The Right to the Private Life

In praise of a life outside of utility

I’ve told this story before, but it’s so central to what I’m trying to do here, I’ll tell it again. 

It’s mid nineties San Francisco and I am an absolutely insufferable anarchist punk rocker working loading trucks at a catering company while spending nearly all my free time helping to run a collective anarchist bookstore / organize various anarchist rallies and events. I spend more time in bars and on rooftops than I do reading, but when I do, what I read (Bakunin, Butler, and (god help me) Bey) I read in furtherance of my poorly thought out but intensely held political beliefs. 

Through punk and anarchism I meet a wide collection of characters who populated the Bay Area in those years – self taught machinists, radical faeries, and bar stool intellectuals of all types. I became quite friendly with one guy, Chris, who was a bit older than me, perhaps 25 to my 21, but orders of magnitude smarter and more well read. We’re both part of the same scene of folks spending too much time in bars and we end up talking often about what we’re reading. One day I ask Chris about what he’s reading. I can’t remember the book now, but it was some sort of European novel in translation, something I’d never heard of, something that, when he explained it, didn’t make sense to me. 

“Why are you reading that?”, I asked. “What do you mean?” Chris responded. 

I dug a bit deeper - “Well I mean is it part of some project? Something bigger you’re working on?” 

“No,” he responded. 

“Well why then? Why this book and not something else, something more.. Significant or important” I pressed.

Chris looked at me with something that felt like sadness and said “A man has a right to a private life.”

I left it at that. But I’ve thought about that line constantly over the next thirty years. 

“A man has a right to a private life”. 

Of course, today I’m sure Chris would phrase it differently, probably closer to “We all have a right to a private life”, but the concept remains the same and as  I’ve reflected on it over all these years I’ve come to realize it’s a simple but radically important idea, probably more radical and important than all the anarchist theory I read in those days.

My father likes to refurbish old tools. He’ll buy a hundred year old drill for two bucks at a flea market, a drill say, or a saw, and he’ll putz away for hours in his garage cleaning the rust, fixing the mechanism, making it shine like new, or as close to new as a 100 year old drill can get. 

“I enjoy it”, he told me once, “And it’s essentially free.” The drill has no real worth, he isn’t trying to sell it, he just enjoys the process of breathing some new life into some old tools. No real reason for it beyond that.  

My dad and my daughter futzing with some old thing in the garage

We all have a right to a life outside the need for utility. We have a right to read what we want for the pleasure of reading it and for no other reason. We have a right to play. We have a right to engage in things simply because we enjoy them, not in furtherance of our career, or our politics, or any other reason beyond what we take from the activity itself. And we have a right to do these things without explanation or apology. 

We have a right to a private life, but there are forces that push us to disavow our private life. Forces that try to push everything towards utility, towards a why for every action. In my twenties, that force was my desire for radical social change, now, it’s… well there’s no other way to say it, it's capitalism. I should be working, or at least reading the latest productivity book so I can work better, but instead, I’m spending countless hours on this 900 page book about a Jewish mystical messiah. 

Whether it's the sanctimony of a young wanna be revolutionary or the productivity cult of modern capitalism, it needs to be resisted. We need to protect, cherish, and (if we choose!) share our private lives. 

That’s what this thing is. A little website. A way to share my own idiosyncratic private life. Some of it in service of bigger aims, some of it just for the joy of it, all of it just me being me.