The Uses of Useless Time

On being in high school and not being home.

This essay was originally published in Cusper Magazine and they have graciously allowed me to share it here as well. Pick up a copy of Cusper here. And follow their Substack and Instagram. I will also be reading as part of a Cusper event on May 29—RSVP here.

We had names for everything: the globe—which was the massive metal globe sculpture outside the Trump International on 57th Street, at the base of Central Park. Mexico—the cheap Mexican food place a few blocks away. The hill—which was the high corner of 61st street and 10th avenue (the street our high school sat at the bottom of was on a pretty significant slope, at least significant for Manhattan). We thought these names were creative until one day in 12th grade we realized they were not. But they were important places to us, carved onto internal maps with names realer than any government designation or Google Maps label (especially because Google Maps was not really in use back then); names that only existed between friends, ones we all carried and shared with a few words unintelligible to anyone who was not us (“meet at the globe to see the fight”; “meet at the smoke park to roll a blunt”), like some kind of highly secure teenage intranet. 

We existed in this world only when adults would allow us to—when we were out to lunch for an hour or after school before our parents made us come home. But as soon as we were allowed, everything else around us slipped away.

My favorite days in this universe were often mundane—walking with my friends from 61st to 72nd street, chilling in various delis and bookstores and parks. Walking and walking and walking. I have no clue what we talked about for cumulatively thousands of hours, but there was never an awkward silence. One time, a friend discovered sticking a toothpick up your nose made you sneeze and shiver and feel a kind of adrenaline high. So we sat on big boulders in Riverside Park and did that for four hours until it became dark. Things like that.

And then, one day, in 11th grade, at the top of the hill, around 4pm, sitting against the beige wall of a large residential building, my friend Anne Marie and I were play-fighting. Hitting each other in the face semi-softly. I don’t know why we did this, but we did it pretty frequently. As we exchanged blows we’d collapse onto each other, laughing, then go back to the blows again, then back to collapsing and laughing; and then I picked my head up from her shoulder and saw two New York City Police Department officers standing there. They asked if we were in need of assistance. Someone had seen on a security camera two teens engaged in combat. 

I was befuddled. Because I didn’t understand how our joy could be interpreted as violence; But mostly because it was the first time it occurred to me that other people existed in our map of the world—that the people we saw walking past us or paid money to or ran away from between the time school let out and the time our parents would begin frantically calling our rudimentary cell phones if we weren’t home (which was a slightly different time for everyone, but for me was about 7pm on school nights and 10pm on weekends), were not just parts of our map, “NPCs” in today’s terminology, but real people who shared our world, and, it turns out, had power over it, and, thus, power over us. 

Other friends had different bubble-bursting moments. Getting arrested for buying acid in 11th grade and having to share a jail cell with the drug dealer. Getting caught by parents for some drug or another (a large percentage of my friends and I were addicted to coke by the time we were 16, whoops). Or more subtle and normal bubble bursting moments like: realizing you had to be home at a reasonable hour to start applying for colleges and generally prepare to become an adult. For whatever reason, that moment at the top of the hill was my moment; the day I realized that that non-time, between 3 and 7pm, in that non-land that only existed to me and my friends, between 50th and 72nd streets and the West Side Highway and Central Park West, were, indeed, not non at all, but very, very real. 

That, more than my bar mitzvah, was my entry into adulthood—when all of a sudden I realized adulthood was in front of me, and unavoidable. The transition thus began—I had to now care about how I spent my time, I had to now care about things like the future and my life’s direction. Time was something that shouldn’t be wasted, but used productively. What is adulthood if not that? 

I can only assume the non-world exists to varying degrees for every American teenager, regardless of locale or time period. Perhaps in the car with music blasting for the suburban teen, for example. And I can only hope it still thrives now. Though I think we are taught that we need less and less of it; that it isn’t productive, and that it is dangerous. 

Every waking moment these days, we are told, can be filled with something useful—extracurriculars and study sessions and exercise activities. And if not that, then filled with a worse form of non-time, one that feels much safer and more easily managed by corporations and parents and other forms of authority over teen lives—screen time. 

Non-time has thus been eaten away at both ends. “Unstructured playtime” as the experts call it has been falling for decades. And time on our phones, as I’m sure you know from personal experience, has been skyrocketing. It’s getting to the point where even doctors are telling parents to go let their kids go do something dangerous, like falling off a bike. It’s good for their health!

