Teenagers need more free time, less “education.” We all do.
Why “free time” is key to learning, social justice, and personal liberation.
Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself is a slave. ~ Nietzsche
It’s what you do in your free time that will set you free, or enslave you. ~ Unknown
Let’s say you are a senior at a public high school in Washington. You have a 3.0 GPA, no Advanced Placement (AP) or honors classes, and no participation in school clubs. Due to the pandemic, you didn’t have to take the SAT or ACT because many colleges have made those tests optional. What schools would you apply to? Would you even go for highly selective universities if you’re not a legacy applicant? In all honesty, your best bet would probably be a community college.
Well, such a student applied to 15 colleges in 2020. He was rejected from 14 of them, including several University of California schools, USC, NYU, Duke, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford. Only one school accepted him: Harvard.
What exactly did Harvard see in Avi Schiffmann that others did not?
Avi was no star athlete but he was a star in his own right. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, even before the U.S. imposed a lock down, he coded and launched one of the first websites ( ncov2019.live) to track coronavirus cases. By April of 2020, more than 600 million people had visited the site and 30 million people were using it each day. He was offered up to $8 million by companies wanting to advertise on the site. (He turned them all down.) For his creation, he won Webby Awards’ Person of the Year, presented to him by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Harvard looks for people with such unusual accomplishments. On its application form, it asks students to talk about “self-directed projects not done as school work.” Avi had plenty of those. The COVID tracker was just one of dozens of real world coding projects he had initiated and pursued in his free time. They kept him so busy throughout high school that he could only put in the bare minimum to get a B average in his classes.
By asking about self-directed projects, is Harvard simply making an exception for people who don’t check the usual boxes? Or does this signal a new trend in college admissions that will impact all students?
Granted, schools like Harvard have always made allowances for exceptional talent. But the way elite schools now look for outliers is changing. They are starting to emphasize self-direction and free time pursuits. You might think they are just raising the bar for admissions as they always do. But their new interest in self-direction may be more than it appears. It may, in fact, lead to a radical reframing of education and a complete rethinking of young people’s relationship with free time.
Teenagers are naturally suspicious when adults talk about their free time. As if twelve years of mandatory schooling weren’t enough, there are now proposals to fill up more of their free time by extending the school day (to 5 PM) as well as the school year (to year-round). President Biden is also proposing an extra two years of education after high school (up to Grade 14) so that young people are better prepared for today’s workforce.
“Twelve years is no longer enough today to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st Century.” ~ President Biden
The way things stand now, American teens are left with about 5.5 hours of “leisure time” each day (an average that combines weekdays and weekends). Some of those hours are spent on extracurriculars, which tend to be adult-led activities that supplement learning in school. Whatever is left is the closest you have to true “free time” — time to do whatever it is you want, assuming there aren’t other personal constraints.
And how do most of you spend that free time? It should come as no surprise that most of it these days is spent online — surfing the web, using social media, playing video games, watching YouTube and Netflix, etc. You are digital natives after all.
But there’s a deeper reason why technology has taken over your free time. Most of us are conditioned to think of “leisure time,” which is used interchangeably with free time, as time that is non-productive. It’s how we tend to distinguish it from work (or in your case school). Only during working hours do we do anything of value. That’s when we get to exchange our time for money in the form of wages. The two areas of our waking life — work and leisure — are distinct and don’t overlap, or they shouldn’t. When not working, we’re supposed to “kill time” with entertainment, hobbies, and socializing with friends. Much of the economy is dedicated to helping us do just that.
Today’s technologies are perfect then for our leisure time. Our devices and online platforms entertain us, connect us with friends, and keep us passive and non-productive. They are a welcomed break from the increasing amount of schooling and programming we are subjected to, especially in adolescence. Even though most of you don’t work, you spend just as much time doing other people’s bidding as your parents.
The last thing you would want to do with your free time is to code websites, as Avi Schiffman does. You’d much rather have some time for yourselves.
