We don’t just “hang out” anymore. And it’s a problem.

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings I’d like to say that it was the pandemic that did it. Cause it’s good to have something that’s not me to blame, but it was probably just adult life. A busy job, more commitments, a small child, a home to take care of and on and on and on. Then one day you read an excerpt from a book about it and you realize I haven’t just hung out with someone in like years. I have friends and family and acquaintances, of course, and I see them. I saw them even during the. Pandemic, but it was all scheduled like, let’s meet at this place at this time for exactly this amount of time and we will accomplish this very specific activity together. And then I have to leave at this time, or hey, we’ll all get together at precisely six o’clock for a Zoom happy hour. That will last exactly 60 minutes. And then the call will end. Hanging out is not That hanging out is just hanging out. We will chill for a while. Maybe we’ll take a walk. Maybe we’ll hang in the park or on the couch or all three, and then maybe we’ll decide to go to this party that we heard about. We didn’t think we’d attend, but hey, let’s just go see what’s up, man. I felt old just saying that. Do you know where I hang out with friends? And family now just shooting the crap back and forth in the group chat or on Twitter, maybe digital access to our friends and family has made hanging out in person without a schedule or an agenda. Feel redundant. They’re already in our pocket all the time. Men, A pandemic made it impossible for a while, and now if there’s one thing everyone knows, it’s that we are all getting lonelier. Let’s just chill for a few minutes and discuss that. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Thank you for hanging out with us while we hang out with Sheila Liming, who is the author of Hanging Out: the Radical Power of Killing Time. Hi Sheila.

Sheila Liming Hi Jordan.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I wanna ask you, because your book starts with parties, do you remember the last party you went to before the Pandemic Shut?

Sheila Liming Everything. I do. I remember it extremely well. Um, In retrospect, it has come to feel like the party that happened at the end of the world or something like that, you know?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Sheila Liming But yeah, I, I think back to a party that I attended, this would’ve been New Year’s, 2019, you know, crossing over into 2020 and 2020 being the year that everything kind of came crashing down, um, in our world. And I was at this party, um, I was visiting my family in, in Washington state over Christmas and. Um, I stayed a little past Christmas and I was invited to attend this, a party where I actually didn’t really know that many people. It was a party that was being hosted by some colleagues of my sisters. My sister’s an ER nurse. So she, um, had gotten this invitation. I was gonna go with her and then she ended up having to work on New Year’s. So I went there with my husband and actually with my mom and my dad, um, who are also invited and. We went to this very multi-generational party that was a heck of a lot of fun, and it was hosted by these colleagues of my sisters, most of whom are originally from Ethiopia. So I got to try a lot of, uh, Ethiopian cuisine that night that they had catered. I got to try Ethiopian moonshine. This liquor called Iraqi. It was amazing. It was so much fun. I woke up super sore the next morning from dancing, and then it was like all of that just kind of came to a grinding halt about, you know, eight weeks later. Um, so I think of that party a lot. Uh, I think of it as like kind of like this special moment that, um, I haven’t quite been able to get back to, but that was, uh, very unique. And in your book you write about how we place a lot of expectations and hopes on parties that we throw or attend. And so I wanted to ask you, after getting that memory, do you then remember approaching the first time, uh, I don’t wanna say after Covid V because it’s still here, but in the Covid era of preparing to. To a party like that in someone’s house with a whole bunch of people you might or might not know and, and what you were thinking about that and whether or not you really wanted to do it. I do. Yeah. Um, I think of, you know, along the ride that we’ve all been on, uh, with the Covid pandemic, there’s been these little like moments where I think we thought we were almost there.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Sheila Liming Things were almost back to normal and then, you know, they kind of swung back in the other direction. Cases went up and things got shut down. and I think of what would’ve been, uh, here in the United States, it would’ve been Memorial Day weekend last year. So the last weekend of May, um, where we normally have a three day weekend, and for some reason that weekend it was like this space had cleared, you know, for a while in like. Covid emergencies and cases, and a lot of people I knew were suddenly like offering parties for the first time in years. And I came up to that weekend and I had maybe like four parties to attend, which was something I hadn’t done in basically three years. And I was so excited for all of them. And then I got Covid that weekend. Oh. You know, I stayed home on my couch and I thought about how excited I had been to attend all those parties.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And then I didn’t get to, I got to, you know, attend some parties later on in the summer. But were you writing this book at that time?

Sheila Liming I was actually, yes, I was, I was working on the finishing touches to this book.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings At that time, , did you reflect on what parties mean to us while you were sitting on the couch not, uh, attending yours?

