"You can be yourself, but only in your spare time."
Reflections on a phrase
Months ago, at LessOnline (a small conference in the Bay Area for rationalists and rat-adjacent people), this phrase came up in a conversation I was having. It was almost a joke at the time, an offhand observation of a dynamic someone was describing in their life. I wasn’t the one who said it, but it resonated with me, so I decided to write it down:
You can be yourself, but only in your spare time.
There are a lot of ways to interpret that, a lot of things it can mean. While I’d enjoy hearing what it means to you in the comments, these are some of the things it means to me. I’m not saying I believe any of them fully or think they’re all correct, just that there’s a nonzero amount of truth to them, at least some of the time.
Life is a stage, the people merely players. There’s a large sense to which we’re all acting out scripts in our lives. We might call these scripts ‘roles’ or ‘societal expectations’ or ‘gender norms’ or ‘professions’, but the basic idea is that who a person really is, inside, is distinct from things like ‘male’ or ‘father’ or ‘lawyer’. Those are scripts that one follows, based on what the world expects from a person. The ‘male’ script includes things like stoicism and aggression; the ‘lawyer’ script includes things like ‘wears suits’ and ‘argumentative’. We spend most of our lives executing the script of ‘child’, of ‘student’, of ‘adult’ and ‘professional’ and ‘parent’ and ‘retiree’, and then we die. But who a person is isn’t a script - it’s the places between the lines, the choices you make that weren’t handed to you by anyone else. And you make those choices - you be yourself - in your spare time.
Duties preclude individuality. When you have a responsibility - a job to do, someone to take care of, etc. - you don’t get to be ‘yourself’ in any meaningful way until that duty is discharged. Your freedom to pursue what matters most to you comes second to ensuring that your child is safe and cared for, that your mortgage is paid, and so on. The bulk of your time taken to discharge those duties is captured, regulated in such a way as to determine an outcome, and thus within it you can’t be yourself. You have to be the person who accomplishes those goals, and so you can only be yourself with whatever time remains.
Yourself is the person with no utility to anyone else. Much human interaction is that of service - a waiter serving a table, a buyer interacting with a seller, a friend listening to you complain about your boss. Acts of service are not bad - far from it - but they can tend to be transactional. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Whether with money, time, emotional effort, etc., people trade each other for what they need. This is good - this is what civilization is based on! - but it also means that a large part of one’s time is spent doing things for others so that someone will do something for you. That’s what having a job is, when you think about it. And that kind of transactional relationship is never entirely free of baggage, of wondering if you could get away with giving a little less and getting a little more. Of wondering what people get from interacting with you, and if it’s worth it to them. So ‘yourself’, who you truly are, only emerges without ulterior influence or motive when there’s nothing to be gained by anyone. You can be ‘yourself’, but only when you’re not trying to get anything from anyone - only in your spare time.
Spare time is choice time. Spare time is, by definition, the time you get to choose how you spend. We are, as beings who live in time, defined in some real sense by how we choose to spend our time. Because spare time is the time we get to choose how to spend, who we are is defined by how we choose to spend our spare time.