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There are degrees of freedom — if freedom is anything other than an illusion. So much of any single day is governed by biological needs, economic needs, psychological needs, that there are precious few moments — if any — when we can say: ‘Now I’m thinking and feeling for myself.’ Ironically, though the whole goal of capitalist culture seems to be leisure time, we have very little conception of what leisure time really means; we only understand leisure in terms of entertainment. Leisure, in its pre-20/21st century sense I think meant something more like: time for cultivation-of-soul. This, critically, is not: time for self-improvement; self-improvement means something like: making yourself a better worker-member of hyper-capitalist society. In the words of Radiohead: ‘fitter, happier, more productive.’ The need for self-improvement is another sign of our un-freedom; a need that does not come from us — that’s imposed upon us. It is really a symbol of self-hatred, a desire to make ourselves more like a culturally produced Ideal Type. This is why I find self-help writers so pernicious: they are propagandists for a spiritually bankrupt conception of how to ‘use’ our time, our free will, our biological energy; they are propagandists for our particularly destructive strain of capitalism that turns all cognition into cognitive labor — even the cognition of our ‘free time.’ Staying connected, even when we are off work, is a way of constantly alchemizing our leisure time into productive time — of staying productive. Anyone who wants to, is determined to, stay productive, is in my mind, a half-automaton with the vestige of human feeling; a very human robot. Leisure isn’t just for the aristocrat: it’s for the human and the humanist.
