I wish it were easy to list numerous examples of people I have encountered who have a passion for what they do after 25 or 30 years in their field of choice, but sadly it is a rare find to say the least. People are slaves to labor and are consumed by society’s social imposition of what ones free time should be. Adorno’s argument in “Free Time” is that people are not free during their work time or free time even though they consciously believe they do, “people do not notice in what ways they are unfree even in the areas where they feel the most free, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.” (Adorno, 170)
Specifically, my father qualifies for a unique spectrum of Adorno’s argument that breaks through the droll conundrum that many subconsciously endure because his enjoyment from his activities can not be limited to the term hobby.
He is a part of an elite club of individuals in society who get a paycheck for doing what they love, turning a hobby into a career which makes him the envy of many self loathing 9-5ers wishing they were anywhere but sitting behind their desk all day confined to a cubicle. My father is a Golf Course Superintendent for a private 36-hole golf course that he has access to 365 days a year. A part of his job description is “testing the greens” which is outlined in his job requirements meaning he HAS to play golf. If you talk to any middle class, middle age, white suburban male what the ideal job would be you could easily find a commonality within their answers concluding in, “I want to play golf and get paid to do it.”
Similarly, Adorno also categorizes himself in to “someone privileged, with the requisite measure of both fortune and guilt, as one who had the rare opportunity to seek out and arrange his work according to his own intentions.” (Adorno, 169) He states that his work is nothing that qualifies as a “hobby” because they are a part of passions that he occupies his time with, not treating his mind and body like a vegetable in a state of boredom.
Transitioning from my father who I believe to be of the working “Holy Grail” in which he likes his job tremendously to where it is not considered a task nor hobby, but something that has truly satisfied him for the past thirty years, to the norm of individuals who find themselves caught in the confusion of “free time.”
Indeed people are doing work in their unfree time whether they realize it or not and as Adorno mentions the growth of technology doing most of the things that once people had to use manual labor to accomplish; people have more free time on their hands. A trend in our society is to recoup from what people do for work on their downtime to do something that “regenerates labor power.” (Adorno, 169) Many people fill this “free time” with a hobby to occupy themselves outside of work and to give a sense of being well-rounded.
For Examples, DIY projects which are time consuming and never gratifying because no matter how well the average person does the project, it still is a cheaper imitation of what the end product should resemble making it unhappy experience for the worker to take on for a hobby.
Truly Adorno’s argument states a guideline that “free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work” (Adorno, 169) which is where people get the mixed message of what to do with their free time because the ideology of doing something productive makes since yet doing something in the field of boredom is what our culture reinforces for lazy Americans. Adorno says that “time free from labor is supposed to regenerate labor power” yet if you never feel that your working enough to take a break than you avoid the means of boredom or doing useless hobbies that are mindless and accomplish nothing productive to contribute to society or oneself such as sunbathing, like my father is fortunate enough to do.
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