Picture yourself in this hypothetical scenario. After a day of studying you have a couple hours of down time. You wish you could visit that friend you haven’t seen in awhile, or catch up on some leisure reading you’ve been meaning to get to, but your mind is fried, your body aches and all you want to do is plop on the couch and enter a vegetative state for approximately 120 minutes. This is the not-so-hypothetical life of the average American.
According to a study done in 2014, a working adult between the ages of 25 and 54 will spend 8.9 hours per day working, 7.7 sleeping, 2.2 doing chores and caring for others and 1.0 eating and drinking. This leaves 2.5 hours for leisure and 1.6 for what was labeled as “other.”
When thinking about our day, we may find 2 hours of down time to be enough; that is the first issue. Out of a 24 hour day, we only grant ourselves 10.4 percent of it to spend it as we will. There is an unspoken obsession with filling our time with activities that not only do we overwork ourselves, but we cram our schedule with events and diversion we even end up complaining about.
Which leads to issue number two. All the time we spend hustling drains so much energy out of us, that when we do have down time we don’t want to do anything. Free time is supposed allow us to be most ourselves, it’s suppose to grant us the opportunity to choose what we truly want to do with the time we have at our disposal. Cramming our schedule takes this freedom from our lives; it fills up our days with things we do not truly want to do and leaves us no willingness for leisure.
The overwhelming amount of things we have to do is ultimately toxic. Countless times I’ve asked my friends how they’ve been and the immediate answer is often, “busy.” I, too, have wanted to spend more time taking walks by the river, or getting tea with a roommate without needing to cut things short with a, “Sorry, I have a meeting and work and class and homework and the gym, I wish I had time for you.”
We live in a culture of constant movement, though, where one feels odd and out of place when doing “nothing” and things like reading, getting breakfast with others, or listening to music are considered nothing. We feel “so accomplished” after days when we’ve had no time to even have a meal, but we somehow feel guilty if the following day is spent with loved ones. This is not to deny there there are indeed things that must be done. Without work, one cannot feel constructive, without sport one cannot be healthy, etc. But what do we live for?
This culture pushes us to be constantly on the move without “wasting” time, and we end up with no time for what truly gives us life. This is lack of freedom. This is a form of enslavement. Ultimately, we must consider what we are truly accomplishing and remember that how we spend our time says a lot about who we are.
Letizia Mariani can be reached at mari8259@sthhomas.edu
While I definitely think we live in a culture that pushes us to over-work ourselves, I don’t think it is very easy for many to simply “consider what we are truly accomplishing” and then take some time off. As someone who grew up on a low-income home, my family worked all the time because we had to just to get by. With minimum wage what it is and with the cost of education so high, for people born into under-privileged households, working less is simply not an option. Perhaps instead of telling people they should be prioritizing their time better, we should be recognizing and changing the systemic inequities that force people to work themselves into the ground? Because as much as my family would have loved to spend more time together, we simply didn’t have that option.