Why your funny answer isn’t so clever
What do you do with your free time?
Yes, I was once one of the people who responded with the every trendy “what free time?”As though I needed to remind people I was busy, important. It is an effortless response which triggers a round of polite giggles and essentially dodges the question.
Congratulations, in a rare moment where others actively demonstrate interest and have given you an opportunity to tell them what you get up in the morning for, and you pawned off the question for a canned joke I have been told by every finance boy trying to sleep with me.
I abhor the idea that somehow we are “too busy” for hobbies. Life has never been about having time. You can always be too busy for what you don’t want to do. There is no natural part of your day in which you “schedule” free time. By nature, the question presupposes you have no free time since you spend it doing whatever the real answer to the question is.
I deplore the power trip of claiming to be very busy. We are all busy. Nobody has hours laying around, simply being wasted. The idea of killing time is generally small amounts, and even there this “dead time” is being spent for some purpose like waiting to see the dentist — scheduled into part of the time taken to see the dentist, just the same as sitting in the chair with his picks in your mouth.
You will never have time. There will never be natural time that cannot be spent doing anything else. With working and sleeping there will always be something, and often on the magnitude of a couple hundred other things you could do with your time. None of that answers my question. What do you do with your free time?
I rephrase: what do you make time for? You are clearly important, busy, and have a lot going on. The root of my question is what are you passionate about? What gets you through your day? What is that thing that if we get you talking about it we cannot get you to stop chattering about it and you’ll keep tying it into every future conversation we will have with you for the rest of the day? What do you wake up excited about, that gets you out of bed, and you think of when your work enemy corners you by the printer and asks you about the project the two of you are supposed to be doing together? What do you enjoy on that 15 minute break while the work coffee pot slowly brews coffee and you pretend to tap your fingers but secretly cherish the fifteen minutes of relaxation between calls with the client? How would you spend a snow day, when the New England blizzards of my youth suddenly derail your work obligations, prior the days of the internet, when you are really trapped in your house all day with no obligation beyond to live the day to its fullest?
What do you make time for? You’re very busy, but what is worth fitting in? Is it going to that sushi happy hour you love, and trying to drag a friend? Is it doing the easy days of the Wall Street Journal crossword and getting frustrated when they get too hard on Wednesdays? Is it calling your dad and letting him explain stocks, investing, banking, or how to put up a picture, not because you don’t know how, but because he will be smiling the whole afternoon hearing your voice? Is it to sit down with your roommate and banter about abstract math for an hour because both of you think Cantor is brilliant and you want to relive why an uncountable set must exist?
Some of these I do for others, and my answer is I love my family, my friends. Some of these I do because I adore puzzles and nothing gets me energized like completing an “evil” sudoku.
I do not have free time in which to do these things, but I make time in my busy schedule to do these things because they are what make life worth living.
So, next time someone asks “what do you do with your free time?” I recommend you talk until they shush you, and the bar closes down, and their face is asleep on the bar ignoring you.
