The joy of hanging out

REQUIRING ONLY TIME AND SPACE IN WHICH TO DO IT, HANGING OUT WITH PEOPLE ISN’T ONLY ONE OF LIFE’S MOST SIMPLE PLEASURES – IT’S ALSO INVALUABLE FOR OUR WELLBEING, DISCOVERS FRANCES AMBLER

Hand on heart, I wouldn’t say that my school days were the best days of my life. But, looking back, I would say that they were rich with an activity that contributed to my best days: hanging out. Hanging out was how my school friendships were conducted: on chilly benches, on stuffy school buses, at breaktimes and traipsing around the local shopping centre. Sometimes the hang out extended into long phone calls. Given how little, relatively, was going on in our lives at the time, what on earth, I think, could we have found to talk about? (A question my parents did often ask, looking pointedly at their phone bill.)

Not much actually happened over those hours of hanging out, aside from some fairly typical teenage angst, and the backdrops were rarely anything above the mundane but, looking back, it’s amazing how much pleasure we squeezed from so little: the in-jokes and the intimacy.

The amount of time I spend hanging out is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot less these days. But it’s continued to play a valuable role in my life – grotty rented places made more comfortable by an hour of talking with a flatmate; the pressure of a workday eased by a chat with a colleague as we wait for the kettle to boil. Hanging out is one of those gentle pursuits that make daily life better – like time with a good book, or a bath at the end of a long day. But I don’t think I’d really appreciated that until I read Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming. As she argues, hanging out is such a basic activity that we don’t tend to appreciate it, in fact, we take it for granted. And because we take it for granted, we allow it to get squeezed out, especially for other demands that might seem more pressing – chores, for example, or work and the desire to use our time productively.

I know I can feel guilty if I feel I’m being unproductive and, by many measures of productivity, it’s hard to measure the ‘value’ of hanging out. But I also know how much I’ve gained from all these different types of hanging out. It’s restorative, rather than lazy. “Hanging out ought to figure in adult life the same way that play figures in childhood,” Liming argues.

It, potentially, gets worse. Arguably hanging out is more vulnerable than it has ever been. While there are obvious advantages to being able to do so much more online now, it’s made casual, everyday hanging out feel that little bit harder and less natural – what’s the equivalent of the instinctive gathering around the kettle? It puts the emphasis on us a bit more – to really appreciate the value of hanging out, and to make it a conscious part of daily life.

While some people are adept at ‘just having people over’, that’s not my natural instinct – though I always appreciate it when it happens. I’m much more likely to schedule things around a specific event or occasion and within its own contained time slot. It’s not done in that same spirit of openness and generosity

“Hanging out is one of those gentle pursuits that make daily life better”

“Hanging out ought to figure in adult life the same way that play figures in childhood”

that it was as a teen. I’ve forgotten one of the valuable lessons from all those teenage hours spent freezing on benches: that the entry point to hanging out is extremely low – it’s the being with other people that’s the event in itself.

As Liming says, one of the unique things about hanging out “is that anyone can do it, so long as they have access to time and space.” There is always time to be found, if you look for it – one of her suggestions is to accompany a friend as they go about their shopping chores, or inviting people for food and it doesn’t really matter if it’s ‘only’ a takeaway pizza. Rather than thinking of it as another thing on our to-do list, it’s actually a valuable release valve for our wellbeing. And not just ourselves – wider society, too. We’re increasingly lonely overall – an Office for National Statistics report from last year found that a quarter of adults said that they felt lonely always, often or some of the time, figures that had gone up since the previous report. Surely even just a little more hanging out with people could help?

All my teenage hanging out took place before social media. I’m grateful for being able to work through my teen feelings and angst offline, and for having those many extended hours of hanging out with my mates to do it in. Those qualities are still useful now that I’m ‘grown up’. Hanging out gives us space for “learning and improvisation” as we interact with others, says Liming, the opposite of many online discourses that seem to need fast and firm opinions. Of course, meaningful relationships can be forged online, it’s just remembering that they’re not any more important than what we already have in our lives. “It’s easy to pivot our attention away from the people who are right there in front of us – the ones we should be hanging out with – and give it to someone else located somewhere else,” Liming says (and I immediately think of all those times I’ve been with my partner in silence as we both tap away into our phones). “If we do this often enough, we begin to believe that life lies elsewhere, outside of the confines of where we happen to be living it right now.”

And that’s the crux of it for me. For all the mindful exercises that try and help keep us in the moment, hanging out is probably every bit as valuable – and (whisper it) a lot more fun? Now, I’ve ordered pizza, if anyone fancies joining me? There’s a bench I’ve spotted over there, too…

Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming (Melville House) is out now