The humane description of free time is to refuse to define it

Evidence

Here, I’m struck by the types of things associated with the category “what we will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine. These are bodily, human things, and this bodily-ness is something I will come back to. When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 78

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is one of the three redirections the reader needs to name: attention redirected toward bodily, human needs — refused definition rather than commodified leisure. ‘The earth and the fullness thereof.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The refusal to define the ‘what we will’ period as anything — neither leisure nor education — is a genuinely subtle point: it marks a zone that resists instrumentalization precisely by remaining undefined, which is a dense and counterintuitive claim about the nature of freedom.