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The way we view free time is making us less happy

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(Image credit: Getty)

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By Aysha Imtiaz 17th September 2021

Some people try to make every hour of leisure perfect,

while others hate taking time off altogether. Have we
forgotten how to enjoy free time?
eisure is the prize, right? We work hard, so we want to play hard; we look

L forward to our time off, believing that the more leisure time we have, the
better life will be. Enjoying that time – or savouring that coveted end goal
– should come naturally.

However, research shows that both having and deciding how to spend leisure time can
be very stressful. Some people feel enormous pressure to maximise their downtime
with the best choices: researching more, anticipating and spending more money. But,
as data prove, this pressure to maximise our fun might get in the way of our enjoyment
of leisure itself.

Additionally, some people struggle to view leisure as worthwhile at all. These

individuals – oen in high-stress, high-paying jobs – prioritise productivity to the
extent that they can’t enjoy time off, oen to the detriment of their mental health.

However different their problems with leisure, both groups struggle with enjoying time
off for the same reason: the way we perceive and value leisure has changed,
problematically. Understanding this evolution, and finding ways to change our
attitudes, could be beneficial for everyone – and help people to start enjoying
themselves again.

The changing concept of leisure

“Leisure has dramatically evolved over the centuries and across cultures,” says Brad
Aeon, assistant professor at the School of Management Sciences at the University of
Québec in Montréal. “One thing that’s consistent about leisure, however, is that it has
always been contrasted with work.”

Two-thousand years ago, concepts of work and leisure were associated with servitude
and freedom, respectively. In Ancient Greece, explains Aeon, most of the labour was
outsourced to slaves, while wealthier parts of society pursued other activities. “Leisure
was an active state of mind. Good leisure meant playing sports, learning music theory, RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
debating qualified peers and doing philosophy. Leisure was not easy, but it was
supposed to be gratifying.”
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fries

Today we’re seeing yet another transition: a lack of leisure The people on board 'flight to
time now operates as a powerful status symbol nowhere'

Aeon believes that a shi occurred when the Romans started viewing leisure as a way
of recuperating in preparation for more work, a transition that accelerated significantly
Why holiday trips go by in a
during the Industrial Revolution. By the 1800s, the kind of leisure that signified status
flash
had shied, too; the wealthy led overtly idle lives. A popular example is philosopher
Walter Benjamin’s description of the fashion, around 1893, to walk through arcades
with a turtle on a leash.

Anat Keinan, associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School

of Business, has conducted extensive research on the symbolic value of time. She
explains today we’re seeing yet another transition: a lack of leisure time now operates
as a powerful status symbol. “On Twitter, celebrities ‘humblebrag’ about ‘having no
life’ and ‘being in desperate need of a vacation’,” she points out. In the workplace,
being part of the long-hours working culture is still seen by many as a badge of
honour.

In fact, those with the most money to spend on leisure are most likely also putting in
the longest hours. “Highly educated people (think surgeons, lawyers, CEOs) oen go
for well-paid jobs that require highly productive candidates willing to work long
hours,” explains Aeon. “This means that those who complain the most about not
having enough free time are wealthy and educated.” That fuels the idea that we must
maximise leisure’s ‘hedonic utility’, or enjoyment value, when we actually do get some
time off – and make every hour count.

The leisure maximisers

Economists call the idea that we must maximise our time off the intensification of the
value of our leisure time. In his book, Spending time: The Most Valuable Resource, US
economist Daniel Hamermesh explains that “our ability to purchase and enjoy goods
and services has risen much more rapidly than the amount of time available for us to
enjoy them”. This pressure manifests in our decisions. “We feel like we want to have
the best bang for our buck and minutes,” explains Aeon, “So we invest more money in
leisure. Better hotels, better movie experiences – like IMAX or Netflix in 4K – better
everything.”

For some people, leisure has come to represent collectible experiences that convey status, oen on social media (Credit:
Getty)

All this can lead to hours poring over reviews diligently planning leisure activities. That
might not necessarily be a bad thing, researchers have found, as pre-trip anticipation
greatly accounts for vacationers' happiness. But too much anticipation might set us
up for a seemingly zero-duration holiday. New research shows that we judge future
positive events as both farther away and shorter than negative or neutral ones,
leading us to feel like a holiday is over as soon as it begins.

Equally, the way we chase top-notch leisure experiences has made recreation more
stressful than ever. High expectations may clash with our experienced reality, making
it feel anti-climactic, while trying to concoct the best vacation or leisure experience
ever can fuel performativity.

In her 2011 research paper, Keinan first posited that some consumers work to acquire
collectable experiences that are unusual, novel or extreme because it helps us reframe
our leisure as being productive. By working through our experiential checklist instead
of seeking simply to enjoy the moment, she writes, we build our “experiential CV”.

And just like a traditional resume, where we show off our best selves, this experiential
CV can become a breeding ground for competition. Keinan believes social media
exacerbates our focus on productive leisure. Referencing a 2021 research paper, she
suggests people are pivoting to signal their status and accomplishments in
alternative domains – in this case, the use of their free time.

“Users post carefully curated slide shows of themselves crossing marathon finish lines
and climbing Machu Picchu. Conspicuous consumption used to be a wayfor people to
display their money through scarce luxury goods. Now, they flaunt how they spend
their valuable time only on activities that are truly meaningful, productive or
spectacular,” she says.

The people who hate leisure

Some struggle to enjoy leisure at all. Some try to ‘hack’ leisure by applying
productivity techniques, says Aeon, like listening to a podcast while jogging or
watching Netflix shows at twice the regular speed. Others may not truly take time off
at all. For example, only 14% of Americans take two weeks' vacation in a row, a
finding in keeping with the overwork culture. The same study reports that as of 2017,
54% of American workers didn’t use up their vacation time, leaving 662 million days
reserved for leisure unused.

