Sheila Liming is the author of the recent book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. In both her book and this episode, Sheila argues that hanging out—being with other people, being open to the unscripted and surprising, and taking time back from default expectations about productivity and predictability—is important for our mental health, our relationships, and even our democracy.
Show Notes
Sheila Liming is the author of three books: What a Library Means to a Woman (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and, most recently, Hanging Out (Melville House, 2023), and the editor of one, a new version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (W.W. Norton, 2022). Her writing has appeared widely in venues like the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Globe and Mail, LitHub, and elsewhere, while her work has been reviewed and featured in People magazine,the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and currently teaches classes in writing and publishing at Champlain College. In her spare time, she continues to play the Scottish bagpipes (just as she did as part of the Carnegie Mellon University pipe band).
Adam and Sheila mention several writers and works in the conversation:
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870
- Jean Jacques Rouseeau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1786
- Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood, 1974
- Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, 2010
Transcript
Sheila Liming: I think that parties are these kind of grand, risky things that we do every now and then to mark important occasions in life that are also filled with this idea of hope.
Adam Davis: Hello and welcome to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. I'm Adam Davis. A question for you, right here at the start. About how much of your time do you spend hanging out? Do you hang out alone or with others?
And what, if anything, are you doing while you hang out? And what value do you place on that time?
What's worthwhile or good about it? You could be working, Or working out, or poring over the news, or sleeping, or who knows what, but you're hanging out. Which may have a feeling of slack to it, and also feelings of relaxation, comfort, and joy. May feel like it lacks purpose, but that might be precisely why it's so important to do.
And now, here you are, hanging out with The Detour, which in the spirit of these opening questions brings you a conversation with Sheila Liming, author of a recent book called Hanging Out: the Radical Power of Killing Time. Sheila has spent a good bit of time in the Pacific Northwest, but she talked with us from Vermont, where she currently lives, teaches, hangs out, and helps people think about hanging out.
We wanted to talk with Sheila, even across the country. Because many of our goals with our work at Oregon Humanities bear pretty striking resemblance to what Sheila argues is worthwhile about hanging out, being with other people, being open to the unscripted and surprising, taking time back from default expectations about productivity and predictability.
Even the name of this show from Oregon Humanities, The Detour, feels like part of the Hanging Out family. So we were glad to learn about Sheila's work, and gladder still that she was game to hang out with us. Here's Sheila Liming now, in conversation with me via Zoom in May of 2024. Apologies for my robotic voice at the start, we were working out some connection and Zoom issues.It gets better ten minutes in. So in the spirit of today's conversation, hang in there.
Hey, Sheila, thank you for joining us from across the country to talk about hangin’ out or hanging out and I wonder if you could tell us before anything else. And I wonder if you could tell us before we do anything else in part, because it seems like place is important to hanging out.
Can, can you just tell us where you are, not just geographically, but sort where you are a little more close.
Sheila Liming: Sure. So I am in the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont. And in particular, I'm in Essex Junction, Vermont, which is about 10 minutes outside of the city center. So that's where I live. I've lived here for four years now.
I moved here in 2020 during the pandemic. So this is my new geographic base camp, as it is, and a place that I've been getting to know.
Adam Davis: And are you in a room that feels like a room you hang out in or are you in a work room? What kind of space are you in?
Sheila Liming: I am very much in a room that I hang out a lot in. I am in what I either call my home office or my home library. And it's a room filled with books. And actually just recently I just finished working on it. My partner built me for my birthday. He built me some built-in bookshelves. So previously I had stacks of books all over the place and like in boxes and laying on the floor and, you know, holding up various pieces of architecture.
And now I have actual proper bookshelves with books on them that are alphabetized and able to be located when I need them. So this is a room that I very much enjoy hanging out in, especially as of about three weeks ago.
Adam Davis: Nice. That's great. And it makes me wonder about one of the, what seems like, the key functions of hanging out that you talk about, which is being with others.
And so I guess I won't ask about the room you're in more, except that it did feel like a lot of what you're moving us to think about with hanging out is. In a way, how it is that we're with other people and what it feels like to be with other people in slightly less purposeful or purposive ways. And so, what I wanted to do, maybe here near the start, is note that you start your book, the introduction, you're with your partner, who you just mentioned, and you're in the car, and you're taking a detour as you head towards some friend's house.
And I just wanted to ask you, like, why start with a detour?
Sheila Liming: Well, I, I start with that detour story in part because it was very memorable to me. And one of the things that was memorable about it was, our friend's reaction when I called him to tell him that we were coming to his house and mind you, this was something that was sort of pre-arranged. I’d talk to his wife, also a friend of ours, and a colleague of ours And told her we were coming. But I don't know that the news had officially made it over to her husband. At any rate we were on our way to the house.
We were killing some time. And we were sort of like traveling around the back roads of western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, which is where I used to live. And we called up our friends, Sherry and Virgil, to let them know that we were getting close to their house and we'd be coming over and Virgil answered the phone very excitedly.
Now he's a man who's in his seventies. And at the time this anecdote took place, he was also still in his seventies and a little bit hard of hearing. And he was talking to us over the phone and he said, “Great. I'll have lunch ready. Can't wait to see you.” And then right before he hung up the phone, he said, “By the way, who is this?”
And I thought it was so sweet and so charming that he was ready to have lunch laid out for us before he even knew where we were or who we were. That was almost an unimportant detail for him. He was still looking forward to, you know, to hanging out, to getting together with us. So, I start with that kind of anecdotal detour in the book because to me it was very memorable in teaching me about expectations that we sometimes place upon hanging out.