All well and good, except technology may not offer you the relief you want. And you might already suspect it. When you binge watch Netflix or scroll endlessly through Tiktok, you’ve probably had this uneasy feeling that you may not be doing something for yourself but against your will. Instead of giving us a break from programming, our devices and platforms are subjecting us to even more programming, the kind that is even harder to resist. Unlike mandatory education, devices offer us the illusion of choice and control. We feel connected to people like us, even though we will never meet them. And everything’s gamified — we are constantly rewarded for more use and more consumption.
What we get from technology is instant gratification but delayed remorse. At some point, we will ask ourselves, “Where did my time go?”
Between compulsory education and device addiction, it’s easy to feel you are not in control of your own life. On your worst days, you may even feel like a zombie — a walking dead. It’s my belief (and theory) that this nagging feeling of being over-programmed is why films about zombies have soared in the past two decades. Zombies are the perfect encapsulation of what we fear. They lack free will. They’re driven by raw consumption. Unlike other monsters, their goal is not to destroy us but to make us become them. They are contagious like a virus. We become zombies through other zombies.
To use a different metaphor, we become sheep, some better than others. Schools subject you to 12 to 16 years (or more) of doing what adults want you to do. Those who excel at this game get admitted to some of the best schools and companies. What is hard to get out of this system is any real sense of who you are as a unique individual.
Former Yale professor William Deresiewicz offered this very critique in his book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
“The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”
Deresiewicz himself graduated high school in 1981, long before smartphones and social media. But looking back, he says he “went off to college like a sleepwalker, a zombie.” Even without modern technology, the school system is enough to make you feel dead inside. It moves you along an assembly line toward college and never stops to let you ask whether you’re on the right path and what your education is for.
To fight zombification, you will need to abandon the work vs. leisure way of looking at your life. It’s a recent human invention that evolved with the industrial era. And just like another creation of the industrial age, mass schooling, it needs to be re-imagined. How? In the 1960s, sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno argued against what he called the “hobby ideology,” the mentality that our free time can’t be used for serious pursuits, that we should rest in our downtime so we can be more effective at work. The way to rest, we are told, is to have hobbies and to distract ourselves with the many offerings of the profit-making “leisure industry.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Adorno was famous for saying he had “no hobby.” Even outside of work, he took everything he did very seriously. It wasn’t because he was a “workaholic.” Just the opposite, he took his free time pursuits seriously because he didn’t want his life to be shackled to work. By having serious pursuits, he was able to form an identity outside of his job — he was able to be more than what he was paid to do.
Similarly, you can be more than a student in your adolescent years. You can use your free time, whatever there is, to discover and pursue things that you find meaningful. You don’t have to use all of your time to please different adults — teachers, parents, tutors, coaches, or youth program leaders — in school and afterschool. And that includes the tech overlords in Silicon Valley whose apps you’re addicted to.
Serious pursuits can involve building websites that help people, designing new products, creating art and music, volunteering for a cause you believe in, starting a home-based business, conducting research on a topic that fascinates you, or learning an instrument, just to name a few possibilities. These pursuits will involve a lot of learning so they might feel at times like an extension of school. But as long as they are driven by your own curiosity and passion (not someone else’s expectations), they will feel “free” to you.
Over time, freely chosen pursuits will help you understand who you are and what makes you come alive, instead of dead inside like a zombie. They will be your best guide to what kind of work you want to do in the future.
Speaking of work in the future, your free time will become increasingly important in the future economy, but not in the way you might think. Yes, technology has connected us to our work all hours of the day and we may end up having to do work from home in our free time.
Even more important, technology is disrupting almost every sector of the global economy. Automation and artificial intelligence are becoming so advanced that millions of jobs are being eliminated or radically transformed. Whatever job you aim to have in the future may not exist or will likely look very different once you get there.
In this highly disruptive environment, free time pursuits become more important for three reasons:
1) Good jobs will require constant innovation.
Automation and artificial intelligence will do away with many routine tasks. Fewer people will be paid to do the same thing over and over, which is what many jobs are these days. What employers will want from you is creativity and innovation (and your human qualities). As any creative person will tell you, it’s hard to be creative when you are bombarded all day with other people’s demands. You often need to carve out time off-hours, when no one’s bothering you, to generate your best work.
