Too much free time may be almost as bad as too little

Asking people to imagine a state of mind they&#x27;ve rarely been in is supposed to inform of us what exactly? Almost nobody can predict how would they fare in drastically different circumstances.<p>I, too, am one of the people who can&#x27;t just look at the ceiling all day. But I am also burned out and tired enough to probably need <i>at least</i> one year for complete [non-passive] leisure. I&#x27;ll likely pick a hand craft, write those N programs I always wanted, start properly cleaning the house, be a bit more persistent in my workout regime etc. -- many things really.<p>I know this because I&#x27;ve been going through the very usual &quot;work 9 months, rest for 3&quot; rhythm that many programmers have gone through. But asking a bunch of Joes and Janes that never had that? Not very useful IMO.<p>And yes, too much free time is bad. I&#x27;ve taken such a good care of my wife that eventually she lost all sense of purpose and life direction and now she has to try really hard every day to rediscover them again.

OOOOR ... people with low mood tend to be less able to engage in activities?<p>It reminds me of that joke: a biology professor is teaching physiology. He takes a frog and says &quot;jump&quot;. The frog jumps. The prof then chops the frog&#x27;s legs, and says &quot;jump&quot; again. The frog now stands motionless. &quot;We conclude&quot;, says the prof, &quot;that a frog&#x27;s hearing depends on its legs!&quot;.

&gt; participants were asked to imagine having a given amount of discretionary time... [and then] asked to report the extent to which they would experience enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction.<p>This seems like a weird research design to me with limited power to actually tell us anything. Why would we think the amount of enjoyment people <i>imagine</i> having in response to an amount of free time we tell them to <i>imagine</i> would correlate well with actual experiences? Are people generally good at predicting how much they would enjoy random imaginary circumstances?<p>Now <i>that</i> might be an interesting study, how much do the things we predict will make us happy actually make us happy?

The main issue is that the study conflates free time with leisure.<p>I personally have a lot of “non-work” time, but not that much leisure time. I just fill up time with personal projects, and stuff like house renovation that I would have otherwise put off.<p>In fact “work time” is only defined for me as “time I do stuff to get paid so I can make other stuff”. So yeah if I could “work” as little as possible, it’d be pretty good.

&gt; 2,550 American adults were recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk<p>&gt; participants were asked to imagine having a given amount of discretionary time every day<p>Seriously? I trust this about as much as I trust a twitter poll.

My anecdotal life experience as a person in their mid-forties: my happiness depends upon a balanced daily rhythm. And I need things I &quot;have&quot; to do to capture that rhythm. With too much free time I just fall apart. It feels good for about three days, maybe a week or two tops, but after that I need my schedule back.

Anecdotally I can report myself having an enormous excess of free time but only because I&#x27;m in a tough financial and mental situation, I have no job, but I&#x27;m also living a very frugal lifestyle to compensate. This frugality leads to few possibilities to meaningfully go forward. For the last year and until next month or so I&#x27;m having basically unlimited free time, but I&#x27;m not happy about it.

As someone who retired not too long ago, having unlimited free time is definitely a different kind of problem. When Monday after Monday rolls around and I have another free day while others are complaining of going back to work, I find I have to give myself assignments. I like to learn so most of my assignments are on the order of &quot;Why was Andy Warhol a big deal?&quot; &quot;What happened to the Neanderthals?&quot; &quot;What was the CIA hoping to accomplish with Project MKUltra and LSD research?&quot; There&#x27;s a wealth of documentary films online that can send me in any direction. Where I used to focus on computer code, now I focus on different kinds of problems, but the effect and fulfillment is the same (more actually.)

Valuing and wisely using free time is a skill. Seems like this study is just measuring people&#x27;s lack of training in that skill.<p>Something like: &quot;we found that adding grand pianos to houses improves the overall pianism, but the effect levels out at about three pianos per neighborhood.&quot;

I’m sorry but “imagine” is a thought experiment and good for researching how people <i>feel about an idea</i> not for evaluating the actual idea’s impact. This is research into how people relate to time allocation they don’t have and don’t experience. I wish it were framed as such because it’s much more valuable that way.

I didn&#x27;t need to click it to know it was bad, but come on... still, there&#x27;s a nugget of common folk wisdom there I guess, but it&#x27;s funner to imagine why a discipline would produce studies about such things. A related quote I like: &quot;Sometimes I just want to take a break, you know? So when I get like that I set a goal like this one. And that in turn creates a little leisure time. The people who live just for the sake of living have no leisure time.&quot; --Ginko (from <i>Mushishi</i>)

I&#x27;m in between jobs right now and I find that being unemployed SUCKS. Yes I have all the free time in the world but I have no motivation to do anything productive. I draw and get tired quickly. I read and I get bored after a few pages. I game and I get annoyed after a few matches.