Adam Davis: And you said early in that, you said, that you on the way there were killing some time and that's a common phrase, but it's also a fairly intense phrase. So I want to ask about that killing “some time.” Jeepers. What, what does that mean?
Sheila Liming: Isn't that a fascinating phrase that we have this, you know, excess time. And if we find ourselves with it, that it has to be somehow like destroyed or dismantled or gotten rid of. I find that to be very interesting, myself. And, you know, the subtitle of the book is called “The Radical Power of Killing Time.” But I think that that phrase itself shows us the kind of pressure that we're under sometimes to make time useful, to make it productive, and to make it count, and how sometimes when we are left with a little bit less left over, that can, really produce almost like a kind of panic where we feel like we don't know what to do with it, or that it has to be somehow dispensed.
So I'm interested in the idea of killing time or wasting time, and in the book I try to see those things as positive concepts or positive opportunities. That actually when we have that extra time to kill, we sort of have a gift and something that we can really do something with.
Adam Davis: Yeah, and you sort of go back and forth on the idea of whether this is a manifesto or a kind of, can it be a manifesto if the argument is to, to be more committed to less purposive or less useful time? If I got that right? Yeah.
Sheila Liming: Yeah. And, I certainly see it as a manifesto. I see it as an argument-driven treatment of the subject of hanging out. And in some ways, you know, people are like, well, what's so controversial about hanging out? That's something that everybody wants to do, right? Which is true on the surface, but it's not always something that I feel is prioritized, and not always something that we feel like we have the right to access or to take hold of.
And so the radical part of that subtitle, “The Radical Power of Killing Time,” is the idea that hanging out actually requires prioritization, that we have to kind of make time for the time that we would want to spend with other people, and make that important to ourselves as well.
Adam Davis: So “radical” is a political word often, and it does feel regularly like you're suggesting that there's a kind of resistance in hanging out and that it is political.
And it made me try to anchor it in like, for me, where do I find myself hanging out? And does it feel political or not? When I'm playing poker with friends that I see in Chicago after a couple months of not seeing them, or when I'm playing basketball with friends here. And so I want to ask you when you're playing music or having lunch with Virgil and Sherry, does that feel political in the moment or is it something that you understand as political later?
Where does the politics enter into this fairly low-key feeling activity?
Sheila Liming: That's a great question. And I do see that word “radical” as having those political valences that you mentioned, especially if we think sort of simply about the roots of the word “politic” meaning the polis, right? Represented by the people.
So politics are the social relationships that we nurture as we live in a society and sometimes the conflicts that arise from living with each other. And I think of hanging out as a political activity. In that context, because it does require the participation of other people and it requires interacting with, sort of interfacing with others, even when that can be very uncomfortable.
Now that doesn't mean that every time we hang out, we might recognize that we're engaging in some kind of radical political action. I think a lot of times it doesn't feel that way, and that might be a good thing. But I think we are also aware sometimes when we have made a choice to surround ourselves with others versus maybe making the much easier and much more accessible choice of hanging out by ourselves or hanging out in isolation. I think that modern life makes isolation very easy, very tempting, and as a result it sometimes requires a little bit of political energy or action to remember to hang out with other people and to interact with them socially.
Adam Davis: Yeah, the social part feels like the strongly political part of the argument that I read in Hanging Out. That is, it didn't feel like you were doing something like Thoreau might have done, and say, go to the woods and be alone and that's where you'll tap back into wildness and full vitality. And so I guess I want to ask you if that's what you understand yourself to be doing, saying we ought to be spending time with other people in different ways. Then we give ourselves time to…or are you saying both–we ought to be alone and with others and that they have similar kinds of power?
Sheila Liming: Well, I think that it's a situation that has to have balance. And I think that in many cases solitude can rejuvenate us and make us more ready for the act of social engagement.
That's the argument of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which I quote in the book. You know, he's a famous writer on the subject of solitude, as is Thoreau. These are two people who kind of mind the idea of what we do when we hang out by ourselves, and how that nourishes our soul. spirit or how that nourishes our consciousness.
But one of the things that Emerson points out is that time spent alone readies us for the activity of spending time socially with other people. And so it's a situation that has to exist in proportion and in balance. The problem that I try to diagnose in the book is an unhealthy degree of isolation or an unhealthy degree of loneliness related to the “epidemic of loneliness,” as our US surgeon general has called it.
Adam Davis: What feels to you like in today's culture, not just COVID, but other forces that are leading us to isolation and loneliness in ways beyond the right amount?
Sheila Liming: Yeah, I think it's easy to blame COVID for the creation of habits and behaviors that actually preexisted. And, and we're already deeply ingrained in our behaviors before COVID came along and made them all the more obvious.
I think that COVID increased our reliance on those behaviors. And what I'm talking about are the kinds of behaviors that take us away from people as opposed to drawing us closer to them. And that of course includes the use of smartphones and devices that put distance between ourselves and other people, but also increasingly have become a primary means of socialization for many people as well.
So I'm thinking here not just about the way that those habits became more entrenched during COVID, but also for a whole new generation of people. How they have started to feel like a default way of being in the world, a way that might even feel more natural than hanging out and talking to people face to face.
So in the book I try to talk about those behaviors with sympathy, because I totally understand how they've developed and why people have become so reliant on them, while also putting pressure on the idea that they may not be the most healthy for us as a society, and that it's important to try to develop other ways of socializing as well.
Adam Davis: My initial sympathy and dispositional sympathy is with the in- person stuff, and that's probably true for many of us. And then I'm thinking about our conversation right now, or the Oregon Humanities staff team, which is dispersed around the state. I'm thinking about how people can join and connect in ways they never would have been able to for a long,...as long as we can go back.
