Time to Break Up With Your 9-to-5

Before laptops allowed us to take the office home and smartphones could light up with notifications at any hour, work time and “life” time had clearer boundaries. Today, work is not done exclusively in the workplace, and that makes it harder to leave work at work.

Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost examine the habits that shrink our available time, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his reflections on American culture and shares suggestions for how to use the time we do have, for life.

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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Ian Bogost: So Becca, many years ago I was driving home from work, and I had a terrible day. I don’t remember why, but I was just cheesed off. And I was, like, white-knuckling my steering wheel, you know, still angry from whatever had happened. As I was driving, I saw a colleague of mine from work walking to the train to go home.

Becca Rashid: Uh huh.

Bogost: And he was just kind of sauntering down the street. And I noticed that he was carrying a book, like, as if it were a lunchbox almost. He was very casually holding this book at his side.

And he had nothing else, not a bag or a backpack or anything. And I remember looking at him and thinking, Oh man, he has it figured out—like, “What is wrong with me that that’s not how I’m behaving, now that my workday is over?”

Rashid: He has it figured out because he’s holding a book?

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Bogost: Well, the interpretation I had of what was going to happen to him next is that: He had left work, his workday was over, and he was going to get on the train and read his book and go home. And, you know, make dinner, do whatever he did in his evening routine. It just somehow came naturally to him to leave the office and begin the process of not being at work.

In a technical sense, I could do whatever I wanted with my leisure time once I’d left work, but there was something preventing me from really having control over that time.

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Welcome to . I’m Becca Rashid, co-host