This is why innovative companies like 3M and Google have given employees up to 20 percent time (on the job) to work on projects of their own choosing. Google has credited this free time for some of their most successful products (Gmail and AdSense). It was inspired by 3M, which has long given employees 15 percent time to work on pet projects. This is what generated the masking tape and Post-It Notes.
That said, companies will be slow to carve out free time for their employees. It will be on you to do that for yourself if you want to stand out and you will need to figure out how to build that into your life.
It’s definitely easier when you are your own boss. Stefan Sagmeister, a successful graphic designer, shuts down his firm every seven years so he can spend an entire year working on personal projects. Giving up an entire year’s revenue is a big sacrifice but as he explains in his TED Talk, his free time projects do eventually make their way into future paid work. They are an investment in his future creativity.
I first realized the true importance of free time when I left my job at CNN. To help me get new opportunities, I decided to create a portfolio of my best work from the six years I spent there. Once I was done, I flipped through its pages and one thing became very clear: all the stories I included were stories I had assigned myself. I even had to do many of them in my own free time. They were what I remembered from my time at CNN.
Since then, I have made sure to carve out time to work on my own ideas, even when I have a full time job. One project led to a partnership with the World Bank and a grant from the Knight Foundation. Another became a viral video and led to an offer to pursue a PhD. They are important to me because they were the best way I could express my creativity. The fact that they opened new doors for me was just the icing on the cake.
2) Job changes will become more frequent.
Despite your best efforts, changes in the economy may outpace your ability to innovate. You will likely have to change jobs and even careers several times before you retire. Before and during each transition, you will need to spend time acquiring new skills, learning where the new opportunities are, and building out your network. All of this may involve passion projects and side hustles that you do in your own free time. They will be your best guide to how you should retrain and what your new path should be.
Governments know just how hard it is to train workers in dying industries for new jobs. And it’s only going to get more difficult when many sectors are being disrupted all at once. That’s why many governments are starting to turn to something called the Individual Learning Account. It’s money that employers and governments give you to fund your learning and you get to decide what you want to learn and how you want to upskill. They are putting more trust in you to figure out your next steps. But that also means you have more responsibility to acquire skills in your own time.
3) We may not have to work as much.
It’s also possible that people won’t have to work as much. That’s the promise of technology after all. We get to work less and have more free time. It wouldn’t make sense for labor-saving technologies to create more work for humans.
While new jobs requiring humans will be created by new technologies, some futurists believe they will neither be enough nor enduring. That means full employment will be impossible. A significant segment of society may fall into what historian Yuval Harari calls the “useless class.” So far, society has no playbook for such a scenario.
Economist John Maynard Keynes worried about this as far back as the 1920s. He was optimistic that technology will solve the “economic problem” of people needing to meet their basic needs. But he was pessimistic about people working less and less and having to figure out what to do with their more abundant leisure time, which Keynes calls humanity’s “permanent problem.”
“There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself.”
Bottom line: people in the future might not know what to do with themselves in their more abundant free time. As the saying goes, “an idle mind is the devil’s playground.” For Ray Kurzweil, the Silicon Valley inventor and futurist known for his accurate predictions, technological unemployment is a given. We won’t solve the problem of fewer jobs. What we need to solve for, he says, are meaning and purpose. Where will you find meaning and purpose if work is getting chipped away? Your free time.
Learning to use our free time well — using it on pursuits that give us a sense of meaning and purpose — will be vital for human well-being in the age of intelligent machines.
As educators look to the future, it’s the need for innovation that is fueling their interest in free time and it’s why schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University are leading the way.
