Sheila Liming

A smart and empowering book about the simple art of hanging out ... and of taking back our social lives from the deadening whirl of contemporary life. Almost every day it seems that our world becomes more fractured, more digital, and more chaotic. Sheila Liming has the answer: we need to hang out more. Starting with the assumption that play is to children as hanging out is to adults, Liming makes a brilliant case for the necessity of unstructured social time as a key element of our cultural vitality. The book asks questions like what is hanging out? why is it important? why do we do it? how do we do it? and examines the various ways we hang out—in groups, online, at parties, at work. Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time makes an intelligent case for the importance of this most casual of social structures, and shows us how just getting together can be a potent act of resistance all on its own.

The Radical Power of Killing Time

Hanging Out

Karolina

The requirement to hang out on the job—under duress, in the face of that specter known as "customer satisfaction”—is a byproduct of a cultural obsession with dwelling in isolation. The drive to dwell results in self-imposed separation and, by extension, in the compensatory need for paid human

companionship. This makes hanging out on the job a required part of, in fact, most modern jobs, because it entitles the customer, who is the purchaser of someone else's labor power and time, to expectations of amiability.

This means that dinner parties, as leisure activities, are underpinned by assumptions of privilege. Taking the time to loiter over a multi-course meal, to enjoy and savor an activity that has mere routine sustenance as its real end, is an inherently classed pursuit. It is classed, in fact, to the very same degree as one's ability to pay for all those multiple courses, Everyone, or most everyone, eats dinner, but only some can lay claim to the time and resources that are necessary to elevate the act of eating dinner to the status of a what is called a "party" meaning a celebratory occasion that is organized round the pursuit of pleasure itself.

We must wrest time away from the places where it has been sequestered and kept from us against our will, We must work to seize and redistribute the wealth that is time and, when we have done that, we must commit to the work of giving it all back to each other.

I'm not talking about “self-care”, one of corporate America's favorite pet phrases, designed to shift the burden of cars away from those who possess the most power to furnish it and. Instead, heap it onto the shoulders of the already-suffering individual who, on top of all that suffering, is then coerced into making up for the shortfall of care that was the original cause of their torment. No, I'm not talking about that; I'm talking about care as a radical form of investment and risk. To care requires making a sincere effort. Care is the soil from which all actions that actually matter have to grow, because the opposite, disinterest, is barren ground.

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