“My own time” is defined by subtraction
“I have no time for myself.” People say this all the time. Work keeps them busy, home keeps them busy, and there is no time left that is their own.
But what is this “time of one’s own”? Listen closely and you notice it is never defined by what it contains. Work, family, social obligations, duties: subtract all the time handed over to someone else, and whatever remains is called “my own time.”
What most people picture is time to relax, time for their own pleasures. It is less a wish to do something than a wish for time in which no one demands anything of them and no one evaluates them.
My own sense of it is a little different. When I am working, when I am at a café, when I am with people, when I am studying law, it all runs together without divisions, and I am inside it.
Where does this difference come from? Following the question, I began to see that the very phrase “my own time” rests on an illusion.
The self that is absent from work
“I’m too busy with work to have time for myself” already carries an assumption: that time at work is not one’s own. People spend most of their waking hours feeling that those hours do not belong to them.
This is precisely what Marx called alienation. You return to yourself only outside of labor; inside it, you are outside yourself. If so, the problem is not the length of time but the absence of the self while working.
Why does that absence arise? I think it is because many people spend their working time as a means to something else: for after hours, for the weekend, for the paycheck. The present is always a waiting room for “later,” and their center of gravity sits slightly ahead of where they are.
That is how divisions are born. And the self ends up existing only on the far side of the dividing line.
The “own time” we hand over
Work means being told what to do and having one’s time bound by others. Playing games, watching streaming services, scrolling social media, on the other hand, is considered “my own time.”
But isn’t that also time we hand over? We give our time and attention to games, streaming services, and social media platforms. It is consumption time, and it generates someone else’s profit.
Structurally, it is even more thorough than work. At work, you at least receive pay in exchange for your time. In consumption, you pay money and give up your time as well. Autoplay, infinite scroll, loot boxes: all are designed to hold on to people’s time for as long as possible.
In his essay “Free Time,” Adorno argued that leisure only appears to stand opposite labor; in fact it is an extension of labor, organized by the culture industry. The argument is more than half a century old, yet it fits today’s attention economy even better than it fit his own time.
The ingenious part is that this confinement has no friction. Constraint at work is visible because we feel resistance. Constraint in consumption is invisible because every source of resistance has been engineered away. People are bound while feeling that they are freely choosing. The most effective control is control experienced as freedom.
Yet this means “whether someone profits” cannot be the criterion. Time spent working in the flow also ends up profiting the company. The difference lies elsewhere: whether you are there, or whether you are being pulled in.
Being present and being absorbed look very similar from the outside. In both, people forget the time and are unaware of divisions. The decisive difference is what remains afterward.
After time in which you were present, the body is left with a sense of having engaged. After time in which you were absorbed, what remains is the feeling of lost time: “Is it already this late?” And often even that emptiness is filled by the next video, so that each chance to notice one’s own absorption is overwritten.
Family service as another shift
For men, time spent with family and children has long been called kazoku sābisu, “family service,” even though it falls in private, off-duty hours.
One hears the phrase less often these days. But the substance has not changed. Ikumen, the word that spread in its place for fathers who take part in childcare, is a rephrasing of the same logic. A father spending time with his children is treated not as a place where he naturally belongs, but as an extra contribution worthy of praise.
Service is labor provided for someone else. The phrase positions time with family not as time in which one is present, but as time handed over to others. Neither the company’s time nor one’s own, it becomes another shift. No one would call the place where they truly are a “service.”
The irony is that children are the very beings who live in undivided time. Children do not use play as a means, and they do not spend the present for the sake of later. Time with children ought to be the best opportunity for adults to re-enter that flow.
But the moment it is approached as “service,” it turns into time to be gotten through as a duty. The body may be there, but its center of gravity is placed ahead, in “when will this be over?”
The phrase also carries an asymmetry. Women’s time with family is never called family service. It is treated from the outset as their natural role, and is not even visible as labor. In both cases, what is missing is the idea that a person might simply be present, as themselves, within the family.
The invention of the dividing line
Society’s notion of “working hours” is itself a compulsory division that absorbs individual time.
Historically, this division is a relatively recent invention. As the historian E. P. Thompson argued, pre-industrial labor was divided by tasks, “until the work is done,” and time was dissolved within the work itself. With the factory system, labor came to be bought and sold by the hour, and the clock became an instrument of discipline.
Once time is sold, the time sold is no longer yours, and what remains becomes “your own time.” The “own time” so many people speak of is a residual concept born of the commodification of time.
