it’s not just that we have a shortage of free time; it’s also that our free time, in order to be satisfying, often must align with that of our friends and loved ones. We face a problem, in other words, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that you can solve on your own.
.. The intuitive finding was that people’s feelings of well-being closely tracked the workweek. As measured by things such as anxiety, stress, laughter and enjoyment, our well-being is lowest Monday through Thursday. The workweek is a slog. Well-being edges up on Friday, and really peaks on Saturday and Sunday. We are, in a real sense, living for the weekend.
The surprising finding was that this is also true of unemployed people. We found that the jobless showed almost exactly the same day-to-day pattern in emotional well-being as working people did.
.. Time is, in many ways, what sociologists call a “network good.”