Sheila Liming Um, I was certainly editing that chapter and, uh, probably feeling some of the sentiments that I expressed in that chapter a little bit more cruelly as a result. I wanted to start with parties cuz that’s where you started, but also because I think that they’re like the big boisterous, headlining version of hanging out, but you’re writing about all different kinds of it and how, uh, little we might do it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings How is a party different from hanging out and how, for the purposes of this book, how are you defining hanging out anyway?

Sheila Liming um, I’m defining hanging. As unstructured or lightly structured time that we spend in the company of others that can be friends, that can be family, that can be colleagues, et cetera. That can even be strangers. Um, as I talk about in the book too, and parties in some ways, you’re right, they form sort of like the loudest version. Of our understanding of that activity. But they’re certainly not the only version. And for many people, I don’t even think they’re the most desirable version of what hanging out is. So in the book, I begin with parties, cuz I think that’s where a lot of our minds go when we think about what it means to spend unstructured time with other people. But then I sort of diverge into thinking about other forms of hanging out. Including quieter versions like dinner parties, um, which originally I was thinking of as kind of the same thing. And then I realized, no, they’re actually quite different. The dynamic’s really different at a, at a dinner party than it is say, at a giant party with 50 people in attendance. Parties can splinter, you know, they become these, um, smaller groups where people search out their own kind of crew or their side conversations or they’re like parties within a party. And, um, I was interested in that move too, which is why I ended up focusing on, you know, more intimate forms of hanging out.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Why is it so important to hang?

Sheila Liming One of the things that I keep coming back to in thinking about why this activity matters is the underpinnings of modern democracy, and maybe that sounds like a big leap to make, but what I’m thinking about here is how modern democracy actually depends, in a sense, on being able to cultivate care for other people and being able to cultivate hypothetical care for what’s going on in other people’s. So that we have an infrastructure that we want to share with each other and that we want to prove, you know, mutually beneficial to others as well. I believe hanging out is related to that because I believe hanging out is about finding ways to cultivate care. Hmm. Maybe in very, very small ways, or even in the most mundane examples we’re experiences. Um, but that it sort of begins there and then it can grow from there into a more hypothetical sense, in a more wide-ranging. What were you seeing or feeling? And I know Covid is a big part of this, obviously, but as you make the point, it’s not all of it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What were you seeing or feeling, uh, that inspired you to tackle this subject and write this book?

Sheila Liming Well, I think, you know, first what I was seeing was a kind of decline of the activities that I’m tracking in the book. I was witnessing that decline on multiple fronts and in multiple ways. Uh, I’m a college professor, so I work with, you know, primarily a population of adults who are aged about 18 to 24 years old. So some of what I was witnessing in terms of decline was happening amongst that population, and I was sort of, watching that and interested in that and studying that. And also wondering where hanging out had gone, where it had migrated to if it wasn’t happening in these ways that I could pick up on and obviously observe. But I was also thinking about it in my own life, in my friend’s life, in the lives of my family members, um, and things like that as well. Thinking about how. Effortless hanging out used to be, um, for me at certain points in my life and, and probably for others too, when they were younger. And then as we age, how much more effortful it becomes and trying to figure out what are the barriers or the boundaries that develop in our world that make it more effortful as we age and make it sort of harder to achieve.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What do we know about, uh, how much of these types of hanging out we’re doing, obviously less during the pandemic, but in general, what kind of decline are we seeing and can we track that?

Sheila Liming Um, I think we can track it, uh, in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the ways that we are, I think, attempting to track it is through data and statistics. Um, I was just reading the other day, a study that said, Um, something like 60% of Americans over the age of 45 have two or fewer close friends. Yeah. Right. So that being one kind of way of tracking this behavior. But on a more sort of, uh, qualitative side, um, or for me on a more narrative side of things, um, I’m interested in the stories that come about as the result of the way that. Our hanging out activities are changing, and one of the ways that they’re changing, of course, is that they tend to take place in a more mediated environment on the internet, or it’s through technology or our phones or whatever it happens to be. And obviously that’s been taking place for a long time, um, and been building for a while long before the covid uh, pandemic came around. I find as I get older, um, I’m sure you do too, and I’m sure most people listening can relate to this, that if you’re going to see somebody, uh, a friend you haven’t seen in a while or even a close friend, you have to schedule it, right? Like, we have lives, we have. Kids, we have jobs.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What’s the difference between what you get out of hanging out versus something that really has to be structured?For instance, I’m going to, uh, spend exactly one hour tonight, uh, with my brother on a golf simulator. We’re not hanging out. We’re, we’re there, we’re there to do it, but at least I’m seeing him. What’s the difference between those two things?

