"My argument starts in observations about time and the way it has been basically stolen from places in our lives and reappropriated to other things. I’m thinking about the expansion of the workday, and working activities in general, so that it’s almost impossible to extricate ourselves from them. Then it turns into an argument about what to do when we’re able to reclaim our time for ourselves.
"One of the concerns I have is with the growing trend towards social isolation. We end up giving in to labor more often than not when we’re by ourselves, even when we are engaging in activities that are meant to bring greater “wellness” to us, or “self-care,” as employers like to call it. What we’re actually doing is trying to make ourselves more fit for our return to work and [trying to be] better laborers, which, as in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” is a cyclical trap.
"In the meantime, while we’re continuously working on ourselves in isolation, we’re ignoring each other. We’re ignoring the people who exist in our community, the people who exist in our democracy, the people whom we have to cultivate attention and care for, because if we don’t, then those structures will fail. Democracy is based on hypothetical care for strangers; if we can’t cultivate that, it’s really hard to keep the whole machinery running." - Sheila Liming
Author Interview: How We Socialize Now: A Conversation with Sheila Liming
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