#40 The Radical Power of "lummelen": Why Time and Space Are Pre-Conditions for Freedom

...and what it has to do with growth imperatives and neoliberalism

Hi all,

There is a quiet form of rebellion we rarely talk about. It doesn’t march in the streets or tweet in all caps. It takes its stand in a sunbeam on a park bench, in a half-read book beside a cooling cup of coffee, in a meandering conversation that forgets its point. This is the rebellion of Lummelen — a Dutch word that translates poorly into English. “Loitering” or “dawdling” captures only a sliver of its essence. To lummel is to drift without purpose, to let the minutes swell with nothingness. It is the opposite of optimisation and, therefore, deeply subversive in a neoliberal economy. Lummelen happens in the quiet in-between moments, what we might call luminal time — the soft, undefined edges of the day where you're not working, not striving, just being. In our productivity-obsessed culture, lummelen can feel radical: it resists the idea that every moment must be optimised.

Modern capitalism does not merely tolerate lummelen; it eradicates it, which is bad for well-being and progress.

When Time Becomes a Scarcity

I have the habit of, at least trying to, enjoy to lummel. My favourite moment: Saturday morning. Coffee. Newspapers and magazines. Just reading half the articles, talking with my family. I even get up earlier to enjoy doing nothing. Because, as part of our neoliberal society, time is also precious to me. Loitering requires two things that neoliberalism renders scarce: time and space. Under the relentless logic of efficiency, time is monetised, monitored, and fragmented, also for me.

Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist, developed the concept of social acceleration to explain the increasing pace of life in modern societies. In his seminal work, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Rosa identifies three dimensions of acceleration:

1. Technological Acceleration: Advancements in transportation, communication, and production technologies have significantly increased the speed at which activities occur

2. Acceleration of Social Change: Institutions, relationships, and cultural norms are evolving faster, leading to a continuous transformation of societal structures.

3. Acceleration of the Pace of Life: Individuals experience a heightened sense of urgency, feeling compelled to accomplish more in less time, often leading to stress and burnout.

Rosa argues that these accelerations result in a "shrinking of the present," where the time to experience and assimilate changes becomes increasingly limited. This phenomenon contributes to feelings of alienation and a loss of meaningful engagement with the world. In my words: decreasing lummel-time leads to a lower quality of life.

Rosa's theory of social acceleration reminds us that even as technologies promise to save time, they often intensify expectations and compress lived experience. In this landscape, “doing nothing” becomes suspicious and economically irrational.

If I look at my children (or myself), I would add a layer to that. Quite often, the time you usually spend loitering ends up scrolling. And there is a difference between what I mean by loitering and doomscrolling. With loitering, you free your mind, open up new creative spaces, etc. Scrolling has the opposite effect. It does not lead to freeing something. It leads to bubble vision non-ideas.

This transformation of time has profound psychological implications. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), well-being hinges on satisfying three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2017). These needs are thwarted in environments of surveillance and control, precisely the conditions fostered by modern work structures. Meta-analytic evidence confirms that when people feel controlled, their intrinsic motivation declines sharply (Patall et al., 2008; Fong et al., 2019).

As Ryan et al. (2022) note in their review of SDT:

“Support for people’s basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness can enhance learning, identity growth, and sustained behavior change” — yet these supports are systematically eroded by environments that commodify time.”

I don’t want to claim that we need loitering for autonomy. There can be autonomy even if we are swamped. As long as we can plan for ourselves. However, if we are so busy that we don’t have time to strengthen our bonds with friends and family, let alone colleagues (relatedness), we have a problem.

Two reasons for the pressure on loitering as part of SDT are interdependent: the neoliberal idea of freedom and the growth-dominant nature of our system. The first one determines how we define the room we have as individuals (or how we see ourselves as individuals as part of society). The second specifies Hartmut Rosa's acceleration structure (and yes, this is all also dependent on previous work). And when growth, although needed for growth imperatives, becomes more useless over time, the pressure on our limited time becomes even harder. I will explain (and for longer explanations, see below).

First, the neoliberal idea of freedom and loitering time.

