“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche is perhaps overly provocative (as usual) with the above quote, but he gets at an important point, which is the value of having a substantial amount of free time outside of work with which to self-actualize. In this post I discuss “work” as a general cause of lack of free time, which can include everything from jobs to education or caring for others.
In my mind, there is a distinction — or perhaps more of a gradation — between free time spent doing what you need to keep yourself sane and what you would really want to do if you truly had no other obligations. To mitigate stress from work and elsewhere, people often use their free time to turn to media, substances, and other coping mechanisms. The kinds of things you watch, read, or do after a long day at your job may be more centered on helping you relax than on what you’d otherwise do. You might do some of those activities anyway, but with more free time, you would also have the chance to do things that take more energy.
For instance, after doing a lot of research, there are certain activities I like to do to “decompress” like watching videos or reading interesting posts. I would also like to practice the piano since I have not been playing much lately, but it takes more effort to make myself sit down and practice than I can usually muster. Some of this has to do with habit formation: certain activities like exercise or practice can be hard to start out but easier once you get in a routine. However, in order to start doing what you want to do in the first place, it helps a lot to have extra time on your hands. I do this writing in my free time, but it took me a while to start, and I end up having to choose to do this instead of playing the piano.
If you have work you are truly passionate about1, then sure, free time outside of that maybe isn’t super important to you. Even so, since you would choose to spend most of your free time doing that work anyway, you are still effectively spending time on what you want to be doing. You also could use free time to reflect now and again on whether you are still satisfied with your current time allocation.
For those who don’t have this kind of passion, free time is an important way to find it. It sucks to do work you don’t like, but even though you need to do it sometimes, you can get trapped in a cycle of spending most of your time preparing for work, working, or recovering from work. You are probably still doing other things like maintaining relationships with family and friends and doing daily chores, even relaxing every now and again when you get the chance, but there isn’t enough time for you to reflect on things with a clear head. Eventually it can reach the point where even if you don’t like the way things are, in the back of your mind, you can’t picture them being any other way. If you can make time to stop and think about whether there is a better way you could be going about things, it can still be immensely rewarding to take action toward this goal, even if you don’t make any deep discoveries about yourself or your passions.
The word “free” in free time ostensibly refers to the sense of liberty in being able to use that time as you see fit, but the monetary connotation of the word is not a coincidence. What makes the time “free” is that you don’t have to pay an opportunity cost (lost earnings, worse relationships, worse health, etc.) to spend it on other activities. As the saying goes, “time is money.” Hence “free time” is similar to “spare time” in that, as with “spare change,” both refer to time one can afford to use as one pleases. If you don’t have sufficient free time after satisfying all of your other needs, it is worth the effort to change this so that you can let your mind wander and see what you are drawn to when there is nothing else to distract you. You never know the importance of what you might find.
Footnotes
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such as an interesting research project. ↩