Youth cultural practices as modes of time work: Chilling as rescheduling everyday life

Abstract

The phenomenon of young people reclaiming their time by rejecting traditional expectations associated with specific roles and engaging in activities that are socially addressed to be devoid of purpose, such as hanging out and chilling, is complex and multifaceted. It encompasses a range of meanings and is not simply what others call a waste of time. While many adults consider this phenomenon as wasting time by “doing nothing” or something that can be done after fulfilling the student role, young people employ these terms to refer to activities such as socializing, engaging in leisure, or taking me time. In Germany, young people have increasingly referred to hanging out as chilling in recent decades. This paper starts from the assumption that social acceleration, including temporalization of time and daily life to ensure social synchronization and coordinated actions, is an important trend in contemporary societies. Against this background, the article aims to ascertain the extent to which chilling represents a youth cultural expression of “time work” insofar as young people demonstrate the agency to negotiate the complexities of life, particularly in how they perceive and interpret time, simply by chilling. The concept of time work offers a crucial lens for understanding the temporal experiences connected to chilling, particularly in relation to how young people grow up and navigate life's uncertainties. Thus, rather than a moment of doing nothing, this article contends that chilling is a central temporal experience during the youth phase as a form of “time work.” Accordingly, chilling should be seen as a youth cultural response to the decelerating demands of the youth phase; it offers the means by which young people regain structural control over their biographical time with peers.