Hanging Out The Radical Power of Killing Time

"...it was not because I thought her book was interesting that I had reached out to Liming. It was because I passionately believed that her book was right...Hanging Out is rich with illuminating stories..." - Slate

"We could all use more of that blissfully unstructured social time, posits Sheila Liming in the well-considered series of arguments found in Hanging Out." —Reader's Digest

A smart and empowering book about the simple art of hanging out ... and of taking back our social lives from the deadening whirl of contemporary life.

Almost every day it seems that our world becomes more fractured, more digital, and more chaotic. Sheila Liming has the answer: we need to hang out more. 

Starting with the assumption that play is to children as hanging out is to adults, Liming makes a brilliant case for the necessity of unstructured social time as a key element of our cultural vitality. The book asks questions like what is hanging out? why is it important? why do we do it? how do we do it? and examines the various ways we hang out—in groups, online, at parties, at work.

Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time makes an intelligent case for the importance of this most casual of social structures, and shows us how just getting together can be a potent act of resistance all on its own.

Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College (Burlington, VT), where she teaches classes on literature, media, and writing. She is the author of two books, What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020) and Office (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of one, a new edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2022). Her essays have appeared in venues like The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Point.

ABLE OF CONTENTS
 
Ch. 1: Parties
Parties constitute, arguably, the preeminent instance of hanging out. But I think our collective contemporary feeling towards them is a bit mixed and complicated, actually. For instance, I once lived in a town where every single party I attended was an homage to a vision of elsewhere—a place where the party hosts had once lived, where they wished they still lived.
 
Ch. 2: Jamming
I once played in a band that broke up once a year, every year, on March 18th. Our band played traditional Celtic music and the routinized mayhem of St. Patrick’s Day—our annual high point, from a financial perspective, as we once played 22 gigs in a single week—would regularly drive us to the brink of sanity.

Ch. 3: Hanging Out on TV
Reality television presents a curated, fantasy vision of hanging out. For this reason, many of us count on it to keep us company, to provide a simulated social backdrop to our (somewhat socially deprived) daily lives. 

Ch. 4: Hanging Out on the Job
As an academic and writer, my yearly professional calendar is organized by conferences in a way that compares to how those of nineteenth-century New York Social Register-style elites were organized by parties and balls. Or, at least, my calendar used to be organized in this way.  
 
Ch. 5: Hanging Out on the Internet
I’d rather have friends on the internet than have none at all. This was my thought back in 2015, when I joined Twitter, the first and only social media platform I’ve ever used. At the time, I had just moved to North Dakota, where I found myself pressed for friends and social outlets. Hanging out on the internet, I want to argue, is far from ideal but it works, in a pinch.
 
Ch. 6: Hanging Out with Strangers
In some ways, there is no greater test of one’s ability to get along and simply “hang out” than when is required to do so in the company of strangers. Hanging out with friends is supposed to be effortless; we know that it’s not always that way, of course, but we tend to greet such occasions with more confidence because we already have some inkling of what to expect from friends. But hanging out with strangers is a different situation entirely. 

Ch. 7: Hanging Out Under Duress
There are all sorts of scenarios—many of them compelled by professionalism—that necessitate hanging out. As a result, there are all sorts of instances where hanging out happens not by choice but by fiat. This chapter deals with that other, decidedly less pleasant side of hanging out.
 
Ch. 8: How to Hang Out
This final chapter furnishes a conclusion in the style of a manifesto. Humans, we are repeatedly told, are social animals; thus, to be human is to hang out. So what happens if we forget how? What happens if the combined forces of neoliberalism and the COVID pandemic make it harder and harder to hang out? How do we fight for our rights to effectively do nothing, to “hang out”?