In 2013, MIT started inviting applicants to submit “maker portfolios.” Its instructions were curiously specific. It wanted to see “one project completed outside of school, internships, work, or extracurricular activities.” In other words, it wants to know what you do and what you’ve accomplished in your own unstructured free time. As part of the portfolio, applicants needed to record a short video of them talking about their projects. In 2014, I searched for “MIT maker portfolio” on YouTube (and recommend you do too) and immediately saw this one by Jake Hillard:
Just from watching 30 seconds of the video, and without knowing anything else about Jake, I knew he was accepted by MIT. (He decided to go to Stanford instead and now runs Red Leader Tech, a company he founded.) What’s clear in the video is how much free time he must have spent on his projects. There’s just no way they could have been done as part of class or program time.
What’s also clear is the genuine passion Jake brings to making. You don’t get the sense that his pursuits are motivated by a need to get into Tier 1 universities. When I got to meet him, he shared with me that his journey as a maker began at the age of 8 or 9 when he wanted to have a lightsabre, so he set out to make one for himself. In a paper he wrote called Understanding Makers, Jake argues that makers are not primarily driven by profit or other types of material gain. Instead, he says, their motivations for making are simply creative self-expression, a sense of whimsy and fun, and also community — human needs that tend to be overlooked in our industrial-age schools.
I had a chance to ask Susan Hockfield, who served as MIT’s president from 2004 through 2012, why MIT would be interested in free time accomplishments of prospective students like Jake. For her, it’s not just about innovation. It’s also about wanting to know what you’re truly passionate about, whether you have a sense of purpose — something that would be hard to discern in students who are good at everything and involved in everything.
Stanford calls it “intellectual vitality.” Even though Stanford rejected Avi Schiffmann (despite building the most popular COVID website), it tries to select for people with similar initiative and self-direction. A former Stanford admissions officer, Michael Colin Short, today coaches students on how to apply to competitive schools. He tells them that “school-based activities won’t help you stand out.” Instead, focus on activities that other students won’t have on their applications. Those are likely to be activities that you “generate with your own initiative.”
Whether it’s about innovation, passion, or intellectual vitality, elite schools have learned something important from years of admitting top students: many of them will do well in their classes but they won’t stand out. It is students who tend to have passion projects who will make a real difference, even while they’re in school. (Harvard’s Mark Zuckerberg would be the most famous example.) Not only are they driven, they’re self-directed. They don’t need parents or teachers to push them to excel. They also don’t need artificial structures that school or afterschool programs try to provide. They do just fine in unstructured free time. They know how to put free time to good use.
If schools start to value free time pursuits, young people are not going to complain.
Schools may be driven by the need for a more innovative workforce but you and your peers have your own, equally important, needs for free time.
First, you have grown up with platforms that by definition seek to empower the individual over institutions (when they’re not turning us into zombies, of course). At their best, they level the playing field, democratize learning, and increase your reach. They give young people powers that previous generations never enjoyed and you want time to use them now, not wait till after you’re done with your education.
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are filled with young people pursuing their passions outside of school and sharing them with the wider world. You do so primarily out of love, not money, which makes you passionate “amateurs” in the truest sense of the word. (In Latin, amator means love.) Some of you amass a big enough following with your content that you start to make a living even before reaching the age when you need to work. Two of the biggest earners on YouTube are not even ten years old. Nastya, a six-year-old Russian girl, makes about US$18.5 million a year from videos showing her playing and singing with her dad. The top earner is nine-year-old Ryan Kaji, who makes US$29.5 million a year reviewing new toys and doing DIY science experiments.
You are seeing so many of your peers pursuing non-academic interests on different platforms that the whole narrative of “growing up” is changing. To be successful, it’s no longer primarily about doing well in school. For more and more teens, it’s about being powerful and making a difference now.
That brings us to another need young people have for free time: purpose. We already know your generation is more socially aware and engaged compared to previous generations. You care a lot about the environment and social justice. Young activists like Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel laureate, Greta Thunberg, Parkland students, and others have inspired you to make the world a better place. More than one analysis describes Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, as the first generation to value purpose over money. This idealism is becoming ever more evident in your out of school time.
In 2020, TIME magazine, known for its annual Person of the Year designation, selected its first Kid of the Year, 15-year-old inventor Gitanjali Rao. A high school student in Colorado, Rao invented a browser extension that uses artificial intelligence to detect bullying online as well as a device that uses carbon nanotubes to detect lead in water, among other things. Other honorees also use their various talents in art, design, and gardening to help people in their communities.