And so how do you weigh that? How do you weigh what's opened up by tech against what it seems to shut down a little bit in terms of how we connect?
Sheila Liming: Absolutely. There are many benefits to being able to find people with whom you have things in common, similar tastes, similar preferences, similar hobbies, interests, whatever.
And that is something that tech and smart devices have made easier for us because we can search these people out in the same way that we can provide or perform a Google search and get targeted results for some kind of question that we have or an answer that we're looking for. What I think is missing from those scenarios is an aspect of spontaneity or randomness.
So this is like the difference between searching for an answer that you want, and browsing. Going to the library and walking among the stacks or going to a bookstore and running your hand along the spines and finding something you didn't know you were looking for. And that's the part of contemporary socialization that I feel has started to suffer.
We don't have as many random chance encounters and when we have them, we feel a little bit more anxious about them and a little bit more skeptical about the results of how those encounters are going to go.
Adam Davis: Yeah, so in part an argument for spontaneity, but especially spontaneity when it comes to interacting with other people.
Sheila Liming: Right, right. The idea of trying to make a place for yourself in the society where you are and with the people who are already immediately located near you. In addition to, of course, forging those connections with people that you have something in common with who may be scattered about your state or about your region or whatever it happens to be.
Adam Davis: And what about the…I hear, I can imagine some people saying, “Yeah, but the thing is, it's risky.” Not just spontaneity, but other people. I have a sense of other people as being more risky than I used to.
Sheila Liming: Yeah, it's definitely risky. And I think that the more we shy away from it, the riskier it gets. In the book, I like to think of socializing as a kind of like musculature or exercise program.
And the less often we do it, the harder it feels. To the point where we start to give up on each other and we start to give up on the idea that it's important to have conversations with our neighbors or with the people who live in our community. And that of course leads to its own problems when we think about that on a political level.
Adam Davis: And this just points me back to what's funny about a sort of manifesto for hanging out is the deliberate part of trying to be more spontaneous and more open and to see where things go. So how do you hold that?
Sheila Liming: I know it feels like an oxymoron, but at the same time, I know that many people live extremely scheduled lives.
I'm one of those people who lives an extremely scheduled life. And for me, what that means is actually finding a way to prioritize social engagement, even
if it means making little slots on my Google calendar and saving some time at the end of the day. So I can make sure that happens because otherwise what I find will happen is I will fill up my day with appointments and with things I have to do, Zoom meetings, et cetera.
And then when I have that extra 30 minutes or that extra hour, I am more likely to spend it by myself, on my phone, scrolling, searching the internet, something like that. It's a way of sort of consciously reminding ourselves that these activities matter and that they are part of the glue that holds our society together.
Adam Davis: The tyranny of the Google calendar I think is real.
Sheila Liming: Absolutely.
Adam Davis: And so I know even some people I work with, and I hope we'll talk more about work soon–feels like work and hanging out, that's a huge area to think about. But I know some people I work with who will put on the schedule, dedicated time for no meetings.
Sheila Liming: Yeah.
Adam Davis: And for me, dispositionally or temperamentally or something, I almost feel like once I've put it on a calendar, once I've planned it in some way, it changes the tenor of that time.
Sheila Liming: Like it becomes more serious, right?.
Adam Davis: Yeah. It makes me think of, I'm going to go back to before Emerson and Thoreau, but someone who I think is often associated with them, and that's Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher who has this crazy book called Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which he wrote towards the end of his life. He says something like anytime he's told he has to do something, he's no longer as ready to do it.
Sheila Liming: Right, right It's a psychological roadblock. Sometimes I think especially if you think of slotting in social appointments, or if you think about slotting in social events, like hanging out, in the same way that you treat, say, work meetings and appointments, then it starts to feel like yet another task that has to be checked off in order for you to get to the end of your day.
And that, of course, does not inspire that feeling where you want to do more of it. You know, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and I have several friends who
still live out that way, mostly in Washington State, who I don't get to see very often. And you know, during the pandemic, I started having like, you know, hangouts with them on zoom.
Like we'd make a time to just sort of talk and chat. And what I noticed about those hangouts is that they would always end up lasting the exact amount of time that I had scheduled them for in my Google Calendar. They didn't need to. They were completely organic, ad hoc, like social events.
But I noticed that I had them lasting exactly 55 minutes long. And then I would get to that marker and it would be, well, time for me to move on to the next thing on my G Cal.
Adam Davis: So what do you make of that?
Sheila Liming: I think it has to do with the way that we become habituated to that kind of scheduling in our life.
And if that means that we're not able to make socialization happen, or we're not able to make spontaneous events happen in our life, then there's a problem.
Then yeah, then that means that we do have to find a space in our calendar for them. But at the same time too, I know that that sacrifices what some feel are like the authentic or the organic quality of the interaction.
And so that's something that we have to bear in mind as well, that there is still that aspect of authentic interaction that feels missing. And that's the sort of thing that we really have to seek out face to face or in person.
Adam Davis: So authentic interaction. And maybe I'll point us back towards work, in part because these days I think you'll often hear, and this is sometimes parodied, but it also feels real, that there's an effort to bring one's whole self to work, that there are a lot of different approaches to how we're going to interact at work. Sometimes they're parodied because it looks like, well, this stuff only serves the bottom line, so it's actually not what it purports to be. Other times because it feels forced. But I think what I want to ask you about is why not see work, or maybe we should see work, as a place where actually, maybe the relationships are more important than the work.
I guess I want to ask you about that, about how you see hanging out, which feels more unstructured, alongside work, which always seems to point towards an end. How do those go together?