There are myriad reasons we have less unstructured time these days. There are fewer places to hang out where things aren’t expensive. In the suburbs, malls often don’t even let kids loiter around anymore. The economy has become more competitive, and so parents are convinced they must fill their kids’ days with things that make them look good to colleges and potential future employers. People are convinced the outside world is more dangerous than ever, even though this is statistically not true. And, of course, perhaps most consequentially, people can now get a simulacra of social stimulation through the internet. There’s much debate over whether the internet is the cause of America’s lack of hanging out, and thus the cause of our loneliness and mental health epidemics, and I think much of this debate misses the point. The internet might not be the root cause, but it is the tool by which we enable the degradation and monetization of non-time. 

Before Discord servers and Instagrams and all the rest, even in the environments least friendly to human interaction (think: the worst American suburbs), people found ways to find each other, to create their own worlds with each other, to simply chill. The internet has allowed people a modicum of that experience without the need of a car or the possibility of trouble from the law or mall security guard. In its place, we exist in places of profit making. Ads are sold against our eyeballs, and our worst instincts—anger toward each other, chasing clout, “discourse” —encouraged so that we spend more time in those spaces. 

In the digitization of non-time, we’ve lost much of its point: that it was unstructured, that it led to places unknown, that it got you in trouble, that it was not productive. That it did not have a point, or at least not a readily apparent one. If it did have a point, it’s only now become apparent as our loneliness and mental health crises continue unabated: it is what made life worth living. 

And now we yearn for a return; trend pieces get written about “bed rotting”—which involves laying in bed doing nothing all day. Influencers woo followers by showing themselves participating in fake versions of non-time: on vacation, or simply staring out their windows with a cup of tea (fake because they are recording it and using it to build a following and make money, and thus not participating in non-time at all). 

But even without our ever-growing-insistence on productivity, and even without the invention of the smartphone, it is and always has been a fact of life that being an adult involves a whittling away of non-time. If you are not working, you are expected to be doing something else, and that something else surely isn’t smoking weed behind a Duane Reade and then stealing from Urban Outfitters. 

Which is not to suggest that adults remedy the drudgery of adult life by participating in teen activities. I have little interest in shoplifting from Urban Outfitters these days; and even less interest in smoking weed—and if I do, I can do that from the comfort of my parent-less home. 

Of course, adults do find time to squeeze in non-time. We go to bars and movies and restaurants and on vacation. It’s simply a matter of degree; we do not have enough of it. I certainly do not. When I am not working, I am often on my phone, or reading the news; and even when I am socializing, there is often a tinge of productivity involved—many of my friends work in similar fields, we’re often scheming about what’s next and how to help each other accomplish those things.

I attempt to force non-time into my life—I delete social media apps from my phone, I refuse to spend my free time networking with people. But really, there’s no individual solution to the lack of non-time in adult life. The world is simply not set up for it. 

And then, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when everything—bars, restaurants, clubs—was still closed, non-time all of a sudden was plentiful again. There was nothing for me and many of my friends to do except collect an allowance (from the government this time, not our parents) and spend it on beers we bagged up and took with us as we walked across the city, over bridges from Brooklyn, then downtown, then uptown, from nowhere to nowhere. And, crucially, because we had no clue whether the world would exist in its current form in the next day or week or year, I had no feelings of wanting to use the time more productively, or feelings of guilt that I wasn’t. It feels horrible to say that those days, which were terrible at a societal level, have become some of my fondest memories. But such is the importance of non-time. 

And then, again, the non-world slowly disappeared, subsumed by what we were told was a good, normal life: People got jobs. We were allowed in bars. Like turning 21 all over again. And now I find myself with so much time meant to be spent purposefully, yet finding less and less purpose in that time. 

My old high school moved locations several years ago, to a nicer building in Midtown, and these days, on the Mondays I meet my dad on the far West Side to play tennis at 2:30pm, I often encounter an endless stream of students from my former school walking past me. I struggle to contain myself from pointing at their hoodies emblazoned with “BEACON” and saying, “I went there!” One, because I’m sure they’d make fun of me, as any self-respecting high schooler would. But two, because I know they are in their own world, on their own map, in their own time, and I, joyfully to both them and me, am now just a visitor, an NPC, passing through. I do not want to disturb that. I know how rare it is.