Beware: your craving for flexibility is making you lonely

Personal freedom comes at the price of connecting with the people around us.

At precisely 7pm the gong reverberated around the hall.

Quiet hushed through the room as we lined up. People from all walks of life, and all ages stood together, connected at the same time and in the same space. The Taekwon-Do lesson had begun.

Every week, we gathered and it was this routine, this synchronicity that formed the backbone of our community, that then extended out to training camps, barbecues, and cross-generational friendships. That was then when I was a kid.

Now I look back at this and wonder what has changed.

It starts with flexible working hours…

My first job in London came with flexible hours. Back then the mere idea of being employed sounded imprisoning enough, so I thought the flexibility would soften the blow.

Flexibility was meant to go both ways. I take it when I needed, in exchange they can get hold of me outside of normal office hours. But what it really meant is that sometimes I had to work late. Or weekends. Or late on the weekends. Sure, sometimes I could also just sneak out to meet a friend for an afternoon coffee, or come in at 10 or even 11 if I wanted to. But this spontaneity came at the price of not being able to commit to anything.

At the beginning, I resolved to protect my boundaries. I felt strong enough to keep my priorities straight and make this flexibility work in my favour, not against me.

But then the first project ‘crunch time’ came along and the flexible working policy really kicked in. Just leaving at 6 pm would have been equivalent to betraying my colleagues who would have to do my work for me. I had a dance class booked for that night, but I let it go.

I started taking my work laptop home more, and eventually set up my work email on my phone. That allowed me to be even more flexible. It seemed that being always available was simply easier than constantly having to negotiate priorities with my coworkers and bosses. The excuse of ‘having a dance class to attend to’ never seemed to hold up anyway.

Instead of continuing dance classes, or joining another martial arts school, I joined a 24-hour gym. One of those where there isn’t even a receptionist. You can just check yourself in through a robo-door that looks like it will beam you up, Scotty.

No gong to start my workout, I just turned up any hour of the day and did my thing. It was flexibility heaven. There was also a 24-hour supermarket around the corner, but sometimes I didn’t even bother to buy groceries. It was just easier to buy a couple of packs of half-priced sushi before closing time and eat it on the tube on my way back home. Never thought that freedom would taste like soy sauce and slightly dried-out salmon maki.

and continues with Flexible Holidays…

The perks of flexibility didn’t end with hours in the day. I was also allowed to take flexible holidays. Instead of taking off on national bank holidays, we simply had more holidays to play with.

That meant you could work through Christmas and get an extra few holidays at a different time if that suits you better. Maybe you were not brought up in a Christian culture, so Christmas doesn’t mean anything to you anyway, so why should you be stuck with this arbitrary schedule?

Of course for each person individually, it might seem attractive to work through single holidays to save them up and take a whole week off later. But we forget that shared holidays are an important community glue. The power of holidays stems from their ability to synchronise us. That is an end in itself and a spirit worth preserving over and above debates about the specific cultural myths they originate from.

Taking time off work at random points during the year allows us to travel, recharge and take a break from our daily lives. Cultural holidays, in contrast, used to be a time to come together with our families, our neighbours, and friends. Knowing that (almost) everyone will be free on those days solves a huge coordination problem that normally stands in the way of getting people together.

Flexible holiday conflates the two. It just puts all free days in the same pot. All based on the assumption that we know best how to spend our free days. This throws us all in an involuntary game of prisoner’s dilemma where choosing selfishly will always be the better strategy for us individually given that it is near impossible to coordinate with others facing the same choice.

Flexibility plays to the weaknesses of our minds

Our desire for flexibility plays on a cocktail of our brain’s most powerful biases:

• We are loss-averse. It’s generally more painful to lose £10 than it is pleasant to win £10. That’s why are such opportunity junkies. We love keeping our options open, because we perceive commitment as a form of loss, as it feels like losing our vague possible futures.
• We hate ambiguity. We hate to make tradeoffs and will always try to make as few decisions as possible. It’s easier to sign up to a 24-hour gym and easier to plan a life that doesn’t depend on anyone.

Of course, personal freedom is broadly a good thing. But when we pursue freedom that is born of avoidance and fuelled by culture, we are building ourselves a whole new prison in which each one of us is unable to connect with those around us.

We imagined how liberating it would be to not be constrained by arbitrary societal rules. We imagined how brilliant it would be to live on our own terms. Work when and where we want. Be wherever and whoever we like.

What we forget is that we are all doing it, we are giving up synchronicity in our civil lives. If society is an orchestra, culture is the drum that unites all of our individual play into a symphony, greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, flexibility allows us to play music to our own beat. But if everyone does it, it doesn’t sound much like music at all. Instead, it’s just a cacophony of uncoordinated noise.