“What we will” resists definition precisely to stay open and humane

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: Defines Odell’s key category “what we will” through what it is NOT (leisure, education) and its deliberate refusal of definition; central to her account of what attention should be redirected toward.
• XREF: The refusal to define the free period anticipates Odell’s broader resistance to productivity-framed definitions of value.