Like, drugs are illegal, man.
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The study isn’t clear about that, presumably one would need to look at the NSCW survey itself to see if that provides a definition.
They do go into a bit more detail about “Study 2”.
I will note that none of those categories appear to involve for example, making stuff. It’s all pretty passive.
There’s a much longer list in the appendix with the various percentages. Notably, playing sports with household children looks like it shouldn’t have made it into their study since only 89.80% of respondents classed that as a discretionary activity.
In fact, it appears doing things with your own children isn’t viewed as discretionary. I suppose we can either see that positively or cynically.
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Why doesn’t your post have all the likes?
Probably because ppl are working so hard.
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Yeah, I’m gonna have to go ahead and label this Junk Science. Who sponsored this study? The Society for the re-introduction of Victorian Workhouses and Indentured Servitude?
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2.5 hours? Do these people even play video games?
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I keep reading this as 2.5 hours for study, 2.5 hours free time, which seems about right.
I’m studying as an adult now, and often wish my working, non-academic friends had the opportunity to take a unit they might be interested in. Without the need to commit to a degree or make it part of professional development.
We only either work full-time OR study full-time, all or nothing. A cultural change that increases active, guided learning and making would probably be more fulfilling for a lot of people.
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Some of them are.
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I think I see a way in which the paper is not generalisable across cultures there: non-Americans think differently about leisure time. For example I think it’s mine by right, I guard it jealously, and while I do like to do things that might be considered “a good use of time” such as learning, exercise, reading “improving literature” as they used to say, I feel no obligation to do so. Hanging out with my partner (even watching telly!) playing with my children, goofing off, reading comics/listening to music/ drinking tea also make me feel good. I feel no guilt when I get more than 2.5 leisure hours. I don’t feel my time use is suboptimal.
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Sure, you just need to continuously shift the time you go to sleep by an hour each day.
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Optimal for who? I just got off my yearly “Birthday Staycation” where I took a few days off to celebrate, and spent almost every free hour of those days playing No Man’s Sky. About 52 hours of gaming in about 5 days (I had to make allowances on Sunday to get some cleaning done out of fear the wife would finally disown me, even though she was wonderfully supportive). And it still wasn’t enough free time.
Bad survey is bad. When we will as a society stop reading these unscientific piles of colonic waste products?
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Mars I believe. More like 24 hours, 37 minutes, but it’s a start. Mercury is 1,407 hours, so you might prefer that.
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Ah, now that explains things. I figured they had to have actually (and somewhat arbitrarily) defined terms at some point.
Yeah, it is pretty passive (besides sports), though some of those categories do allow for more active, creative activities. But most people are engaging in passive leisure activities.
It is interesting to see how people interpreted that
“time spent on leisure activities or on other nonroutine pursuits—where the primary function is the use of time for pleasure or some other intrinsically worthwhile purpose”
I mean 69% thought Socializing, Relaxing, and Leisure as Part of Job (e.g., attending social event w/coworkers, talking w/coworkers at social event) fits that definition?
Ok, maybe a lot of people have a lot more fun with their coworkers.
But nearly 10% said Telephone calls to/from professional or personal care service providers (e.g., banker, lawyer)?
The mind boggles.
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Presumably anything that wasn’t overtly work was seen by at least some people as “leisure” or at least “socializing.”
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Therefore, discretionary time is not simply whatever time is leftover outside of paid work; it is instead the portion of people’s waking hours spent doing what they want.
But seriously, “what I want” is kind of a philosophical question, isn’t it? Like, if you stripped away all of my responsibilities, to-do lists, chores, obligations, etc I would probably want to do “nothing” too. Fact is, those obligations and appointments are the result of pursuing “what I want”. What I actually want is to work, but to work on the things that are meaningful and rewarding to me, and which allow me the agency to make my own decisions. Whether building a cabin, arranging a party, or reading a book.
In this sense, “free time” is less about time and more about freedom. Maybe when it comes to free time it’s useful to think about the quality as well as the quantity.
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I agree with others that the problem is people have been conditioned to feel “lazy” if they have anything approaching proper free time, and not that 2.5 hours is an innate optimal point.
I also agree that this is liable to be used by corporate overlords.
Given my PI lectures me about how in the academic world, people work 7 days a week if I don’t answer weekend e-mails promptly, however, I suspect that the authors wrote this paper for the express purpose of waving in the face of their graduate students.
The authors do mention this. Sort of.
Their research is of course not about why people feel this way.
My personal favourite bit of their paper is Study 3 which they term an experiment.
It consists essentially of asking a bunch of people to imagine they had a certain amount of free time and asking them to describe how they think they would feel after two weeks and after six months of having that amount of free time.
And oddly enough they found that people who worried about being ‘productive’ were worried about it.
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