What do you do when you don't have a job to go to?

With all these thousands of retrenchments, a lot of people are suddenly finding themselves with something they haven’t had in a while: time. So what do the newly redundant do with it all, now that they have so much of it?

The writer of this article in the Times has noticed that men are starting to appear in the middle of the day at the gym or sipping disconsolately at cappuccinos in coffee shops. He likens them to “prematurely retired racing dogs”.

What do you do with yourself when for years you have become accustomed to the routine of the work day punctuated with meetings and bordered on either side by a commute in mute solidarity with millions of your peers?

Perhaps we’ll see another golden era of slackerdom, where the experiences of dotcom workers laid off after that bubble burst were chronicled in online magazines like Salon.com; maybe, suggests David Scharfenberg in the Boston Globe, the slackers had it right all along. Many of the men described in the Times piece were laid off along with friends, so there is comfort in being one of a crowd. Plus, there’s always somebody to have fun with. Some of the activities listed include paintball, long boozy lunches (laid off merchant bankers, at least, can still afford them), going to the movies and sleeping.

(One thing men do seem to be doing less of is visiting prostitutes, judging by the impact of the recession on the sex industry. Even the Economist has considered the price elasticity of sex work in a down market.)

For my part, I’ve felt myself regressing at times to my student self. Late nights if I feel like it; I can sleep until midday if I want to, after all. Monday is just another day, which means that Saturdays and Sundays are, too.

Oh, I have things to do: I have a looming book deadline, and, besides the job hunt, I also volunteer for a local NGO and sing in the church choir. There’s the movie script I started and then abandoned. Not to forget shopping, washing dishes, doing the laundry. Cooking (lentil stew, mostly). The long-neglected novel. Blogging, of course; I have started yet another blog, one based on an article I wrote for the Sunday Times last year and which in time I may work up into a book.

But my time is my own and, living alone, with few friends and no family, I am losing, in many ways, have lost, my connection with the routines that order the lives of those around me. So I find myself operating in some respects on South African (and UK) time, knowing that 4pm is 7am in the morning, a reasonable hour to start texting my husband or looking for online friends on forums and Facebook. I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at lolcats or watching clips on YouTube.

I live in a strange twilight zone, here but not-here, in what is a kind of perpetual limbo. It’s not entirely unpleasant, mind you: I have described the awful loneliness, but there’s also a luxuriousness about all of these untimesheeted hours. I am inside a lacuna of time and space, strangely autonomous, effectively beholden to no one but myself, at an age when most people are tied to mortgages and suburban grind.

At dusk, with a glass of wine, I look out from my balcony over towards the glittering spires of the city where once, every day, I went to work, and it seems impossibly distant. One day I know that I will wake up and it will be back to an office, to routine, to the kind of normality that is more socially acceptable than the one I am living right now. Though I certainly want to be conventionally productive and useful again, part of me will mourn the passing of this strange freedom.

Pass it must; I’d hate to get too used to this, after all. And I wonder about all of the others who find themselves in a similar position to me — how long will people laid off recently and in the coming months spend outside the routine of work? Will they end up doing something different? Making a positive difference to society? Will the world end up with a substantial portion of middle class society in long term unemployment, as in the case in many developing countries?

Filling those hours, finding meaning in a world which has no use for them, not for the time being: that will be their challenge.