Sheila Liming: Yeah, it's a, it's a tricky relationship, isn't it? Because obviously having relationships that we build in the workplace can not only increase our enjoyment of the work that we do, it can also strengthen our attachments to that work where, you know, we feel like we're not just contributing to something that's resulting in our paycheck or contributing to something that's increasing a company's bottom line.
But we're also there for each other. We're supporting each other in the process of doing that work. And we're part of a unit that functions and works together. I think that's one of the things that work relationships can actually build. And, you know, I'm thinking of my dad right now because my dad retired at the beginning of the pandemic.
And after many, many, many years of working, and I noticed that since he's retired, that the majority of relationships that he continues to have, the majority of friendships are with people that he knew through work. And so, like most of the relationships that he succeeded in fostering in retirement really got their start there in the workplace.
So, on the one hand, yes, I think we all hate those mandatory, fun, forced bonding activities that we are occasionally all subjected to at work. But at the same time, I think there's a real value in the relationships that we have to our colleagues and to our fellow workers.
Adam Davis: Yeah, it feels like shared projects, whether they're from work or family or friends, or where you worship, that there's something about a shared project that makes it more likely that we can hang out in ways that feel generative and connected and even intimate.
Sheila Liming: Right. Right. And I know where we run into trouble with that is that with work, people don't always feel like they have a choice in being there. And that can sometimes threaten that investment in the shared project or that investment in forming relationships with the people around us. But at the same time too, it strengthens our attachment to the job that we're doing and to like our ability to really care about the products of that job too, and what comes out of them.
Adam Davis: At the end of Hanging Out, which I continue to want to call Hangin’ Out, I just want to drop the G.
Sheila Liming: That is fine, that is fine, I'm fine with that.
Adam Davis: Okay, tell me if I need to pronounce the G. You conclude by saying, well, there's a section called how to hang out. And so you name five things, five, I guess, actions, and they all begin with the word “take.”
So “take time,” “take risks,” “take and create opportunities,” “take care,” and “take heart.” And the repetition of “take” struck me. So let me just ask you about “take.”
Sheila Liming: Sure. First of all, I will acknowledge the ridiculousness of writing something with a title like “How to Hang Out,” right, because this isn't exactly like a prescriptive how-to guide, and that wasn't what I was going for. But I did notice as I was writing the book, and as I was researching and having conversations with people, that there did seem to be this kind of generalized anxiety about how to do this.
And I think part of that, of course. was due to the COVID pandemic and that coming out of it some people were feeling extra socially anxious or like they had forgotten how to just be in the presence of other people. And so I conceived of the conclusion to the book as a kind of lite how-to guide, sort of tongue-in-cheek, but filled with these kinds of guidelines or cues to think about with regards to hanging out.
And I centered on that word, “take,” as an active verb that to me signifies the seizure of something that in order to make hanging out a priority and in order to really invest in those social relationships that make life worth living. It does sometimes mean taking time or resources of one kind or another away from somewhere else, sort of like grabbing them and seizing them back, and then, you know, reasserting our right to do what we want with them.
So I start with the idea of taking time, a very kind of simple idea, but a difficult one to put into action, especially if we feel like we are those hyper-scheduled busy people without a lot of time to give. If that's the case, then taking time can be a really difficult project. And that's why I think it's the place to start in thinking about hanging out.
Adam Davis: Can I just push a little bit more into how do you take time?
Sheila Liming: Yeah. Well, on the one hand, taking time means saying no to something. Because if you're going to say yes to spending time hanging out, then you usually have to say no to something else. So crossing something off of your calendar or realizing something that you really thought you had to get done maybe doesn't matter as much.
Or else maybe just realizing what kind of time is left over in the day that can be better spent in some kind of social capacity. I'm thinking about this with regards to my workplace and the university campus that I work on where faculty members have these really, really atomized individualized offices and how actually I can go an entire day working on my campus, and if I'm not teaching a class, I might not run into another coworker during the day or have a conversation with another coworker. And so if I want to do that, if I want to actually make sure that I talk to somebody and have a social interaction in that day, I really have to take 15 minutes out of my day and go upstairs and have lunch in the courtyard so that I'll run into someone and be able to talk to them or something like that.
And so that's what I'm kind of talking about with this concept of taking time. It is taking away from something else and also just being sort of conscientious about how that time is being spent.
Adam Davis: Yeah. And so the caricature of hanging out,which is implicit in the subtitle when you talk about killing time, it sounds like formless time, time without a specific end.
But it feels to me like you're saying pretty clearly, no, it's not about time without a deliberate end. It's a different kind of end, a different kind of goal than most of the goals that we devote our time to.
Sheila Liming: That's a great way to think of it. In the book, I define hanging out as daring to do very little, but I think the other side of that is daring to do very little and daring to do something else with what you might have otherwise devoted that time to. Even if that something else has itself very little meaning like very small steaks or very small potatoes
Adam Davis: Can you hang out too much?
Sheila Liming: Certainly. There's there's probably been periods of my life when I knew people who might have been hanging out too much, but I find that it's not something that I see very much of anymore in my life. I think that sometimes we have stereotypes about people who do hang out too much. We have stereotypes about, you know, they're being lazy or not being productive or not contributing to society or something like that.
And I think those stereotypes are sometimes what caused us to police the way that we spend our time, and to police how much hanging out we do, maybe to the extent where we end up doing very little or none at all.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Sheila Liming.
I mentioned sports before, and one of the things I did while reading Hanging Out was think where do I find myself hanging out most? Where am I doing the thing that you're reminding me is valuable? And for me basketball has been an important way to have that sense of connection.