Sheila Liming Well, first I’m glad that you’re doing that with your brother. That sounds like fun. But I think one of the differences is that, you know, um, when we. schedule activity, which of course we have to do, um, sometimes in order to achieve what we wanna achieve for our own social goals. When we schedule those activities, we also end up. Unwittingly placing extra expectations upon them, I think, or else we can end up placing those expectations upon them, including finite understandings about how long the activity’s supposed to last and what’s happened, what’s supposed to happen during the activity.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Sheila Liming One of the things we lose in that context is this sense of improvisation. Um, the sense that, you know, whatever we’re making with each other, our relationship with each other can be sort of subject to invention there in the moment. I don’t wanna say that one form of hanging out is more authentic than the other, um, because I actually think that any kind of hanging out that we can do to strengthen our relationships with other people is, is necessary and is useful. But we do sort of miss that, uh, quality of improvisation that allows people to sort of meet in the middle, I think as equals. You mentioned technology, so I want to ask directly about that because I actually have, ooh, fond is maybe not the right term for them, but, but decent memories of those days during the first year of the pandemic, when, you know, uh, the people who work on this show or my. Friend group would gather on Zoom or on teams and, you know, sit down at a designated time and we’d all bring our beverages and, and we’d sit around and, you know, shoot the crap. And I guess my question is, how different is that from like, just hanging out aside from the time it wasn’t really that structured. That’s true. Um, and I remember doing similar things to that in those early days of the pandemic, including even, you know, getting together via the internet, of course, with friends who I hadn’t really seen or gotten to hang out with face-to-face in years. Um, people who I, I was separated from by distance and by, you know, life choices and life changes and things like that. So there was certainly a kind of celebratory quality. I think what became difficult was that we also started to rely more heavily on these forms of hanging out these mediated forms at the same time that our working lives also became mediated in those exact same ways, which started to make hanging out with friends on Zoom or on the internet or in a group chat or whatever. A lot like being at work.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Sheila Liming To the point where those activities started to become indistinguishable from each other. At least this was something I was noticing. You know, once you have your sort of Google calendar up and you have that Zoom appointment in there with your friends, even if it is unstructured and you have a good time doing it, it’s sandwiched in there between work meetings or between obligations or between responsibilities in a way that starts to make the overall landscape of the day feel like a series of encounters with screens and not with people.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings How much of finding unstructured time or taking advantage of unstructured time is like a muscle? I try to think about the times that I used to hang out in university days are when I was young with nothing to do. And I can’t remember how I did it.

Sheila Liming I feel the exact same way. I rely on that metaphor of, of musculature and exercise a lot, um, in talking about hanging out in the book, um, because I think there’s, there’s some wisdom there in thinking about, you know, how um, our muscles of course, don’t leave us. They don’t abandon us entirely. If we stop exercising them, they just become slightly less able to perform the task that we would ask them to do. But if we give them a little bit more training and we try to get them back into the habit, we can kind of reclaim. Um, that ability, whatever it happens to be. And I think the same is true of our social musculature, and the same is true of hanging out. I look back on the same periods in my life that you were just referring to, you know, thinking about college and stuff like that when I had a lot of unstructured time. And I also wonder how I managed to make it happen, because it feels unfathomable to think about doing that today, about spending that kind of time in that unstructured way, or even having. Time to spend in the company of other people.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Sheila Liming Um, where you’re just sort of like, you know, roaming around and looking for things to do or inventing things as they come to you. I want to ask you about the response to this book, which obviously has been positive. You know, there’s been a lot of press around it. Um, and, and that’s been great and I, I embrace the message of it, but also I wonder if there has been pushback. It resonated with me, but I also kind of feel at times like, you know, I. I get my backup at being told, like, just clear your scared man and relax and just chill out, you know? Don’t worry so much.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And, and it’s way easier said or written than done.

Sheila Liming Yeah, agreed. And I’m actually not telling you to chill out, and I’m not telling you to relax because I can’t, I know I don’t want either of those things to happen. I’m, I’m definitely not very good at relaxing, so I’m not the person to like, you know, speak as a guru on that subject. Although I can understand why some people might view the book in that. Um, especially because there are so many messages like that that come to us from the culture of wellness and self-care.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yes.

Sheila Liming And things like that. And I’m actually not arguing in favor of relaxation, um, or tuning out. I’m actually arguing in favor of seizing time away from things. And paying it somewhere else. So taking it aside, um, you know, from the things that where it has essentially been stolen from us, whether that’s work or whether that’s, you know, preparation for work or, you know, maybe even in the, um, areas of self-care and instead giving it back to each other as a kind of act of kindness and generosity and, you know, um, as a way to like exist in the social world. I will say that the response to the book, which has been overwhelmingly positive, um, but there has been, you know, definitely some notes of discord. An early review that I read of the book, which, you know, was from an anonymous reviewer, um, that had to be a man because of the way that he was talking about hanging out. And he was saying, um, you know, lining diagnosis is a problem that I don’t think is actually a problem because I have no problem getting together with my friends at the ballgame. Right? And I was like, yeah, well that’s. Great for you. The rest of us are working 55, 60 hour weeks and finding it really difficult to make that happen sometimes. Okay, so let’s put it this way.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings We know we need to do it more. Um, it can be really hard to steal back that time the way you’re talking about, um, the last chapter of your book offers, uh, some places to start. Can you sort of walk us through them?

