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You’re not imagining it. With 8 hours of sleep and a 9 hour work day plus all the other things that are effectively ‘required’, we are left with about 4 free hrs per weekday in a very optimistic scenario (commute is 30 minutes each way, you’re really fast with your bathroom routine, you down breakfast super quick, dinner and lunch are 30 mins each, etc).

The upper limit of achievable ‘free’ time per week is about 25% of total time (42 hrs). Most people don’t get nearly that much.

In that 25%, you need to fit: socialization, child care, parental care, leisure, events, learning, hobbies, planning, physical activity, non-essential shopping, medical care, etc.

What’s amazing is that we’ve collectively inflicted this state of affairs upon ourselves. Generally speaking, no one’s boss has it any better than their subordinates (usually they have it worse) - if you keep iterating by that logic, you end up in a loop because you eventually get to shareholders, investors, and customers.

And then the picture gets even more bleak when you realize people are averaging something like 3-4 hours per day on waste like TV and social media.




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