As Windegger and Spash argue:

“Freedom, as defined by neoliberalism, is negative, individualistic and market-centred… [it] downplays collective dimensions of freedom such as solidarity and equity”.

This concept of freedom is insufficient. Genuine autonomy — the ability to author one’s own life — requires more than the absence of interference. It demands the presence of enabling conditions: time to think, space to reflect, and the psychological safety to imagine alternatives. These are precisely the conditions for loitering offers.

Yet, loitering is not evenly distributed. It is a class privilege. That was also one of the comments I got when I wrote about it. For many, especially those in precarious employment, loitering is punished with surveillance, job insecurity, or social stigma. The freedom to be unproductive, to step outside the economic grid, has become the preserve of the few.

So, what should happen is to decouple earned labour more radically from income. Basic income, basic wages, part-time work, non-careers—all kinds of proposals already exist, but they are hard to get traction.

And the most important reason is that organised labour is also a hostage of the growth paradigm. Unions fear that stopping or reducing the labour supply (if we start working fewer hours) will reduce economic growth and, hence, the number of jobs and income. And if that happens, the other part of their members (pensioners, people with social security benefits) will also start to mumble and resist: if the economy grows less, the government budget comes under pressure, and as a result, there will be pressure on benefits.

Zac Edwards describes this condition as “growth dependency,” a state in which workers’ well-being is tied to an economy that alienates their labour and commodifies their time:

“The capacity of labour to produce surplus value makes economic growth possible. However, the realisation of this potential is not automatic; rather, it is induced through concrete regimes of labour organisation”.

These regimes do not simply extract labour — they shape identity and constrict freedom. The average worker no longer works to live, but lives to work, caught in a system where rest is conditional, leisure is privatised, and reflection is scheduled.

This is one of the growth imperatives (see, for instance, blog #13). Therefore, we have (again) start to discuss those growth imperatives and how to reduce them (but not now in this blog).

But if we want to create lummel-time, we need to shift this relationship of labour-income-growth. Edwards argues for reforms that decouple well-being from economic growth, including universal basic income, reduced work hours, and public provisioning. These measures not only protect workers but also enhance their autonomy:

“Reforms that increase autonomy from waged work and decouple wellbeing from the growth rate are by their nature also likely to increase the bargaining power of labour”.

Lummel-time! Seems like a revolution. Or common sense. All a matter of perspective.

I want to raise another point related to this obsession with economic growth. Our economic growth is becoming increasingly useless or even destructive. Demolition growth is my word for this—Sloopgroei in Dutch. It refers to the paradoxical expansion of GDP even as societal foundations are undermined: skyrocketing healthcare costs from burnout, militarisation instead of peace, investment in fossil infrastructure rather than resilience. Economic growth, but no progress.

Simon Kuznets, who devised GDP, warned that it doesn’t measure well-being. Yet we still rely on it, even as it counts pollution cleanup and stress-related healthcare as “growth.”

Alternative indicators like the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) show a different story: while GDP rises, real well-being in developed countries has stagnated or declined. We’re spending more to stay afloat (see below for more).

To move forward, we must stop mistaking repair for progress. Adopting holistic metrics like GPI and rethinking our economic priorities—beyond profit and productivity—are essential. Actual progress means creating the conditions for well-being, time, and freedom, not just economic motion.

Degrowth offers a systemic correction, not a politics of austerity, but a redefinition of value. Instead of measuring progress by throughput and output, it proposes a society where sufficiency replaces excess and time is reclaimed as a public good.

So, we find ourselves in a place where we don’t have time to lummel, because we do, for an increasing part, things that are essential for economic growth, but are increasingly defensive, probably not necessary and not increasing well-being. Seems logical to think about system change, right?

We have to stand up for our freedom to lummel. This is not a distraction from politics; it is its foundation.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Time as Commons

What would it mean to treat time not as a resource but as a commons? What new solidarities might emerge if we ceased to glorify busyness and began to organise around rest, reflection, and reciprocity?

To loiter, then, is not merely to stop. It is to remember. It is to resist. It is to rehearse a different kind of future — one where value is measured not by the volume of things, but by the quality of attention, care, and connection.

