Here’s the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s take on it: ‘The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: free time is more difficult to enjoy than work. Having leisure at one’s disposal does not improve the quality of life unless one knows how to

we found that lacking a sense of productivity is why people with excessive amounts of available time feel less satisfied in their lives.14