Part of the problem, new research shows, is how comprehensively we internalise the
message that leisure is wasteful. Selin A Malkoc, associate professor of marketing at
the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study,
says certain people perceive leisure as lacking value, even when it doesn’t interfere
with their pursuit of goals. These negative beliefs about leisure are associated with
lower reported happiness and greater reported depression, anxiety and stress.

Certain people perceive leisure as lacking value, even

when it doesn’t interfere with their pursuit of goals
Malkoc describes two types of leisure: ‘terminal leisure’, where the activity and the
goal are ‘fused’ together, like attending a Halloween party just for fun, is immediately
rewarding and an end goal in itself; and ‘instrumental leisure’, like taking a child trick-
or-treating and thereby ‘checking off’ parental duties, which is a means to an end and
feeds a long-term goal. The ability to enjoy terminal leisure is a stronger predictor of
wellbeing than enjoyment of instrumental leisure, the study showed.

In one of the study’s experiments, Malkoc and her co-authors wanted to see if they
could manipulate participants’ beliefs about leisure and get them to enjoy it more.
Each group was presented with a different version of an article that framed their
understanding of leisure, either as wasteful in terms of goal-achievement,
unproductive or as a productive way of managing stress. Participants were then asked
to evaluate how well-written the article was.

But researchers were more interested in what came aerwards. They offered
participants a break and gave them a funny cat video to watch to see how much they
enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, priming our beliefs about leisure only works in one direction, the
researchers found – the wrong one. Those who read the articles framing leisure as
wasteful enjoyed the experience 11% to 14% less than the baseline (the control
group, who read about coffee makers), while those cued to believe it is productive did
not experience bolstered enjoyment levels. In other words, trying to prime
participants’ receptivity towards enjoying leisure more was about as effective as
having them read about coffee, suggesting that our attitudes are deeply entrenched.

It’s a sobering finding. “We had this group of undergraduate students in the lab doing
a series of mostly mind-numbingly boring studies – there’s nothing enjoyable about it,”
says Malkoc, “And then, we offer them a mental break to watch a fun video. The fact
that even though they couldn’t use those brief moments for something better, they
still couldn’t enjoy themselves... attests to the strength of their belief.”

The view that leisure is wasteful can be deeply entrenched – meaning some people really struggle to enjoy time off
(Credit: Getty)

Malkoc also compared samples from different nations. Participants from India and
America, both nations with overwork cultures, endorsed the belief that leisure is
wasteful more strongly than participants from France, which has social norms, “less
restrictive of enjoying life and having fun”. In fact, while Malkoc estimates about 30%
of the population endorses the ‘leisure is wasteful’ belief on average, this varies greatly
across cultures, going as high as 55% in the Indian subsample and as low as 15% in
the French sample, she explains.

Hope for leisure intensifiers and avoiders

Fortunately, there are ways to help both groups. The first, regardless of which end of
the spectrum you fall on, is to relax the productivity mindset. Keinan says a way to do
this is by “assuming a broader perspective on life and anticipating your long-term
regrets, as it allows people to enjoy the present more”.

For those seeking to intensify leisure, Aeon recommends using the peak-end rule, a
cognitive bias that influences the way we remember events. For example, he says, at
the dentist’s office, we remember the peak (when the pain was at its worst) and the
end (the candy we’d get as we le); the average sum of these experiences adjusts the
emotional intensity. So, for holidays, he recommends doing one thing that’s
“completely insane” in the middle, such as bungee jumping, and one equally grandiose
thing at the end (for instance, a spa day or indulgent meal) to elevate the entire
experience and maximise hedonic utility overall.

He recommends using mindfulness to help savour leisure experiences. “It expands

your subjective perception of time (i.e., you feel like you have more of it) and enhances
memory formation, which means you’ll not only feel like your vacations lasted longer,
but you’ll remember them a lot better.” And in keeping with research on anticipation,
having multiple smaller vacations to look forward to rather than one massive one
could also maximise our enjoyment value.

For those who find it hard to take time off to begin with, Keinan suggests using a
functional alibi – a practical excuse for enjoying themselves. “Having a ‘functional
alibi’ that articulates a purpose for an activity (such as the health and productivity
benefits of taking a much-needed vacation) allows many consumers to relax without
feeling guilty,” she says.

The only ‘right’ way to do leisure is to relax, let your guard

down, make good memories
Combating the ‘leisure is wasteful’ mindset might also mean emphasising the value of
an activity by aligning it with another utilitarian goal, instead of trying to reframe
leisure as a concept. “Vacations are meant to be ‘terminal’, but we can have different
goals embedded within them,” says Malkoc. A trip to Disneyland, for example, might
have terminal value for the children, and offer instrumental leisure for the parents.
“Making them understand… that this is a way to get productive or fuel another
purpose might help them let their guard down and enjoy it a little bit more.”

Enjoying leisure might even be a learned response, similar to the way we build up
stamina gradually at the gym. Smaller vacations – a 30-hour getaway at a hotel –
might be just short enough for such individuals to leave responsibilities behind. For
longer trips, Malkoc suggests allowing driven individuals to work for a short window
once a day might actually be less stressful than asking them to unplug completely.

For both groups – and even those somewhere in the middle – the persistent fear that
we are not using our time ‘right’, whether by having an extravagantly ‘collectable’
experience or just being uber productive, can derail the very purpose of leisure.
Because the only ‘right’ way to do leisure is to relax, let your guard down, make good
memories and trust the pieces will fall into place.

“If you approach a vacation with a ‘should’ mindset, you might be messing it up,” warns
Malkoc. “Don’t let your belief that you ‘need to get the best out of this’ get the best of
you.”

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