In none of their profiles in TIME magazine do any of them talk about school. Their endeavors were not done to improve their academics or standing as a student. Their free time pursuits had meaning and purpose in themselves.
What’s true across many generations and many cultures is that free time is central to our notions of justice and a good life.
The reason that 40 hour work weeks have become the norm is that labor movements in the 19th century campaigned for free weekends and shorter working hours. A popular slogan at the time was, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what we will.” It took new labor laws in the U.S. and many other countries to protect people from excessive work in the capitalist system, even if they are paid.
What is implied by “what we will” is that apart from rest or sleep, we also need sufficient time to pursue our own conceptions of the good. We need to be free from work so that we are free to pursue the good life, whatever that may be. Or as the economist Keynes would put it, we need to cultivate the “art of life,” not just the “means of life.” We can’t simply wrap our identities around our work or our educational path. Then and now, most adults don’t feel engaged at work and most students don’t feel engaged at school.
It’s in our free time that we have to turn to when we want to fully express “what we will.” Don’t just equate it with leisure.
Ask yourself: What if we all prioritized free time over work and school? What would it take for you to define yourself by what you do in your free time? (That means time not needed to meet your basic needs or someone else’s.) What do your free time pursuits say about who you are and what you consider to be a good life?
We know what young people like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg pursue in their free time. Very few of us know what they’re studying in school. Same goes for TIME Magazine’s Kids of the Year and the coder Avi Schiffmann. The same is even true for all the young YouTubers you follow. You know all of them by their free time pursuits.
They are not, by the way, all people of privilege.
When I think of free time, I think of William Kamkwamba from Malawi, the small African country where I also grew up. At the age of 14, he had to drop out of school because his family couldn’t pay his school fees. Determined to learn anyway, he went to the library to check out books. One of the books showed him how a windmill can generate electricity and how it’s made. With none of the parts, he nevertheless cobbled together a working windmill using a bicycle and scraps from the junkyard. It generated enough electricity to power appliances in his family’s home. His story quickly spread and led to a TED Talk, which then got him into the African Leadership Academy and eventually Dartmouth College. His natural curiosity lifted him out of poverty in a way that the education system in Malawi never did.
I also think of my mentee, Alexandra Guttierez, who lives in the small border town of McAllen, Texas. She was interested in learning guitar but her charter school is focused solely on getting kids into college, so it doesn’t offer music or art classes. Undeterred, Alexandra went on YouTube and taught herself how to play guitar and piano, practicing three hours a day over four years. She eventually composed and recorded her own original songs, which involved even more learning. She credits her musical pursuits for helping her get into colleges and win scholarships.
Free time is key to helping us escape the limitations we are born into and the limits of our systems. It needs to be part of any conception of social justice. Yes, people need to work and go to school to meet their basic needs, some more than others wherever inequality exists. But everyone, especially the underserved and the underaged, needs to have their free time protected and supported so that they are free from excessive work (or school) and free to pursue their own conceptions of the good.
So how can society value and protect your free time — for the sake of your learning, your well-being, and your future?
Everyone plays a role, especially you. Let’s look at what free time might mean for everyone in your life.
Parents
Your parents need to make sure that school and enrichment programs don’t overwhelm you, that you have sufficient free time (as well as energy) to do other things. More programming isn’t always better. They should instead pay closer attention to what you do in your free time as the most valuable time you have. If they see that you are only passively consuming media or playing video games, it may be a sign that you don’t have enough free time. It may also mean you don’t have the social and financial support you need to pursue your own goals.
Parents should try to support your free time endeavors with resources and connections to people who may help you. They should take interest in what you do but they should avoid telling you, or even suggesting to you, how you should spend your time. That would defeat the whole purpose of free time. Even if they know you well and have good ideas, they should want you to set your own goals. When they try to direct you, they are only making you more dependent on adult guidance, not less.
