Buyer Beware
Spending Time identifies our allotted hours with currency and the idea of being fully depleted, and not in a good way. Filling Time has a different feel, loosely associated with boredom and seeking activity. What did you do with your Time? is another variant, which suggests we need to be responsible.
Spending is most common and maybe most neutral, but doesn’t it automatically mean that we are buying something?
I recently came across How Do People Spend Their Time at Our World in Data, an Oxford University project. There are nice charts and explanatory remarks. It covers 34 OECD countries and the dataset is available and easy to download.
A few interesting factoids pop out about people, on average.
they sleep over an hour more per day in China than in Japan or South Korea
the ones in France spend almost twice as much as everyone else on Personal Care
the ones in Mexico lead the world in Housework and Shopping by a wide margin
There are more random insights, like gender inequality in recreational time, and with the dataset anyone can find more little gems on their own.
Browsing further I discovered another dataset, focusing on how people feel about what they do with their time. I wish it had been categorized by the same activities and the same countries, but it still raises some big questions for me.
This list shows the bottom group, the least enjoyable activities.
The Least Desirable Activity in the World is Looking for a Job.
Where would it even be categorized on the Time Spent chart? Here are the options:
Paid work
Education
Care for household members
Housework
Shopping
Other Unpaid
Sleep
Eating and drinking
Personal care
Sports
Attending events
Seeing Friend
TV and Radio
Other leisure activities
“Other Unpaid’ I guess, but that’s defined more as charity work.
Interesting that it is not obvious how to categorize the worst thing there is to do. I’m sure the amount of time devoted to the often soul-crushing activity of job search is significant. I would guess that the amount of time worrying about it is even larger. I’m not sure the Time Spent data adequately describes this aspect of the human experience.
People don’t like their Main Job, they don’t like driving there and back, and they don’t even like paid work at home. It’s not just the driving. Paid work dominates our waking hours and people don’t tend to like it. Marx called it alienated labor, basically disassociating from our selves because we have to
Not enjoyable, on average.
Second Jobs are not in the least enjoyable group; they are a step up and into the middle group of desirability — but Second Jobs is the single activity in this dataset with the most variation. Some people do not like a Second Job at all and some people Love it. I’m pretty sure it depends on how much you need the money as opposed to freedom of self-expression.
Here is the top tier of enjoyable activities:
Sports, theater, concerts, restaurants and pubs, visiting friends, and out-of-home leisure are the big winners — and the big losers in 2020.
My Take-Away — this little exercise shows a few things about Big Data.
It is seductive, especially when it appears to confirm what we are already encouraged to believe through long-standing cultural stereotypes, like the French are vain.
It is also misleading, not just at the individual level, which we know this view does not predict — but even at 40,000 feet, where the data might show us working, sleeping and watching TV without a hint that we are looking for a job. Constantly. With the TV on. During ‘Care for Household Members.’ The anxiety it produces might help determine what we eat and drink, how much, and when.
The picture I get is that people stay where they are because they hate looking for something else more than they like how things are.