And in a weird way, probably, to derive some sort of meaning from the interaction I'm having with people. I wondered about sports and whether as you thought about this, that showed up for you. I wondered if it was a particularly gendered way to think about hanging out. Where do sports show up–either for watching it or especially participating in it?
Sheila Liming: Several people have asked me since I published the book, you know, what about sports? That has alerted me to the central role that sports play in many people's lives for facilitating hanging out. And I will say it's something that I was thinking about as I was writing the book. It's not something that I end up devoting discussion to, simply because it's not that much of a priority for me.
But I know that for many other people in my life that is one of the central ways that they hang out. And I would sort of compare it to the discussion that I have in the book about music. I play music and I'm a musician. And I find that to actually be sort of similar to the act of what people do when they're watching sports, when they're a spectator at a game, or even when they're just kind of like playing a pickup game of some kind or another.
So I know that that is very important for many people. And my partner is somebody who feels very strongly about baseball. Baseball as a spectator sport was really developed to afford a lot of hanging out. Yeah. And so, you know, he's somebody who has lots of opinions about the new rules in baseball that have been introduced to actually speed them, make the game go faster and cause less hanging out to happen
Adam Davis: Yeah. That's a great example that to try to improve viewership they took away what makes baseball so ideal for that vibe that you get, especially if you, especially if you're there at the game.
Sheila Liming: Right. And you're really in the pace of it. Yeah.
Adam Davis: Yeah. I also had in my head, my nephew who lives in a rural place in the Midwest and just about all of his relationships are online and through, not sports, but games. So online games. And he will passionately make the case that it's actually a better way to be with people than in person. And I wonder if people have come at you with arguments like this.
Sheila Liming: Oh, certainly, especially my students, the people that I teach, most of whom are aged 18 to 24, are deeply invested in video games and in hanging out online and playing video games, which is something that I get.
And it's also something that I touch upon just a little bit in the book. Not a lot, because it's not something that I have personal experience doing, but I have learned a lot through my conversations with them about what it is that they get out of doing this. I'm not sure that I would necessarily call it a better form of hanging out, but I know that for many people, it's really a lifeline and that kind of project of playing a game together or being on a campaign together in the context of a game can really be like a low level way to bond with someone without introducing lots of conflicts that sometimes come up in relationships.
And so I know that they value that kind of interaction. I don't think it's a replacement for in-person hanging out. I think you need both, but I see the merits of it.
Adam Davis: I'm trying to inhabit my nephew's response, which would be like, like, why, what, what's happening in a room that can't happen more when we're connected the way you and I are connecting now?
Sheila Liming: Well, I think about the way that we communicate with each other, not just through the words that we use, but also through our bodies. And when we are in a room with someone else, the way that we can read and clock their emotions, even when what they're saying might not necessarily appear to match up with those emotions.
I think that's part of the emotional and social intelligence that we gather in hanging out with people face to face is how to read those cues, how to tell when somebody is upset, how to tell when they need something physically from us, like a hug or an embrace or something like that. And that's not something that we can accomplish through hanging out online.
Adam Davis: Yeah, in part I'm asking because I so agree with you that there's something that happens in there. There's something about sharing food. There's something about glancing eye contact, all of that stuff that means much more than we can usually describe. And especially coming out of COVID and the experience of COVID, just what gathering online did for people and what it has since done for people who might have found it hard to gather in-person.
Sheila Liming: Right
And we didn't realize that. And now we know, wait a minute, there are all these people for whom connecting this way is actually giving them so much and giving everyone in the room because of the new combination so much more. So in my head, I'm kind of trying to weigh my comfort with standing next to someone while we get food against the participation of people who might not have participated before.
Sheila Liming: Yeah. And you know, one handy kind of comparison that I have as an educator is thinking about the difference between hanging out in a physical classroom versus hanging out online. You know, during the height of the COVID pandemic, I spent a lot of time teaching online and the way that a conversation happens among a group of students in a classroom online as opposed to how it happens in person–it’s completely different.
And one of the reasons it's different is that you can see people and you can see their engagement or else their lack of engagement and you can find ways to sort of pull them into the conversation and make them a part of what's going on.
Whereas in an online environment, people have to fight their way into the conversation or else they have to make a big deal of unmuting themselves or raising their hand or whatever it happens to be.
And participation just sort of drops off this cliff. And so that's something that I've been thinking about as I have returned to in-person teaching– how to be really attuned to the hanging out that we're doing when we're together in a classroom.
Adam Davis: Yeah. A lot of our work is trying to get groups of people being more attuned to each other.
And so, and we don't often use the phrase hanging out, but sometimes I think how weird that as an organization, we're trying to get people to hang out more with each other and that it does feel political and feels like long term work to try to create conditions where we're more attuned to each other.
Sheila Liming: I like thinking of that as a secret mission of the humanities.
Adam Davis: So, yeah. And mostly keep it secret, especially in grant proposals and reports, which of course is part of the issue– how can you show the value of this activity that we all recognize and we all know the value of, but it's not demonstrable in some of the ways that other forms of productivity are.
Sheila Liming: Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Davis: Have you run into, or do you get challenged on evaluation and strict results of hanging out that you could provide as evidence?
Sheila Liming: That's an interesting question. I think about the way that a lot of events are organized around the idea of engagement. And here I'm thinking about events that happen on my campus.
If we bring a speaker to campus or if we're hosting a workshop, or if there's some kind of special event going on, how engagement is often measured through a simple attendance. We're looking at metrics, how many people come in the door, how many butts and seats we have. And of course, this is also the way that we approach planning and scheduling classes as well–thinking about strict metrics in terms of attendance.
