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Hul-Gil comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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Humans pine for excess leisure but revealed preference shows that they find excess leisure stressful. People go stir crazy after 2-3 months. I can't say I wouldn't eventually find leisure boring, but I was unemployed for 8 months a couple years ago and it was unequivocally the greatest time in my life. The only lasting negative thoughts I had during that time were thoughts related to it ending. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm some wonderfully atypical snowflake, I suspect that many creative/intellectual types would love carte blanche to pursue random projects. But this proportion of the general populace is far smaller than the portion who profess to want it.
I have experienced the same thing. I have apparently endless capacity for leisure, possibly because I have an endless number of interests and hobbies to pursue then drop then pick back up. I've never understood people who don't want this kind of life; do they really exist? Can people get bored with leisure?
I'd suspect most people feel both stress from unemployment, and guilt when they are dependent on someone else (or possibly fear of losing this support). I can't really imagine a lot of situations where a person has months to themselves without triggering one of those two, so I'd expect most people aren't very good at evaluating the situation to begin with...
Retirement, among people with retirement savings and no major health issues yet? I'm sure that's been studied. There's also a number of professions where hiatuses of a couple months at a time are normal -- teaching comes to mind, as do the more lucrative forms of seasonal employment.
There are also people with inherited money.
There's a category I call the petty rich. They have enough money that they don't need to work, so long as they maintain a middle class or lower lifestyle. I'm not sure how many there are, but I've met a few. I've never seen them discussed or studied-- they aren't exactly conspicuous.
Mmm. Possibly, but remember that "unemployment" has a fairly arbitrary definition in most cases -- it measures the number of "potential workers" (as in members of the "labour force", which is tough to pin down exactly) who've looked for work within a given time period (usually about four weeks) but haven't been able to find it. It doesn't capture: homemakers, full-time students, incarcerated people, disabled folks who want to work within their abilities but can't find a job, people who've become discouraged from looking for work, people who prefer not to, the self-employed, involuntary retirees, the underemployed, stay-at-home parents, children, elderly folks, most disabled people, and independent farmers. It's possible to be neither "employed" nor "unemployed" by this measure.
My point is, the stress probably isn't from lack-of-employment itself; that's probably a proximate cause, a triggering event that's playing on something else, like simple desperation.
That's a matter of culture, I daresay. The Protestant Work Ethic and the self-supporting individual memes are not generalizable to humanity the world over.
Which isn't to say it isn't a common reaction. Just that, as my ultimate point here goes, you should probably not conflate "an inability to meet one's own survival and psychological security needs that's recognizable within one's mental framework" with "leisure." I have lots of free time, in the sense that I'm unemployed and not carrying many obligations day-to-day, but it's hardly all leisure time, and there are things that need to be done in terms of practical upkeep even if that doesn't look like trading labor for biosurvival tickets.
That sort of reinforces my point - simply "not having a job" doesn't equate to an actual increase in leisure
("Humans pine for excess leisure but revealed preference shows that they find excess leisure stressful" and "I can't say I wouldn't eventually find leisure boring, but I was unemployed for 8 months a couple years ago and it was unequivocally the greatest time in my life. ")
Basically, I'm questioning whether the people studied actually had excess leisure, or just happened to meet certain standards like "not employed full-time in a standard corporation."
nod Downthread someone else mentioned some relevant ideas like "the petty rich" and other folks whose basic needs are met, but who aren't necessarily world-shakingly wealthy in their spending habits.
I guess some people can and other people can't, where by some I mean ‘a fraction most likely to be more than 5% and less than 95%’.
(As for me, if I have nothing to do for a while I tend to just waste most of my time sleeping or aimlessly browsing the Web and similar addictive-but-not-so-fulfilling stuff, whereas if I'm very busy I spend what little spare time I have on actually fulfilling hobbies and socialising. So I do get bored with leisure, but that's just a result of akrasia and I guess if the next time I get a few spare months I beeminded (say) reading books/watching films/listening to albums/doing things I've always wanted to read/watch/listen/do but never got around to reading/watching/listening/doing, I wouldn't.)
ETA: This guy did get bored with leisure, apparently.
Yeah, I find that very confusing too. But then, if pursuing random projects is in "leisure", then I don't really see the distinction between that and "not leisure". Maybe some people just sit around and watch paint dry, given the chance?
I was thinking of that; maybe some people equate leisure time with being directionless, and thus need externally-imposed goals?
Yes.