added by Keely Adler and · updated 2y ago
The way we view free time is making us less happy
- It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more
from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg and added
- We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps fo... See more
from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg added
- Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, i... See more
from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg added
- This story offers one explanation for why leisure hasn’t much increased for many rich workers in the 21st century. We’d collectively prefer more money and more stuff rather than more downtime. We are victims of the curse of want.
from Three Theories for Why You Have No Time by Derek Thompson
Alex Wittenberg added
- It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the hea... See more
from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg and added
Harold T. Harper and added