Back before the industrial revolution, the workday for the vast majority of people, centered around the daylight hours in order to perform agricultural work, hunting, fishing, and the like. When the industrial revolution came to fore, the hours for the common working person were to a large extent out of their hands, for they own little or nothing, and therefore had to work the hours so required, and did so under the conditions so demanded, in order to receive the compensation, so dictated by their circumstances. So then, to a certain extent, the industrial revolution for the common worker, effectively meant less leisure time than the agrarian civilization, that came before.
However, when we fast forward to the modern age, labor laws have now been put into place, along with various rules and regulations in regards to acceptable working conditions, overtime, benefits, and wages, so that, though there are many a person that has to still labor for more than forty hours a week in order to make ends meet; we find that for most people forty hours of labor or even less than that constitutes their obligation to the labor market. Of course, what’s left is not all free time, for people have the time of their commute, childcare obligations, school, and assorted other mandatory things that they must attend to on a regular basis. Still, at the end of the day, most people have a fair amount of free time, that is available for them, to do whatsoever that they so desire to do within the limitations of their time, budget, and circumstances.
We shouldn’t forget, that a given week has 168 hours, and though we must eat, sleep, work, and do other assorted things, this would seem to provide a fair number of hours being left for a significant amount of people, in which they don’t have any mandatory obligations, and for some of those people, the free time so available is actually quite considerable. The paradox of those free time hours that people can use in a manner that suits them, is that some of those people, that have the most leisure time, can’t seem to ever come up with an effective usage of such, but instead, fill their days in mindless activities, of alcohol or recreational drug usage, TV watching, internet browsing, or social media activities, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, some people with fairly busy schedules, have a plan of action in place, of those things that really matter to them, and go about attending to that with their free time.
The thing is, whether time is well spent or pretty much wasted, we do find that time moves relentlessly ever forward, so it would seem to behoove most everyone to want to spend their leisure time in a manner in which they will get the most satisfaction on some level, from it; yet, many people don’t really do that, probably because they undervalue how valuable leisure time really is. In truth, far more of us, need to actually understand that time stands still for nobody, no matter one’s status or lack thereof, and therefore each day when we do have some free time, we should probably want to consider doing those things that feel significant to us, that is thereby true to our ideals and image, and far less with that, which is mindless and of no real good purpose.