The best way parents can support children’s free time is to model for them how to use free time well. They should have passion projects of their own. You will learn through observation what it takes and what it means to pursue personal goals.
Schools
Instead of mandating more learning and adding more curriculum that you must learn, schools should free up time in your schedule to pursue self-directed learning. Twenty-percent would be a good start. And it should not be graded, assessed, or ranked by teachers. If you share your free time learning and projects with anyone, it should be your peers or an “authentic audience” of some kind. For example, if you are creating a mobile app, share it with potential users to get real feedback.
This doesn’t mean teachers can’t play a role. They can take interest in your learning and cheer you on, as a “guide by the side.” You can consult them and get their input but you are not learning for them. You are not seeking their approval.
Schools might balk and say there’s absolutely no way they can give you 20 percent free time. But some schools already have, as I showed in my video, If students designed their own schools. The public high school I profiled gave students an entire semester and up to a year. Other schools have experimented with one day a week.
Schools in the Big Picture Learning network give students 40 percent time to spend on internships of their own choosing or creating. That’s two days a week through four years of high school that they don’t spend in class. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Universities can also go a long way to make learning more self-determined, similar to what happens in free time. But they often have to re-imagine the university from the ground up, like Quest University did outside Vancouver, Canada. There, you don’t choose a major by shopping from a catalogue. And you don’t “design your own major” by choosing from available courses. You have to formulate a question that you want to spend two years exploring, and then try to answer it through a combination of courses, self-designed projects, and field experiences.
For this type of self-determined learning to work, your question has to be meaningful to you. So the school gives you ample time to figure out what your question should be.
More than a few Ivy League professors are now recommending that students take a gap year after high school. It’s important to gain some perspective on what you want out of life before diving into college. But don’t think of it as a “year off.” Think of it as a “Year On,” as the young photojournalist and artist, Dan Eldon, once said.
Figure out some free time goals first and then align your education and your work to support those goals. Not the other way around.
Afterschool Programs
There’s nothing wrong with using afterschool programs to expose you to new things and give you the skills and support you need to pursue interests. But they should empower you to continue with those interests in your free time, not make you dependent on them. That would be dependency, not empowerment. They should measure their success by what you do after the program, not what you do while in it.
If afterschool coding classes don’t lead you to code in your free time, then maybe coding isn’t for you or you need a better program that knows how to make you love coding… in your free time. If you only code when there’s a teacher around you’re not going to get far.
Some programs like Griptape are fully committed to free time learning. They know what stops many teens from pursuing their passion is not motivation, but a lack of resources or a champion. For my mentee, Alexandra, they gave her a few hundred dollars to get the equipment she needed to record her own songs. They also matched me with her to provide her with moral support. As a champion, I had to observe Griptape’s №1 rule: Don’t give advice! Telling them what to do, even in a suggestive manner, won’t help them in the long run. (Warning: some advice are about to follow.)
You
The most important person in your free time is you. You will come to know the full meaning of the phrase, “Time is Money.” Time is valuable, yes. But also like money, free time is hard to find, hard to keep, and hard to spend well. Nor do you want to spend time only on basic survival. That’s not what we want our life to be about.
Learning how to use your free time well is a lifelong process. “How should I spend my time?” will be a question you will ask yourself for many years to come. There are no clear right or wrong answers, just as there are no easy answers for what you should be “when you grow up.” As you begin to ask yourself that question with real intention, here are some things to keep in mind:
1) Free time is scary.
After years of being told what to learn and what to do, you become used to getting directions from adults. Sometimes, you might say no to their marching orders. But that’s different from setting your own goals. When we are free to decide for ourselves, we often struggle with freedom and uncertainty. That’s when we reach for anything that provides clear structures, even if they’re artificial. Five seasons of a Netflix series? Easy. Advance ten levels in a game? Bring it on.
But starting an art project or a side hustle? You don’t know if you have the skills or how to even learn them. So you freeze in front of the blank canvas. You don’t even start.
