NOVEMBER 11 — “Our bodies and minds are subject to a culture that relates to every moment as an opportunity to produce or consume.” — Josh Cohen
A company director I know was given an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. It was a three-week vacation FOC.
That’s 21 days of doing nothing but eat croissants and visiting the Eiffel Tower. Know what happened?
He flew back after four days. Couldn’t take the pure nothingness and horror of having no meetings to chair, no subordinates to instruct, no projects to manage.
It’s a paradox.
Open-ended, unstructured, free-and-easy time is (supposedly) the time during which there are no obligations or requirements to do anything other than what you decide to do.
The problem is that for many people, whenever they get such “time to themselves”, they immediately obsess over “what I should be doing, now that I have free time”.
Free time is especially problematic for people who have spent their lives in quasi-OCD mode: Strict schedules, goals and objectives, tasks and deadlines, work, work, work times infinity, etc.
To be (miraculously) given a slice of time devoid of “something to accomplish” can be a source of boredom, stress, anxiety and mild terror.
Time has become simply too wild and free. Far better to leash it back to a regime of rules and structures.
This is doubly ironic as, according to the 2024 Wellness at Work Report, 67 per cent of the Malaysian workforce reported feeling burnt out in 2024, up from 58 per cent in 2022; the biggest contributor to burnout among Malaysian employees is juggling work-life balance, with 55 per cent rating their work-life balance as poor or average.
I suspect one reason why many folks fail in this “juggling” is not because they don’t have enough free time but because they don’t know what to do with such time when they get it.
In such contexts, we can envy our local mall lepak-ers. As we age, it gets harder and harder to be able to sit next to a fountain and talk absolute shite for six hours and not feel the slightest bit of guilt or pressure.
This could be something our high-achieving corporate folks, who can’t take a piss without thinking of the next meeting’s agenda, can learn.
Many Malaysian executives — on a 24/7 journey of clawing with their finger-nails after the next promotion and next salary increment — see the very concept of “free time” as a moral failure.
Life and existence is about meeting KPIs, about turning your bread-and-butter into abalone-and-roast-beef, so what’s with all this talk about “spending your days doing whatever the hell you want to do”?
The open secret in many Malaysian offices today is that people feel tangible guilt if they fail to “appear” super-busy, even when no one is watching.
An open schedule can be stress-inducing.
Unstructured time has the power to produce anxiety, lead people into temptation and cause people to go round and round in neurotic circles worrying about a) how they’re not using their time well but b) how they need a “much deserved” rest but, alas c) feeling guilty about spending so much free time doing nothing and therefore d) thinking of something “productive” to do, and starting all over again from a).
As psychoanalyst Josh Cohen wrote in Not Working (London: Granta, 2018):
“It is culturally acceptable for us to complain aloud about how busy and how tired we are, as though in doing so we reassure the world that we fully acknowledge our moral and social obligation to work and contribute. Acknowledging the need to stop is more difficult, for it implies a shaming admission to being weak-willed, lightweight and not quite up to it.” (italics added.)
Again, we both desire, yet can’t deal with, unstructured time.
Time has been categorised and invaded by the philosophy of the capitalist workplace in which everything has a pre-assigned value and purpose.
We “already know” what we’re going to do every second of every occasion; there are no surprises any more because the very idea of surprise has been cordoned out of time.
To not know what “this hour is for” scares the hell out of us.
Behold, that hints at the truest definition of unstructured free time i.e. an interval where you can fashion your own “something” which may be “nothing at all”.
Perhaps we can decide not to be “productive”, we can decide to stop, we can choose to pause not because we’re lazy but because we want to rethink the very need to keep filling our moments with “doing or enjoying stuff”.
Or, whatever — it’s your life. Your time.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