I’m on leave from my job, which gives me a plethora of free time at the moment. (Usually while on my job, I’m really busy with two kids etc). It is an amazing contrast to my usual workweek. However, in relation to this topic: I automatically fill in productive tasks, and spend the days with stuff that needs to be done. I’ve also devoted a lot if attention to exercise and dietary constaints, so I lost a lot of weight.<p>I guess, if I would continue for a long time I would either pick up gaming with the aim of becoming skilled, or do something productive, like start some programming tasks or similar.<p>Right now I have a month left.<p>BTW my main goal for the time being is to experience boredom (where I’m partly succeeding). That way I can hopefully look back at this time and recall why I’m usually busy and why it is a good thing.

Well, yes if you have a nothing to do then you get bored ... but the next step is that you will fill it with things to do yourself.

Given the source, and the framing, and the context, this means very little.<p>The value of free time is very highly dependent upon one&#x27;s situation and one&#x27;s conditioning. For a Zen Buddhist Monk it could be valuable. To an inmate in solitary confinement, probably not.<p>To a modern capitalist office worker with loads of debt, a house full of stuff, and a city full of cars (yeah showing my bias here, sorry), then it could be a world of possibilities while you wear a straightjacket.<p>Knowing what to do with free time is something we&#x27;re born with, but it&#x27;s also something most of us unlearn through decades of rat racing. So regaining that skill of free time appreciation takes... time.<p>But you can look at it from the opposite perspective. It is well documented that many people suffer increased depression upon returning to work from a holiday. And as many of us know personally, going on holiday can mean 1-4+ days of transition time to finally start to relax and forget about all the (artificial) bullshit we normally think.<p>So the problem is not that free time isn&#x27;t useful, but that we are so trained to not know what to do with it that we struggle for a period when exposed to it.

Studies like this are why social psychology has a such a bad name. Add this to the pile of &quot;unreproducible studies that are then over-generalized to justify &#x27;just so&#x27; stories.&quot;

&gt;&gt;The researchers also analyzed data from 13,639 working Americans who participated in the National Study<p>In my experience the act of working has dramatic impact on my perception of free time vs. when I have not been working. We tend to count hours and evaluate their &quot;productiveness&quot; when limited by work, vs. focus on overall outcomes and accomplishment when not. I doubt the latter would echo the feeling that too much free time is a bad thing I know I didn&#x27;t.

&quot;Paying employees less and making them work longer hours simultaneously is actually beneficial and good for their health, study finds&quot;

Adjusting to more free time needs time. You cannot fill the void if you are abruptly to zero work time. You need to find friends, discover activities you like, etc. - which can take years. I know many persons who live a very fullfilling life with almost zero forced work time, but they followed that path almost their entire life.

See Parkinson&#x27;s Law:<p>&gt; “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” If something must be done in a year, it’ll be done in a year. If it must be done in six months, then it will.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;personalmba.com&#x2F;parkinsons-law&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;personalmba.com&#x2F;parkinsons-law&#x2F;</a>

This paper draws its conclusions based on asking people to imagine things. That seems more like speculation, not science.

I do believe our future where the machines do all the work, one of their jobs will be to make us feel like we are doing useful work — just enough, a different amount for each person, so that everyone will feel satisfied and productive.

This idea has been explored before. Reminds me of a bit from Brave New World - they had originally tried to create a society where nobody had to work, but it broke down.

Just 10000 years ago there was not ”work”. Before that people lived millions years with 100% free time.<p>We are still able to be free and decide by ourselves what to do during the day.

In my experience leisure time is absolutely wonderful. Just puttering about, reading, gardening, and maybe some hobby coding, to name just a few things, without anyone else telling you what to do, is fantastic. There is great truth in Twain&#x27;s observation that &quot;Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.&quot;

There are occasions in social science where it is reasonable to question whether or not the study has become part of that hard to pin down category that social theorists talk about... namely, the kind that is used to justify and perpetuate the status quo.<p>tl;dr of course a study of a society in which large amounts of free time is not a thing would yield people suffering culture shock when they experience it.

Nonsense.

Yes, but then there are examples like this guy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;woodworker-drivable-wooden-bugatti-centodieci-2021-4?op=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;woodworker-drivable-wooden-b...</a><p>...who I hope gets as much free time as is possible.

Too much free time is infinitely worse than not enough free time.<p>Most people are not self starting, and self driven, without someone&#x2F;something driving them most people flounder.