The law makes this explicit. Since the Japanese Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Nagasaki Shipyard case, working time under the Labor Standards Act has been defined as time during which the worker is placed under the employer’s direction and command. The law divides time according to whose control it falls under. That the term “bound time” (kōsoku jikan) has become everyday language is itself evidence of how much society takes this for granted.
Still, the division is double-edged. The eight-hour-day movement proclaimed: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. The dividing line was originally a seawall, protecting people from time that would otherwise be absorbed without limit.
Today, work messages arrive on our phones, and the line is collapsing in only one direction: work seeping into private life. A line meant to protect survives as the logic of those who allot time, and it now functions in one direction only.
Time cannot be owned
The time spent working, the time spent resting, and the time that is neither are all time that I am living. People do not own time. Yet society treats time as property and trades it.
Japan’s Civil Code defines ownership as the right to freely use, profit from, and dispose of a thing (Article 206). Time fits none of these. It cannot be stopped, stored, rewound, or transferred to anyone. Even so-called private time cannot be postponed to tomorrow, and a boring hour cannot be shortened. We call something “my own time” that satisfies not a single condition of ownership.
What, then, is being traded? Not time, but the self who is living that time. When you “sell eight hours,” what is sold is eight hours’ worth of yourself.
The fiction of time as property works to conceal this fact. So that we need not feel we are selling ourselves, an abstract commodity called “time” is inserted in between. When the ILO’s Declaration of Philadelphia (1944) opened by affirming that labor is not a commodity, it was acknowledging the danger of this fiction.
Even so, many people feel as though they are surrendering their freedom, almost like slaves. The nineteenth-century labor movement spoke of “wage slavery,” and Japanese has the word shachiku, “company livestock.” Marx remarked wryly that a worker who sold his labor power all at once would be a slave; it is only by selling it piece by piece, by the hour, that he remains formally free.
Of course, the metaphor has limits. The freedom to quit and to refuse a contract remains, and that is decisively different from actual slavery. But it is worth asking where the feeling comes from.
If time cannot be owned, then neither can freedom be sold off in pieces. Even under the same employment contract, a person who is present does not feel they are selling their freedom. The slave-like feeling arises when, on top of the real weight of the structure, we internalize the view the structure imposes: that time is property.
The moment time is treated as property, it becomes something that can be saved, wasted, or stolen. The guilt of “wasting time” is a by-product of this.
The freedom to choose how to be
In On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote that everything else belongs to others, and time alone is ours. At first glance this sounds like the language of ownership. But he is not speaking of a right to control or dispose of it. He means that time flows away without our being able to keep it, and that we lose it when, instead of being there ourselves, we hand it over to others or to our desires. Seneca’s “ours” is closer to being present than to owning.
The freedom people have with respect to time is not the freedom to alter it. It is only the freedom to choose how to be within the time that flows. In working hours or private hours, this does not change.
This “choosing,” however, is not a decision made in the head. The idea that we choose with our heads, with thought, is an illusion. What exists is the body.
Merleau-Ponty held that we are in the world first not as “I think” but as “I can.” When we walk, speak, or ride a wave, the body is already responding to the situation, and thought merely adds the story, afterward, that “I chose.” Dōgen’s shinjin ichinyo, the oneness of body and mind, likewise points not to a mind steering a body, but to a way of being in which the two are not separate.
That is why, even if you resolve by willpower to “be here now,” a body in the habit of living time as a means will soon be pulled forward again. This freedom is not obtained through a single decision. Like practice in a traditional art, it is chosen again and again until the body grows into it.
Looking back, the very idea of treating time as property was a product of the head. Clocks, schedules, working hours, “my own time”: all are abstractions that divide time by looking at it from outside. The body has never once owned time.
Not even a flow, but the ma where the body is
At the beginning I wrote that I am inside an undivided flow. But as the thought goes further, even that is not quite accurate. “Flow” is still a metaphor of time, an image seen from a vantage point that compares before and after, which is to say, from the side of the head.
The body does not feel a flow. It simply is, there. If things feel undivided, I think it is because I am there as a body.
In the Genjōkōan chapter of the Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen taught that firewood does not become ash. Firewood abides in its own place as firewood, ash in its own place as ash; there is a before and an after, yet before and after are cut off. Each moment is not a segment of a flow but complete in itself.
The Japanese word for time, jikan, contains the character 間, ma, which means interval, space, the between. Ma is both space and time. To receive time not as a measured, divided quantity, but as the ma in which the body is.
The “time of one’s own” that so many seek has been a share to be reclaimed from time society has carved up. But what actually exists is not a share. There is only the ma in which the body is. It cannot be sold to anyone, and no one can take it.
We feel it has been taken only when the body is there while the head lives somewhere else. What is lacking is not time, but the self who is there.