And I'm thinking about how that only shows, of course, like a mere slice of the entire pie that is people hanging out together in a room, engaging in an issue or a topic, having a conversation, whatever it happens to be. But it's one of the ones that's most easily available to us. And it's one of the ones that we will often use to try to get funding to do that thing again, or to do something like it. We'll say, well, we had this speaker on campus, we had Bill McKibben on my campus about a month ago and we had a packed auditorium for it.
So next time around, we'll see if we can get a similar speaker to Bill McKibben so that we have guaranteed results. But maybe instead of those guaranteed results, what we're missing out on is the more risky conversations or the more risky events that could happen from having less guaranteed results.
But that's something that nobody wants to take a risk on.
Adam Davis: What would you want, say, the university, or in my case, like the non-profit, to be measuring and to be making the case around, if not butts in seats, what are the other things that you go, “Look at this. This is what matters about this?”
Sheila Liming: Hmm.
That's difficult. That's difficult, but it's interesting. Just by way of example, I'm thinking of an event that I attended in Vermont that was sponsored by Vermont Humanities. And this was, I want to say about a year ago. So it's probably April of 2023. And it was a conversation about AI. And it was right after ChatGPT had debuted and people were using and experimenting with it for the first time for that first couple of months. And they had this panel discussion lined up with a couple of experts, like a couple of local academic experts on the subject. And the place was absolutely packed. There were a lot of people there and it was a Thursday night, but the place was packed to the gills. And I was impressed to see how many people were really, really interested in the subjects.
But also because they were really, really concerned. There were a lot of people in the audience who had come because they had fears or they had anxieties and they wanted answers in response to those fears and then these anxieties, which the panel did not talk about or deal with whatsoever. And so it kind of just, you know, it went off in its own prescribed direction and it didn't end up responding to the main reasons that a lot of people were there in the room.
Now, of course, these things are hard to anticipate, but I guess in that sort of situation, what I would want to then see is like, maybe we should have some sort of follow up event that's some kind of open discussion or that's more like a social interaction, a mix and mingle or something like that on this topic, since it seems like so many people are invested in it and concerned about it, but didn't really have the chance to talk and participate in the exact forum that we gave it.
Adam Davis: Mm hmm. Yeah, when you started to describe that experience, the presence of all those people with shared concerns in the room made me think, Oh, this is going to be a story about people turning to each other and finding themselves hanging out around those shared concerns. It sounds like, this is one of the interesting things about expertise, I guess, is that where does expertise show up when you're hanging out?
Sheila Liming: That is a really big question. That's something that I think about a lot because, yes, I think about the hanging out that I do with students when I'm in the classroom and I think about my ostensible role there as the kind of expert or the authority figure and how that can sometimes undermine some of the hanging out that could happen or stop it in its tracks and block it.
So it's something that I have been considering and thinking about and also trying to figure out. What is it that we do when we go to listen to an expert or to get answers from an expert? And I think of course, one of the things that we want to do is we want to hear that person's take. We want to hear that person's opinion. We want to hear them speak from their expertise, but we also want to talk with them. And that's something that's really difficult to manage sometimes within formal channels of how expertise is presented.
Adam Davis: Yeah, I'm thinking back to what you lay out in the introduction where you talk about connection, intimacy and meaning, and there's something about a reciprocal experience.
That almost seems necessary to get to that sense of connection, intimacy and meaning. And so it makes me wonder again about these competing priorities of, say, knowledge and getting stuff done as against connecting and hanging out.
Both are obviously necessary, but they don't always align perfectly.
Sheila Liming: It's making me think as well about the role that social media sometimes plays in these scenarios. I think it is often to provide an additional or extra or auxiliary forum for where those conversations can happen if they don't happen in formal spaces. And you know, I'm a kind of late adopter to social media to this day.
I still only have one social media account, which I started in 2014, but I remember the moment that I opened it and started it because I was at a professional conference and I was going to panels and I was hearing talks and I was hearing lectures. And I felt like I was somehow missing the conversation.
Like there was something more going on and I couldn't access it. And so I opened a Twitter account later that afternoon and I logged on using the conference hashtag. And suddenly I found all the conversations. It was like, I could just find a way into them because they weren't happening through those formal channels.
So, of course, I get why many people are so invested in social media where they have these alternative spaces for conversations too. Again, not a replacement for hanging out, but I understand how it's arisen in that way.
Adam Davis: You, first of all, wrote a book about hanging out, but also the book is full of references to other books.
And that made me wonder about reading, and whether reading is in some way an experience of hanging out, or whether it's a different thing.
Sheila Liming: I think it is an experience of hanging out, and I think it's a really important one, too. Because what we do when we read a book that's written by another person, is we hang out in an extended fashion with them and their opinions and their attempts to understand something and to convey their understanding of it.
So at the same time that we are hanging out with them and their thoughts and their ideas that they have put down on paper, we also are also hanging out with ourselves. We are interpreting meaning from what we read with them. And we're having this kind of conversation, this give and take. this back and forth that's occurring as we work to make meaning from what we're reading and to understand it. So I think that reading is a really important form of hanging out.
It's something that we often cast as being antisocial behavior. But if you are spending an extended amount of time with somebody else and their ideas, that itself is extremely social. That's really rooted in a desire to understand someone else's perspective on something whether it's similar to yours or not.
Adam Davis: Is there anyone you read who it just feels like you're chilling with when you read, anyone that comes to mind, just like tonally, more than topically, but tonally, when you read them, it feels like, oh yeah, this is what hanging out feels like.
