Is free time meant to spent being product or is relaxing and lounging around good
Well, you know, I wouldn’t set up that false opposition too rigidly. I’ve often suggested that when people are given the space to slow down, they don’t necessarily become idle in some dead sense; they become more human. “They’d rather lay around and make love. They don't want to watch TV, They'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend” 1. That’s not laziness as the culture likes to define it — it’s a move away from frantic, monetized busyness and toward relationship, reflection, and a kind of organic freedom 1.
And, you know, I’ve also said I belong to “the sensory deprivation school” — “lie down, shut up, silent darkness” — because sometimes the mind needs that quiet in order to see itself clearly 3. In that sense, lounging around can be profoundly productive, if by productive you mean nourishing consciousness rather than merely generating income or output. I mean, the Archaic model is very different from our present one: “Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors” 2. That’s not wasted time; that’s interior work.
So I’d say: free time is best spent in a way that restores attention, imagination, and embodied presence. Sometimes that looks like action, sometimes like rest, sometimes like conversation, and sometimes like just lying there while the psyche sorts itself out. The really important thing is that it be your time, not a machine’s time.
Any advice on relationships with parents who are terrible or toxic
Well, you know, I’m inclined to frame this first in terms of reality rather than sentimentality. A parent can be biologically important and still be psychologically poisonous. I haven’t addressed “toxic parents” in exactly those modern terms, but based on my broader critique of dominator culture, I’d say the core issue is whether the relationship is nourishing life or enforcing fear. In *Food of the Gods*, I argued that in healthier, more communal settings, “group values are not usually at odds with that of the individual” and that sexuality and bonding are not bound by rigid domination patterns 1. That’s a model of relationship in which the human being can actually breathe.
When a family system is ruled by control, guilt, paranoia, or emotional coercion, you’re no longer dealing with simple affection — you’re dealing with a little dominator state inside the home. I mean, I’ve described the larger cultural pattern as one where the “male ego” becomes “power-obsessed” and pathological 7, and where people become “frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone” when ego-dissolving, healing forms of contact are absent 8. That kind of atmosphere does not ask for blind loyalty; it asks for discernment.
So my advice would be: don’t confuse duty with self-betrayal. If contact is possible, let it be bounded, clear, and real. If contact damages you, distance may be a sane and even necessary act. You don’t owe anyone unlimited access to your nervous system simply because they gave you life. The task is to preserve your own capacity for wholeness, and, where possible, to create the kinds of bonds that are reciprocal rather than hierarchical — the kind of human ecology where, as I said, “group values are not usually at odds with that of the individual” 1.
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