In this way, lummelen intersects with the psychology of flourishing. Both demand that we move beyond survival, beyond growth, toward a society that makes room for life itself.

Source: DALL-E

Demolition growth

There is growth that builds, and there is growth that sweeps up the debris. The latter—sloopgroei or demolition growth—is becoming a dominant feature of our economies. It is growth without direction, without intention, and increasingly, without benefit.

We have begun to mistake motion for momentum in a society fixated on GDP. More spending means more growth, or so the story goes. But what if most of that spending is not about creating new value but patching old wounds? Imagine a household spending more each year, not to improve their home, but to fix its crumbling foundation, replace broken appliances, and cover health bills caused by stress and mould. To an accountant, this might look like prosperity. But from within the house, it feels like survival.

This is where we are with GDP. It counts the repairs, not the reasons for them.

Simon Kuznets, the architect of GDP, warned us almost a century ago:

“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”
— Simon Kuznets, 1934

Kuznets understood the limitation: GDP is a financial thermometer, not a health assessment. It is (very!) useful to measure production. It might even be a proxy for progress if production is helpful for society: in times of food scarcity, producing more food helps well-being. In times of housing shortage, building houses is, by all means, good. But it also rises when there’s an oil spill (more cleanup), when there’s war (more production), or when mental health crises lead to more pharmaceutical sales. All of it counts as growth—even if what’s growing is distress.

This problem is not theoretical. We spend billions not to progress but to prevent collapse. We allocate vast sums to climate adaptation (caused by economic activity), restoration of nature, combating obesity and increasingly on military budgets. The NATO plan to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP (equal to the entire education budget in the Netherlands) is emblematic. This isn't an investment in the future. It’s barricading against breakdown.

And yet, GDP goes up.

Alternative indicators like the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) have emerged to explain this disconnect. GPI corrects GDP by accounting for environmental degradation, social inequality, and resource depletion while adding the value of unpaid care, volunteer work, and leisure (see table below). Unlike GDP, it asks: Are we truly better off?

Source: Tsara et al (2024)

According to studies by Baysal and Sutton (2024), GPI offers a far more holistic measure of well-being and sustainability.
Their conclusion is stark: While GDP has grown steadily, GPI in many developed nations has stagnated or declined since the 1990s. In other words, we’re spending more, but living less.

They also show the egg of well-being, which has almost the same message as the doughnut or another metaphor. From a global perspective, it is clear that we need to start with favourable ecosystem conditions. However, from an individual or even a country perspective, we can still have a favourable human condition within a bad ecosystem. But, in the end, we all know that you should never eat eggs in bad condition.

This pattern is confirmed by Gundimeda and Atkinson (2024) in their review of global metrics. They found that economic growth often obscures the destruction of natural capital and fails to improve human well-being. The proliferation of metrics—more than 500 so far—reflects a deep anxiety: GDP is no longer a compass. At best, it’s a speedometer stuck at full throttle, as the wheels fall off. Similarly, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) offers a recalibrated view. Tsara et al. (2024) revisit this indicator, initially developed by Daly and Cobb, as a superior proxy for sustainable prosperity. The ISEW subtracts for pollution, adds for unpaid work, and adjusts for inequality. Their review of its applications across countries reveals a consistent trend: real well-being is flatlining or falling, especially when ecosystems degrade or income disparities widen.

One vivid example comes from the realm of climate adaptation. Consider the billions spent on heat plans, sea walls, and water management. These are vital expenditures, but they do not represent forward movement. We’re not building the future; we’re fortifying the past. Or take healthcare: soaring costs driven by burnout, loneliness, and lifestyle diseases are recorded as economic output. Yet they reflect a society fraying at its edges. A stressed-out society can still be productive in GDP's arithmetic because reducing stress means fewer health costs and more measured economic production. However, there are also people sitting on the couch who are not productive.

As Rijpma et al. (2024) explain in their analysis of multidimensional well-being, the Netherlands’ historical GDP series diverges significantly from real indicators of life quality like health, education, and ecological balance.
They show that well-being and growth are decoupling. We may earn more per capita but are not necessarily living better. The growth itself is part of the problem.

