What Exactly Are We Doing All This Work For?

Apparently, primarily for two-and-a-half hours a day of mind numbing TV.

Having just completed another quick read through Joe Dominguez’s excellent Your Money or Your Life and contemplating the exchange of life for money that we all do, I stumbled (via LifeHack) upon a bunch of interesting stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the American Time Use Survey.

And looking through the results all I can think is “my, what boring lives we are living…”

One-third of life working away in order to afford the rest.

One-third of life sleeping away.

Not even one-third of that remaining one-third spent on ‘leisure time’.

And with that pittance of leisure that we do afford ourselves, I’m sure we make great use of it:

Well, I guess not. Half spent rotting in front of the idiot box! Well, at least we’re getting our money’s worth from the cable bill…

Utah SEO

I once had a college course where we had to track all of our time for one week and it was amazing to see how much time is really wasted doing nothing.

Sean

Passions, eh? Never heard of it, but by looks, a brain cell eater sounds about right... ;) Don't feel too bad -- I'd hazard that 99% of TV is nothing but brain rot as well.

Lately I've gotten pretty good at not even glancing at the thing until after 10pm. Anything I really want to watch gets DVR'd, so I'm not 'missing' anything anyway. There isn't much of to miss this time of the year, so I guess the real test is going to be once fall rolls around!

Gerri

Uggg.. we certainly don't put our leisure time to that great of use, do we? I'm trying to cut back on TV. I used to justify it because I TIVO and fast forward through the commericals but I honestly just need to cut back entirely. Most of all I'm worried about my son being exposed to too much tv, so what kind of example am I setting for him?

I'm going to try to cut back by at least 50% this week starting with not watching Passions anymore. That show is way stupid. I feel like it's eating my brain cells and deducting iq points.