Let me ask you, though, is the “time crisis” real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time and it’s not in making the effort to go out and join a club. It’s in watching a Netflix show, sitting on my sofa or bed rotting, as it’s called on social media. But is is our time crisis real, or is it — — Yeah. manufactured just by our bad choices? I’m going to say yes and no on that one, right? Yes, in the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence — I’m thinking of like the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up like very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia and so on. They, you know, have a 35-hour workweek, so people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge. They’re “joiners,” right? In part, because they have time. Structurally, we’ve set it up so that they have time. I think that does matter. And I think if we set things up structurally to have more time in the U.S., maybe with a four-day workweek with people like Juliet Schor have shown us like, you know, by all accounts is happiness-inducing, good for companies and so on. I think we could get there, right? So I think that there’s something about the “time crisis” that is real. There are structural factors that are stealing our time. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today, interestingly, actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like it. It really does not. — It really does not. And that, and there’s a reason it doesn’t feel like it, which is that the amount of time we have, the kind of blocks of time have shifted. They have turned into what the journalist Brigid Schulte has called “time confetti.” These five minutes when you’re, you know, if our conversation ends a little early or 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep a little unexpectedly quickly, you know, some work meeting ends. It’s not a big chunk. It’s little chunks. We have more time because we have more of those little chunks, but those little chunks don’t feel like a lot of time. And so what do we do with the little chunks? I know what I do. Before I knew about this research, I check my email I scroll something quick on Instagram, right? Like, I look at something dumb on my phone, right? I don’t do any of the things that would make me use those three to five minutes, 10 minutes, in like a positive way. And that gets to your point, right, which is that, in practice, we do actually have free time, it’s just like we’re not using it that well.
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