This brings us back to sloopgroei—growth as a symptom, not a sign of success. A system that needs to grow to avoid collapse is unhealthy. It's a patient on life support, not an athlete in training.

So what do we do?

First, we must stop calling repair and remediation “growth.” It’s a linguistic trap that disguises decline as progress. Second, we need to mainstream indicators like GPI and ISEW. These metrics must inform reports and real policy decisions—from taxation and infrastructure to education and energy.

Finally, we need a new cultural narrative that values enoughness over excess, regeneration over expansion. We need a future where progress is measured not by how fast we can rebuild what we broke but by how little breaking we do in the first place.

Reducing the growth imperatives is still something else. In addition to better measures for well-being, the centrality of economic production profit and labour dependencies on it determine our limited summer. Therefore, we need to talk about freedom and time.

Reclaiming Lummel Time: Freedom and Labour

In a world obsessed with efficiency and productivity, the simple act of loitering—of doing nothing in particular, on no one's schedule—is quietly revolutionary. What if freedom meant not just the absence of constraints, but the presence of time? Time to think, to connect, to be. This vision, often dismissed as nostalgic or utopian, gains real traction when we examine the fundamental contradictions in our prevailing economic and political paradigms. There are two points here: how to define freedom and relate to time.

At the heart of our modern predicament is a distorted notion of freedom. Under neoliberalism, freedom is typically framed as individual autonomy in the marketplace: the right to choose between products, to own property, and to sell one’s labour. As Windegger and Spash argue, this negative liberty—a freedom from interference—has become hegemonic, equated almost synonymously with capitalism itself. It justifies structural inequalities under the guise of meritocracy, valorises consumer choice over communal agency, and systematically undermines collective bargaining and democratic participation.

But this model ignores that real freedom—freedom to loiter, to be present, to be part of a community—requires more than an absence of constraint. It requires favourable conditions: material security, reduced work hours, and participatory institutions. It requires what philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis termed autonomy, both individual and collective—a lucid self-governance over the norms and structures that shape our lives. The enormous creative capacity innate to human beings enables them to envision alternatives in constructing their identities, practices, and living lives that exceed the already available forms. This is vital, since it helps form resistance against social powers, which, in Castoriadis’ opinion, are manipulative, insofar as they predetermine what one perceives as conceivable and eligible options.

This is where the degrowth movement offers a profound alternative. As Zac Edwards explores, degrowth is not just about consuming less; it's about restructuring our relationship with labour and time. It confronts the "double bind" of modern workers: exploited through alienated labour (yes, Marxian terms!), yet dependent on economic growth for their livelihoods. The current growth regime demands ever-increasing productivity, not to expand collective well-being, but to sustain a system in which wages and employment are tied to the relentless churn of GDP as discussed above.

For decades, numerous proposals have been made to break this dependency: universal basic income, job guarantees, and, most crucially, work time reduction. These aren't just technocratic fixes—they are pathways to lummel time. As a sidenote, as a student, I did an internship at the Dutch Labour union (FNV), studying working time reduction. It was a revolutionary reduction to 36 hours then, where many people could realise a four-day working week. As part of my research (always have been nerdy), I read many books about the history of the labour movement. From that, I learnt that the essence of the labour struggle— in addition to living wages — is autonomy over working time and working time reduction. And that many workers were pleased with a full day free!

All these proposals allow us to decouple our sense of self-worth and societal value from waged labour. They open the door to solidarity economies, localised production, and the revival of public commons.

But to realise this vision, we must also reckon with the labour movement’s uneasy relationship with growth. Historically aligned with capital during the Fordist era, many unions continue to frame prosperity regarding economic expansion. Yet, as Edwards notes, there are signs of a strategic pivot. Some factions within organised labour now recognise that aligning with degrowth could enhance their bargaining power by reducing capital’s coercive leverage.

Reclaiming freedom in the 21st century thus demands more than political will—it requires a cultural shift. We must learn to value enoughness over excess, connection over consumption, and presence over productivity. Lummel time, far from idle, becomes the foundation for a freer, more just society—one in which we have the time not just to work but to live.

Thanks for reading, take your Lummel-time!

Take care,

Hans