Sheila Liming: There are a ton of writers like that for me. So I will just name one because I'm reading her at the moment, which is Eve Babitz, a nonfiction writer who was writing a lot during the 60s and 70s out of California and especially wrote a lot about California life. I've just been reading the essays that are collected in the volume called Eve's Hollywood and where she just kind of talks about what it was like to live in Los Angeles during that time period. to be bumping up occasionally against celebrities or people who wanted to be celebrities and also struggling to make it. What we see in the background of a lot of her essays is her just kind of like struggling to get by, to make it as a writer and also just to make ends meet for herself financially in her life.
But something about Eve Babitz's tone I find so, so winsome. It just draws you in and it does kind of make you feel like you're just hanging out with this slightly gossipy friend who's just going to dish the dirt like a little bit further than what feels like socially acceptable. And I, I love it. It's just very, very like conversational and accessible, but also just like a teensy bit sassy as well.
Adam Davis: Yeah, it's funny. Well, you were talking about Eve Babitz. I realized that the way you were describing your feeling about her made me think of Geoff Dyer.
Sheila Liming: Oh, yes. I love Geoff Dyer. Yes.
Adam Davis: And there's something, like, there's something about reading him where it, it feels different than a lot of reading because of that same stuff you were just describing.
And it made me think especially about this odd two-part novel. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and the first part is set in Venice at the Biennale. And I'm going there because I think it points to something else you talk about, which is how hanging out includes, there's an element, especially hanging out at parties.
It includes an element of hope and Dyer's character in that book, he's at these parties and all they do at the parties is drink a little bit and talk about the next party they're going to go to.
Sheila Liming: I love that.
Adam Davis: So how do you tie hope and thoughts of what's next or thoughts of what might be to hanging out?
Sheila Liming: Well, I think hope is something that's rooted in a sense of futurity. The idea that in the future, you're going to revisit this scenario, or you're going to revisit this interaction with this person, or you're going to do it again, or you're going to do something like it that's slightly different, and you're going to keep the ball rolling.
You're going to keep that momentum moving, and so in the chapter that I have on parties, I talk about parties as deeply invested in that idea of hope, because to throw a party, or to attend a party, is a gesture of saying that you want to keep that momentum rolling. Whether it's through your relationship with the person, you know, who's hosting the party, or the people who come to your party if you're the host, or if it's even through that hope that you're gonna go and you're gonna make new friends, and new interactions, or you're gonna hit it off with somebody new and then you're gonna, you know, keep that momentum rolling in a different direction. So I think that parties are these kind of grand risky things that we do every now and then to mark important occasions in life that are also filled with this idea of hope. And that's one thing that, you know, I think we all felt during the pandemic, that absence of celebrations and that absence of parties and how hopeless it sometimes made life feel.
Adam Davis: Yeah, I like that. I don't think I'd thought about parties in that way. And the funny thing is, as some people, and I could include myself in this, sometimes that moment when I'm saying yes to an evite, or I'm getting ready to go to a party, I feel something like the opposite of hope. I think that would be dread. But then it takes the experience of being there, and being with other people, especially when it's going well, and of course the going well, that's what we've been talking about. There's like a buzz that comes with it, which I hadn't understood to be a kind of right.
This is good. There should be more of this, this kind of being together.
Sheila Liming: Yeah. Yeah, I think we all experience to some extent that feeling of dread that you mentioned, that anxiety that comes up when you say yes. And then it comes time for something and you're getting ready and you're thinking about going and I think a lot of that discomfort and anxiety stems from the idea that we don't know what to expect. That things are going to happen that we can't necessarily control or plan for and that itself can make us feel a little bit ill at ease. But like you said, when it goes well, we end up feeling like, okay, those risks were worth it.
They paid off and we want to do it again and we want to try again. When it goes poorly, maybe we feel a little bit differently about that and maybe we're a little bit more nervous about the next evite that we accept.
Adam Davis: Huh. You've talked about your students a couple times in this conversation. And while I was thinking about hope and what you were saying about, what's next in momentum, can I ask you what you're thinking about as you're watching your students hang out, not hang out, react to the idea of hanging out? What, what kinds of feelings is that raising for you?
Sheila Liming: I'm thinking about how I know they hate parties, most of them, and I once asked a class of students–I was writing a short column for the Guardian that was like advice how to attend a party or what to do at a party.
I was crowdsourcing my articles. I was thinking about it by asking my students, and most of the reactions were something along the lines of you know, stay home, don't go, avoid at all costs, that kind of thing, which I thought was so funny that there was this generalized dread of parties and this generalized kind of reaction was, why would you even want to do that? So, you know, that made me a bit concerned in some ways. And it also made me a little bit more aware of the way that life has thrown challenges at them as a generation that have reoriented their attitudes towards social activities.
I wouldn't even say that those attitudes are not legitimate or are not justly formed. They completely are because they've formed in response to these scary situations and to these challenges that they've had. But at the same time, too, I also think going back to that conversation of musculature, that this is stuff that we have to work on together as a society, that we have to get better at our responses to these challenges and that we have to build up that musculature a bit more to be able to have the stamina to do it.
I think it's important for the way that we live with each other in society and also potentially for our democracy as well.
Adam Davis: I agree with you. And I have just one or two more questions toward the end. One is, especially given the figurative language you were just using, as you set out on this project, did you know that you were going to become a kind of personal trainer for hanging out?
Sheila Liming: Definitely not. And I would not have volunteered myself for that job had I known that's how it was going to go. I, in the book, talk about my approach to the subject of hanging out as being kind of like a tour of accidents in modern living because that's sometimes how it feels and a lot of the scenarios that I talk about and a lot of the examples that I give are not necessarily always positive or completely successful ones.