Sheila Liming Yeah. I structure the last chapter of the book, the conclusion along the lines of the verb to and I offer five different kinds of things that I believe we can sort of take meaning, like sort of forcibly seize in order to get better at hanging out in order to revive that kind of musculature that I was talking about that allows us to be able to do it. So the first one, of course that I talk about, and maybe the most obvious one is take time. Um, which means, you know, seizing time away from the places or the duties or the responsibilities where we have ended up being forced to put it, um, and bringing it back toward. Where we can actually give it to each other too, um, as a way of, you know, creating opportunities for hanging out. Mm-hmm. , one of the other things I mentioned in the final chapter is taking and creating opportunities as well, uh, taking the opportunity to invite people to do something. Taking other people up on invitations that they offer you. Even if something feels like maybe it’s not quite your scene or it’s not quite your thing, or it feels uncomfortable, or it feels experimental, or you’re not sure how it’s gonna turn out. And that of course turns into another piece of advice that I give, which is taking risks as well. I think social opportunities involve taking risks sometimes. They’re usually pretty small. But we gotta get used to doing it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I also want to ask you before we stop, because there’s one example in there that I think a lot of us with busy lives or friends with, busy lives can, can really, uh, take to heart, not to, uh, not to take away from the ending of your book, but can you tell me about your friend Marta and how you hang out with her?

Sheila Liming Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned her. Um, Marta’s my best friend from childhood and these days we live on opposite. I live in Vermont and she lives in Washington State where we grew up. She these days, is a very busy parent. She has two young boys who are very sweet and I’m glad to know them and have them in my life. But she also is extremely busy. She has a full-time job and I know that when I go out to Washington, I will be lucky if I can grab some time with her because you know my schedule when I’m out there visiting as a kind of visitor and tourist is a little bit more flexible than hers. I’ve kind of adjusted to this situation where I’m like tell me what you need to get done today and let me come with you and do it. Whether that’s grocery shopping or taking your kid to the doctor or picking them up from daycare or running some errands. And I’ve come to really cherish these activities in this time that I spend with her because not only do I get the chance to actually be with her when otherwise I might not, you know, she might say, oh, I don’t really have the time. I have to do all this stuff. But I also get to like witness the mature human that she has become. I get to see her in her. In her life, in her like day-to-day existence, which to me is this really intense form of intimacy that I really appreciate. So when I was just back in Washington, it involved taking her new dog to the dog park and letting the dog exercise while also meeting up with her sister and her sister’s new husband and their dogs, while also managing her boys. And it was a lot of fun. So that’s the last thing I want to ask you about, which is just how broadly can you apply the philosophy of hanging out? Because, uh, you mentioned in the book with Marta, you know, going to the doctor’s office with her and her. That’s not something most people would think of hanging out. And I wonder if there’s a way to reframe it so that, so that taking this time doesn’t feel like, uh, such an insurmountable thing. Well, that of course starts with having time. Right, right. And, um, I’m lucky that on those trips I have the luxury of time because I’m visiting, I’m out of my element, I’m away from my schedule. So I have a little bit more flexibility than I know other people might not be able to claim under those circumstances. But I really want to think about hanging out as a. Expansive kind of range of activities as a whole umbrella that includes a variety of different activities, even mediated forms of hanging out, um, like in the internet or through correspondence or email or whatever. The important thing for me is being able to enjoy that unstructured or lightly structured time. In the presence of other people who otherwise maybe we would not be able to make time for and would end up having to like sacrifice our connections to, which is something that, you know, of course I’m, I’m concerned about.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Sheila, thank you so much for this, a fascinating book.

Sheila Liming Thank you very much. This has been really enjoyable.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Sheila Liming, the author of Hanging Out The Radical Power of Killing Time, which you can get at your favorite bookshop, and maybe you should just chill at your favorite bookshop for a while. See what happens. What’s the worst that could happen? That was the big story. You can find more If you want to hang out with us for a little while longer at the Big story podcast.ca. You can always find us on Twitter at the big story fpn, and you can always email us at hello at the big story podcast.ca or call us and leave a message 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. Have a great weekend. Make some time to just chill and we’ll talk Monday.