... who had only two full time jobs: one year in 1961: computer company, and thirteen years: Physics Advanced Lab Mgr. at UC Sant Cruz retired in 1997.
I think I would spend more time with my family, practice the guitar more, set aside more time to read my growing backlog of books, go on more walks in new places, take a WSET Diploma in wine, learn to make cheese, brew beer and cure meat, and just generally spend more time in my kitchen cooking. There are probably other things, but these are the first things that came to mind.
I’m now sat here wondering, why don’t I just try and restructure my time so that I can do these things as much as possible.
I have 3 young kids and, although my husband tries his best, I'm not yet able to leave the kids alone. If suddenly that changed, I would go back to salsa dancing. It was something my Mum frowned upon when I first started as an 18 year old, compared to the other activities I did as a child (which she overly praised and tried to encourage - none of which I want to do anymore either). It was the one place I felt was 100% my choice, and the other salseras always made me feel welcome.
As a side note, my brain never stops thinking. Salsa is the only thing I've found which forces my brain to switch off, as I have to concentrate enough to follow the man's lead but, by following the lead, I am not in control of anything at all, so my brain is unable to think of other worries. It's also a social time and having moved around a lot, has been an easier way to get to know people than just randomly going upto people and trying to make small talk.
I was literally talking to my parents the other day about what activities switch our brains off and allow us to live in the moment (for those of us who have difficulty doing that). It’s so interesting to hear how it’s different for everyone. Dancing does it for me too.
Metal detecting did that for me! :)
In no particular order: read, guitar, spend 1:1 time w my wife, build home stuff in the yard (playground, gazebo), trailrun (more), bake bread (more), have unstructured/extended playtime w my kids (more!), drink beer (more), get a project car to work on. I guess some of this stuff I already get to do, which is nice to contemplate, but I’d just like more time for it all! Looking forward to the post! 🤙
I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently. In my late teens and early twenties, I used to frequently despair about how little of my time was "free." I was working 40-60 hours a week at minimum/low-wage jobs I didn't terribly enjoy and relying on a very limited, rural public transit system to get to work, the grocery store, etc.
Now I have a car, a 30 minute round-trip daily commute, I work 35-40 hours a week doing work that I (usually) genuinely enjoy, and I get paid---well, still significantly less than a "living wage" for my area, but enough that I can afford to regularly do fun things that cost a bit of money and I'm not constantly stressed about my finances.
I have a lot more "free" waking hours now than I used to, and my hours spent at work don't feel as depressingly un-free as they used to. I don't feel like I work too much anymore. The old refrain of "I don't have enough time to do everything" admittedly still runs through my mind on a regular basis, but what I've noticed from the recent time periods when I've had the option to work less than 35 hrs/wk and have more free time is that I'm not actually happier.
Important details about my lifestyle: I have no kids, I don't have family or a religious community, and I have a partner but we haven't moved in together. I get along with my housemates, but we're not particularly close and all have different schedules. Even when I have more free time, pretty much everyone I know is busy working. I can't spend my extra free time with the people I care about, so that free time actually makes me feel lonelier.
What I've found makes me feel happiest about the amount of time I have is when I'm able to do my "must do" tasks together with someone I care about. The occasions when I've been able to do my household chores alongside a friend (e.g. cooking together, cleaning together, folding/ironing our laundry together) have had some of the biggest impact on my satisfaction with how I spend my time. It's rare that I have the opportunity to actually do these things in-person with someone else, so whenever possible, I call a long-distance friend on the phone while I do these tasks.
In this society, the only typical avenue for a semblance of communal living is the nuclear family. As someone who grew up in an environment of neglect/isolation and then moved out at the age of 16, not having a family has meant that I've had to spend much of my "free" time alone against my wishes. Consequently, one of the big things that feels missing from life for me is a communal rhythm to our time. I wish our time off was more synchronised---that we had more frequent communal days of celebration and/or rest (like Sabbath) that we couldn't be compelled to opt out of by the pressures of capitalism. I feel the same about unpaid work I have to do: when I get grumpy about having to do laundry because it precludes me from spending time with people, I think about how my village-dwelling ancestors might have walked to the river together to wash clothes. I long for that.
That's my long answer, and probably my more accurate answer. But here are some of the things that I often think, "I'd like to do that if I had more time..." (although I'd most like to do them with other people!)