When we’re afraid, we often trade freedom for security. Our freedom is not taken away. We give it up willingly. So what can you do? Acknowledge the fear and work through it. Fear can actually be a good thing. It tells us we’re faced with real choices to make and we’re taking real risks.
2) Free time is about possibilities.
School only scratches the surface of all that there is to know and all that we can be. It exposes us to only a few of the thousands of possible careers that are out there. So our free time is when we can explore new career pathways and learn things that are not considered “academic.”
If our education is a pizza, then school is but one slice. It’s up to you to decide what makes up the other slices. What you should explore, in your free time, are not just possible careers but possible selves.
As the poet Walt Whitman famously said, “We contain multitudes.” We are never just one thing: a student, a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. Even if you are obsessed with video games or Tiktok, you are not only a gamer or a Tiktoker. You can also be, simultaneously, a citizen, an entrepreneur, a poet, a caregiver, a changemaker, an explorer. We all have multiple “practical identities.”
Use your free time to try on other identities and see if they are right for you. What you freely choose to be in your free time becomes part of the mosaic that is you.
3) Free time is about commitments.
At the same time, what gives us joy is not the idea that we can do anything and everything. What we eventually want to stumble upon are a few things we feel deeply committed to.
If nothing else, we want to get better at the things we do. Being good at something takes practice — not just in formal learning but in our free time, as much as 10,000 hours of it. When we get good at something, we feel good about ourselves.
We also become committed to people (classmates, teammates, collaborators, friends and family), causes (social or environmental issues), and even places. We want to see them progress so we commit our time to their needs. They can take up a lot of our free time but they also give us the sense of belonging we all need.
4) Free time is about purpose.
What our various commitments can give us eventually is a sense of direction, which can go by many other names — vocation, calling, mission, or purpose. Psychologist William Damon, who has studied purpose in young people, defines it as “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.” Whereas goals can be short-term, purpose is long-term. Purpose is what helps you decide what goals to set.
According to Damon, you are purposeful when a) you have found something that matters to you, b) you know why it matters, and c) you are actively working on it as part of a long-term plan.
It can take time to find your purpose. The best place to look, in my opinion, is not in school where you are often jumping through hoops that others set for you but in your free time where your self-determined choices reveal to you the things that make you come alive.
5) Free time is about liberation.
We are all living within systems: some we choose for ourselves, some not. Every one of them is trying to program us to live a certain way: our capitalist system, our schools, our culture, and even our DNA. The same is true for apps that we freely download onto our devices. Their AI-powered algorithms are taking over more and more of the decisions we humans used to make. Some are designed to help us achieve human goals. Others simply want to control us to make money in the new attention economy.
Now more than ever, we have to remind ourselves: Program or Be Programmed.
Most of us have no choice but to work or go to school. But in the free time we have remaining, we need to liberate ourselves from the programming of others so that we can live a life of our own choosing.
It’s in that free time that we can most easily find meaning and purpose. There, we can focus on quality, instead of productivity. So value it more than school. Don’t let it get hijacked by the education system or technology.
Only when we have control of our time can we say we’ve lived a free life.
In one of the most influential books on education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paolo Freire, argued that a human being’s vocation is to be the Subject who acts upon the world and transforms it. The problem with our education systems is that they treat us as Objects. In doing so, they not only oppress us, they make us fear freedom and turn us into oppressors ourselves.
His book was widely read by educators soon after it was published in 1968. But here we are, 50 years later, and we still operate under the “banking model” of education that he criticized, a system where teachers deposit knowledge into children’s minds as if they’re empty bank accounts.
As we move into a new era of education — beyond “ peak college “ — we have to recognize the limits of formal education and its inherent resistance to change. Schools can’t teach everything and they can’t be the solution to all our problems.
It’s time to put real limits on compulsory education (and maybe someday end it) and focus first and foremost on young people’s free time. Now more than ever, you need to use that free time to explore new pathways, find a sense of meaning and purpose, and be the Subjects that act upon the world and transform it. Only in your free time can you learn to program yourself (by first resisting the programming by others), begin your lifelong journey “to be more fully human,” and collectively write the many new stories of education for the 21st century.
