Improved Lives

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One of the biggest end goals of personal growth and positive psychology is more leisure time. Leisure time is closely associated with happiness and with good reason, leisure is a lot of fun!

We are told every day, both directly and indirectly, that to get more leisure time we need to get more money and become rich. We are lead to believe that when we have enough money we can stop spending so much time working and instead enjoy the things we really love to do.

It turns out though that this is not the case:

People invariably believe that money can make them happy — and rich people usually do report being happier than poor people do. But if this is the case, shouldn’t wealthy people spend a lot more time doing enjoyable things than poor people?

Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.

Daniel Kahneman and his fellow researchers found that people with a yearly salary of:

• $0 – $20,000 spend 1/3 of their time in passive leisure
• $20,000 – $99,999 spend 1/4 of their time in passive leisure
• $100,000+ spend 1/5 of their time in passive leisure

Passive leisure is activities such as playing a favorite sport, doing a hobby, or just relaxing in front of the TV.

This decrease in leisure time as people get richer corresponds to an increase in compulsory activities. In other words, the researchers found that the more money people had, the more they had to spend time doing things like working, commuting, and shopping. They found that this increase in compulsory activities was taking away from leisure activities.

The important thing to take away from this is that, generally speaking, it’s not money that creates less leisure time, it’s the things we do to make money that takes away from our leisure time.

So how do we make money while cutting back on leisure time draining activities?

I could try and explain this concept, but Tim Ferriss has done a far better job than I could do with his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

The basic premise of the book is that by applying the 80/20 principle (80% of our productivity comes from 20% of our work) to our lives, along with a few other helpful tricks, we can drastically cut back on the amount of time we spend on work related activities, so that we can have more time to spend on leisure activities.

Tim’s book teaches us that there is another way to get more leisure time. The study shows that compulsory, money making activities take away from leisure time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to cut back on your money making activities. Instead, just make your money making activities more efficient.

By cutting back on non-essential work activities it is entirely possible to retain or even create a substantial income while having a lot of leisure time. Don’t let anyone convince you it cant be done.

Further Reading:
- How Rich People Spend Their Time
- Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion (login required) by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone

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