* Practice my fiddle more
* Go hiking and camping more
* Learn Tagalog and Arabic
* Learn how to cook all my favourite foods from scratch - I'd especially like to make my own tortillas fully from scratch, starting with the nixtamalisation process
* Get back into darkroom photography
* Take an auto shop class
* Learn to sew
* Hunting & fishing
Spend more time outdoors. Read more. Spend time with hubby (he works long hours) and family. Practice more hospitality.
I had not thought on "hospitality"... this resonates for me. I would really like to invite people to my home more often, without worrying about the house being messy, etc.
Exactly what I am doing now
I was recently fired and haven’t been looking for another job yet. What I’ve actually been doing with more free time is Zumba classes and watching tiktok more. If you asked while i was working i would have said more indie game development. Turns out that’s not true 🤣
I retired 3 years ago from teaching. I wasn't well then, but I've recovered.
In that time I've completed play therapy training and now give a morning a week to same.
I did creative writing classes and I've completed a children's novel and written several short stories. Nothing published yet.
I've set up a community choir.
I would go back to playing basketball. The reality is that I do have time. However I think I have lost the drive.
As a western, consumerist culture we do not know the worth of free time, so much so that this question can seem paradoxical.
I retired four years ago, and immediately plunged into home maintenance, caring for relatives, community projects, family projects and learning new skills.
Nearly all of these are motivated by a sense of obligation or moral pressure, and a need to demonstrate my worth through continual accomplishment - reiterating patterns I had mastered over 50 years of working.
Becoming aware of the insanity of this, I have been having counseling, exploring the Tao( of Pooh) and getting a really good massage once a month with the idea of establishing a new, fully present life. Sometimes I sit in the garden and think, and sometimes I just sits (thank you Pooh) - something about a garden regulates the breathing, the heart rhythm and the mind becomes clearer, more aware.
It is HARD!! to 'take time out', but hugely rewarding to discover a different sense of time and my place in it.
I am finding that the best use of 'free time' is to transform oneself, or at least to step out of the bindings of our Work! Consume! Die! culture. Only the brave ... 😉
If you had asked that of people 200 years ago, 50 years ago, 10 years ago they would have imagined all sorts of wonderful things. But we have seen the truth of it. We have machines that do so much of our work for us, ovens, electric mixers, computers, robotic vacuums to name just a very very very few. But how do we use that additional time? With family? Learning? Imagining? No. We are just as busy as humans have ever been. It's not busy with life-or-death running from animals or enemies. It's not busy with planting/harvesting/grinding/kneading/baking. It's a million things we "have time for" which all lead to feeling overwhelmed, overbooked and unable to enjoy rest and play.
So. If we had more free time, we'd have more expectations of our time.
One thing I see about to happen is the "free time" we will have once we are all traveling by self-driving cars. Will we sleep during the commute? Will we read Shakespeare or chat with friends? No. We will use that "extra" time for work. We will read emails, contact customers, get a leg up on the work day. We already do that on our phones all weekend, all vacation. We are never away from work. And we (the cultural "we") are ok with that, it's expected and feels normal already.
So, I don't think free time will equate to free time at all.
And all that from me, who is a glass-half-full/rose-colored glasses gal.
A lot of people are saying that they would use the free time for slower “work,” though, like baking, having a hobby farm, gardening and preserving food, knitting, etc.
We can turn work into play just as well as we can turn play into work.
I'm in my 50s. I've discovered I really like gardening. I am very happy spending a whole day on a garden project. At the end of a garden day, I have the same great feeling you get after a really good hike in the woods. Energized and an uplifted mood.
I'm in my mid-forties, moved from Singapore to Australia, and only just discovered the joy of plants and growing things in the garden. There is something soulful about doing so...
I think the key to more time is that You have more time but others don’t. Because if everyone had more time everyone will expect more and set demands higher. The other issue is the additional time has to be shared with the people who also want to spend it with you. Having more time just for yourself is one but I think many of us want to have more time to spend with loved ones. So THEY have to have to have the extra time AND commit to spending it with you.
I don’t think more time is the answer. We are the stewards of our own mortality. If we hadn’t made something property now, how would we manage more time any better?
Except for those with terminal illnesses that have a concrete goal, such as desperately wanting to see their child get married.
I was going to write something like this but you have expressed it so eloquently already!
1. Spend more time just sitting with, watching, and responding to my newborn.
2. Spend more time reflecting and writing. Documenting more of my life experiences and my thoughts about them.
I'd also work more ...
In my free time I make things. If I had more free time, I'd make more things. :)