But I try instead to emphasize what I learned from the scenarios and the lessons that I took away from them. I don't think that I have always been the most successful hanger outer. So I think it's something that I've had to work on and get better at over time, which is why it's kind of funny now that I find myself in the position of, yeah, providing a kind of life coach like advice on the subject.
Adam Davis: I mean, there's no way the most successful hanger outer could be the best hanger outer. That just doesn't make sense. Right. Right.
Sheila Liming: If you asked my freshman year college roommate, she would tell you I was a terrible hanger outer.
Adam Davis: Which might mean you're a good hanger outer.
Sheila Liming: Maybe. It's a little hard to… it's a little hard to know.
Adam Davis: You've put a lot of time into thinking and talking about these ideas. Do you feel like there's an open question or two, a kind of persistent wondering in your head around this stuff?
Sheila Liming: Yes. And I don't think it's a situation where I've solved all the questions or I've gotten to the bottom of the answers on them either.
In fact, the conversations that I've been having about the book since it was published have, if anything, opened up more questions for me in thinking about, you know, what is the future of social activity and how is it done and what we should be fighting for or advocating for and how we should be prioritizing that social activity.
These are questions that continue to remain for me, especially because antisocial habits are just so easy. They are so accessible to us and they are so available to us at all points.
Adam Davis: Yeah. Well. I really appreciate your making a good amount of time to talk with us across the country. Appreciate the way you've helped us think about all sorts of both being together and authentic showing up in the world.
Thanks for taking time. Thanks for writing the book. Any last thought from Vermont to Oregon that you want to share before we close it down here?
Sheila Liming: I will just say that I've had to find my way into hanging out culture in Vermont in the four years that I've lived here. I think I've finally done it because about a month ago I received an email from somebody I've never met inviting me to a party in June and saying, “I've heard you're a great asset at parties, and I'd love if you would come to mine.”
And that made me feel like I'd really sort of like arrived. I'm like, oh, somebody thinks I'm an asset at parties. Fantastic. Right.
Adam Davis: That might mean it's time to go. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Sheila Liming: Which is just to say it can be done. If you feel like you're not good at hanging out, you can get better.
Adam Davis: Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College and the author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, she lives in Vermont. You can find links to Sheila's work in our show notes at oregonhumanities.org.
I’m excited to share that we at Oregon Humanities have been working on a new project that I think you're gonna like.
It's called This Place, and it's about this place that we live, Oregon. This Place presents vignettes of what different parts of Oregon look like, smell like, sound like, and feel like, from people just like you, all across the state. We haven't published it yet. But we wanted to give you, our listeners, a first listen with more to come soon.
So here's a first taste of this place with Janet Webster.
Janet Webster: It's a working waterfront here. So we're looking out on fishing boats. And a breakwater, which separates where the boats are from the main channel of the river, of the Yaquina River. It's in the Yaquina estuary, the Yaquina Bay. And then you look, keep looking across the water and you see the other shore and there's a big research and educational facility over there, a marine science research facility.
And you keep looking and you see the… it's deceptive because when you say where we are, and you can say the bayfront, but it's kind of a crescent. So you're, in some ways, you're never quite sure if you're looking north, looking south, east, west. I'm a geographer by education, so it's always like, I kind of like to know where I am.
So, I'm, I'm in the middle of some action. People think of Newport, I think, as a small town with a pretty vibrant art community and we have a fishing industry that's very strong. People don't always engage with what that means in terms of the fishing industry. And living down here, you see it every day.
Right now the boats are in because it's so stormy out. They can't get across the bar. You just see them all lined up there, and you can see, oh, okay, so and so's not doing anything. That boat's, those boats are refueling. Those boats have crab pots on them, so they're about ready to go out. Those haven't loaded theirs yet, so they're waiting for a different opening.
That's wintertime. Right now it's pretty hectic because it's crab season. Two months ago, there was a different feel because it was hunting season. So everybody kind of takes time off or is working on their boat. So I've always liked the maritime environment. I think it's partly, I like the air. I like the smell.
I like the weather. People think it rains a lot, but we get these incredible breaks in the weather. Even today, which is a pretty gray day in January, there's been blue sky. I am on one side. I have a Marine supply store. The other side, there's a restaurant. Those are my neighbors. During the holidays, they get Christmas cookies.
If something comes up, I can ask for help from next door, on either side. Told people before when I've worked with them, we're a town like any other, with problems. We have homeless, we have people who have mental health and drug addiction issues that are walking around the streets. We have a lot of potholes.
We have really difficult terrain to build a city on. There's a lot of ravines, so it means we have all this water that cascades down our streets. It's hard to manage it. I can get frustrated with the city and infrastructure, but you realize this is for a small town, we're dealing with a lot of difficult municipal maintenance issues.
And if you're a tourist, you never think about that. I worked on parking down here for a decade and that's not pleasant or easy. And there's really not a great solution, but you learn a lot by listening to other people and realizing having your ideas challenged. People have lived here, white people have lived here a fairly long time, indigenous people have lived here forever.
People have been here, they've figured out things that work here and you need them. You need to maybe bring in ideas, but you also need to respect the people who are here. And I felt that I could do that. And I think if you come in with the right attitude, there's lots of ways you can contribute to the community.
Adam Davis: That was Janet Webster from Newport. Thanks for listening to This Place by Oregon Humanities.
The Detour is produced by Keiren Bond. Kyle Gilmer is our editor. Ben Waterhouse, Karina Briski, and Alexandra Sylvester are our assistant producers. I'm Adam Davis. See you next time.