Hannah Arendt once observed that people in America are lonely because they are busy. "In this country,” she explains in a letter from the 1940s, "one gets very lonely because people have so many things to do that, after a certain point, the need for leisure is quite simply no longer there." Arendt’s point is that the strain brought about by constant activity, or by the apparent necessity of performing such activity, prevents one from not just enjoying but even experiencing free time. So what is free time? How do we experience it? And what rights, if any, do we have to it? Come hang out and discuss what it means to hang out in a world where that feels increasingly difficult.
