
Why is free time still so elusive?

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... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
As if to rub it in, some anthropologists tell us that thousands of years ago people had much more time available to them than their hunting, gathering and child-rearing required. Three or four hours of work a day paid the bills, so they had a lot of downtime. Then came agriculture, and eventually industrialization, and somehow these helpful... See more