The social perception of time is a construct formed over the course of past centuries that was mainly based on the needs of capitalist, commercialised labour. Work and non-work time were radically and violently separated, which had an important impact on our psychology and our very existence. This article points out that time is absolutely central to the debate on the transformation and future of labour.
It’s the fourth attempt to finish this text since coming back from the holidays. I have tried working at the office, at coffee shops, from home, and at a friend’s house. Returning to everyday routines, and the agonies that come along with them, is not always simple. This seems to be the case for those who had a good time, for those who had a bad time[1], and maybe even more so for those who didn’t manage to go on vacation at all—a first count shows that this year it was about half[2].
The separation of time and self
If the transition is difficult for a creative and rewarding job like writing this text, we can imagine what happens with many other jobs in the world of capitalist, commodified labour. It is into this reality that science fiction comes to intervene. In the series “Severance” (2022), the protagonists are employees of a shadow company who have voluntarily undergone a memory separation. The “outside” self does not remember the “inside” self, and vice versa. The “separated” people enjoy their free time on weekends, Thursday afternoons, and summer holidays without worrying about what their work self, of which they have no idea, is doing. The central idea of the script seems appealing to both the characters in the show and many of us. As the blogger “unemployed negativity” writes[3], the series does not invent separation (much less propose it as a solution), but rather turns a magnifying lens on the already existing separation between ourselves on the one hand and our time and work on the other, over which we have little or no control in conditions of wage labour.
Through the distorting mirror of “Severance”, we can see the reflection of our own attempts to find islands of time within, outside, and beyond working hours. At the weekend, for example, we try to fit in what we didn't get to do during the rest of the week: commitments and errands, meetings with friends and family, personal rest, and cultivation. Under these temporal conditions, the need to have a good time becomes almost an obligation, which ultimately feeds back a sense of unfulfillment and contributes to what has come to be called “weekend stress”[4]. Beyond the psychological issue, there is also the economic one: consuming entertainment products and services (a gift, a theatre performance, or a dance class) can be expensive. Greece ranks last in Europe in terms of leisure satisfaction, with the financial aspect being a major obstacle[5]. Against this backdrop, articles such as the above-mentioned one from Vice (4) usually suggest individual time management strategies as a way out: “living in the moment”, turning off the mobile phone, or escaping to nature. While useful in each case, these practices leave intact the politics of time and labour that structurally determine the conditions under which all of the above take place. Could the question of time lead to more radical transformations in labour?
Towards a radical rearticulation of work
A first approach to the above question has to do with creating space for time. The central idea here is to reduce the working week without reducing wages. The arguments behind the idea are varied, including the increase in productivity through new forms of organisation and technology, the need to reduce unemployment, the need to reduce energy consumption and air pollution, and the introduction of more free time as a universal need and right. The four-day working week has in recent years been both a political vision and a labour experiment, with the largest pilot project currently taking place in the UK. As of June 2022, more than 3,000 workers from around 70 companies across a range of sectors have reduced their working hours by 80%. The first results are encouraging[6]: Of the 41 organisations surveyed midway through the experiment, 86% said they would continue to implement the four-day working week after the end of the experiment.
One criticism of the four-day week is that, at least for the time being, it focuses mainly on reducing working time rather than freeing up time as a whole. In a more general context of gender inequality in the distribution of invisible work (cooking, cleaning the house, reading to children, or caring for the elderly), one day less of “normal” work may be necessary, but is not in itself a sufficient condition for sharing time equally and without gender discrimination. In addition, a reduction in working hours may lead to an increase in the demand for rest and leisure services, shifting the pressure to other sectors of work. As George Kallis says, “the office lights may be off, but those of the hotel nearby are not”[7], and we are thinking of hotel guests as well as hotel workers. This argument is particularly relevant in Greece, a country with a large tertiary sector, where 25% of workers are employed in accommodation and food services[8].
Alongside the attempt to redistribute time without creating new inequalities, temporal or otherwise, there are also calls for a radical revision of time. As one of us has written elsewhere[9], we can re-face time as a collective resource to be managed collectively. Theorist Graham Jones, in his Red Enlightenment podcast series[10] and forthcoming book[11] of the same title, suggests a way to begin to understand and experience free time as a common. When we dance in a ballroom or a nightclub, Jones says, we can notice that we are not dancing in isolation from those around us, but that every once in a while our bodies are being affected, tuned, and organised into patterns of movement. This, for Jones, immediately transforms the concept of dancing from being an individual expression to an early form of collective organisation[12]. This, in turn, can have practical consequences on a political level. We realise that our capacity to go to dance class, for example, depends not only on our own psychological, financial, or temporal adequacy but also on that of our co-dancers and teachers. These in turn correlate with having spaces that are truly open and accessible, that are welcoming not only when we feel good but also when we don’t, and fair and safe working conditions for our teachers. In this way, the individual opens up to the world and paves the way for collective experiences and actions in which students and teachers dance and demand, and sometimes do both at the same time.
This relational approach to time and others not only allows us to forge bonds of solidarity with those who work while we relax or recreate, but also to hold on to these experiences and infuse them into our own working everyday lives: creating spaces and times for caring and resting, making and asserting demands, and experimenting with creative ideas.
Instead of indulging in the separations of an alienated life, redefining time as a common can heal our relationship with time and with others. Philosopher Martin Hägglund[13] suggests that we define socially available free time as the measure of the value of our lives. Free time that we devote to ideas, plans, and (co)operations that are worthwhile to us. These will at times be desirable and at times necessary, but in any case, they will give meaning to our lives. A life that is finite and fragile—and therefore precious.