Who owns your time?
How you spend your free time shapes not just your life, but the kind of society we become.
Most of us work for others — that's just reality.
Companies get our best hours, our peak energy, our sharpest thinking.
After work, other commitments chip away at what time’s left: family needs, social obligations, church, clubs, the basic maintenance of life. This isn't necessarily bad — civilization runs on rules.
But here's why this matters: your private time is where real growth happens. When you pursue what actually interests you, you develop new skills and learn to think for yourself by solving the problems that matter to you.
Whether you're teaching yourself woodworking, reading philosophy, or building strength in the gym — these pursuits shape who you become.
This is also where freedom lives. Hobbies, books, art, ideas — these are the spaces where we dissent, explore, and create. Free time has a funny way of creating free thinkers.
Naturally, those who want to control us fear leisure time above all.
They know that people with free time and active interests are harder to predict and control. Their ideas are Unpredictable. They’re dangerous to the status quo.
That's why there's such a push to keep you busy with work, or alternatively fill your every moment with junkfood content, notifications, and manufactured needs.
“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
― Marshall McLuhan
Decades ago, author Norman Mailer sounded the alarm about mass media’s invasion of private life. TV, radio, corporate news — they crept into our homes, our minds.
At last corporations and governments had found a more seductive and thus effective way to influence private life.
And even better for established power structures: Americans welcomed the invasion. What sort of home had no TV? It became a symbol of status to have multiple TVs or a room dedicated to the device, rather than a mere “living room.”
But here’s the thing: creators adapted.
They turned the tools of control into platforms for rebellion.
Indie films, underground magazines, provocative books — they struck back. Even if they were losing the war, they kept fighting, here and there sending a signal up to remind others that everything wasn’t as it seemed.
Intelligent interview programs even managed to make their way onto airwaves. Mailer himself and his often wild, sometimes prescient ideas were regular guests on several shows. Jack Kerouac — in varying stages of decline — spoke at length, mystics and intellectuals all made appearances.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media theorist, was on TV countless times and explained to Americans:
“Today, the instantaneous world of electronic information media involves all of us, all at once. Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness … You have extreme concern with everybody else’s life. It’s a sort of Ann Landers column written larger. … The walls all go out.”
Then social media arrived like a trojan horse. Corporations and government salivated.
The ultimate tool for control, right?
Flatten opinions. Silence outliers. Bland content. Safe ideas for mass appeal.
But then the walls really went out.
Creators stole the fire like Prometheus. They found ways around censors and ways to make the digital space into something more interesting: a place where independent voices can find their audience, where unconventional ideas can spread, where people can learn and grow in any number of ways.
If you’ve got a curious disposition and are willing to hunt a bit, YouTube University can take you to some wild places. It can teach you, what you should have learned sooner.
We know where the traditional paths lead — 9-5 and pray for retirement at 65. But distill some more interesting ideas into young minds and who knows where that will lead?
Yes, the algorithm rewards banality. Yes, influencers play it safe and many hawk b.s. products.
But not everyone. Not everywhere.
Social media, for all its flaws, has become a battleground for ideas. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. It’s alive. And that’s the point.
The outliers are still there.