More Free Time Does Not Necessarily Produce Greater Well-Being

Cassie Holmes traces her work on time and well-being to a morning when the life she had worked to build looked, by ordinary standards, nearly ideal. After moving to Los Angeles to join UCLA’s faculty, she lived near campus and walked her three-year-old son, Leo, to preschool. Leo skipped, sang, and lingered over what caught his attention.

Holmes, meanwhile, walked ahead of him, mentally cycling through the day’s demands and calculating how much she needed to accomplish before pickup. When Leo stopped to put his face into a rosebush, she urged him along: “Leo, we do not have time to stop and smell the roses.”

That distinction shapes Holmes’s central claim: time matters not merely because it is scarce, but because the hours of ordinary days become one’s lived experience. A life can contain things one values and still feel rushed or unsatisfying when attention is organized around urgency rather than around those things.

The phrase startled Holmes precisely because her professional work concerns time and happiness. Nothing about the scene itself was deficient. In planning for what came next, she had missed what was immediately available: the flowers, her son’s delight, and the walk itself.

Holmes uses “happiness” in the research sense of subjective well-being: both how people feel in their lives and how they feel about their lives. It includes enjoyment, life satisfaction, and, in important ways, meaning. The question is not whether every moment is pleasant. It is whether daily time use supports a life that feels worthwhile while it is being lived and satisfying when viewed in retrospect.

The temptation for people who feel chronically behind is to assume that the answer is simply more free time. Holmes once had that intuition herself: if she had more time to relax or do whatever she wanted, she expected happiness would follow. Her research complicates that hope. The amount of available time matters, but it is neither the only variable nor a straightforward one.

Cassie Holmes and colleagues examined the relationship between discretionary time and self-reported life satisfaction using data from the American Time Use Survey. The analysis covered tens of thousands of working and nonworking Americans and classified discretionary activities as things people wanted to do rather than obligations they had to meet.

The broad pattern Holmes reported was an inverted U. People with very little discretionary time were less happy, consistent with her work on time poverty: the acute feeling that there is too much to do and too little time in which to do it. In the dataset she described, happiness was lower for people with less than roughly two hours of discretionary time in a day.

But people at the other end of the distribution were also less happy. Those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time per day showed lower life satisfaction as well.

The finding does not mean leisure is bad. Holmes’s interpretation is that people can be averse to idleness when a day yields no sense of purpose, contribution, or direction. This is not the temporary freedom of a vacation; it is the recurring cadence of ordinary life. Large stretches of unstructured time can become dissatisfying when they seem disconnected from anything worthwhile.

How discretionary time is spent changed the pattern in the analyses Holmes described. Her team separated time use by whether it was social, active rather than passive, and experienced as productive rather than wasteful. Social discretionary time continued to correlate with greater happiness rather than turning downward at the high end. Productive discretionary time did not show the same decline; its relationship with happiness leveled off.

“Productive” here does not simply mean paid work or maximum output. Holmes linked it with active leisure and with time that feels beneficial rather than squandered. Passive leisure can provide rest and rejuvenation. In her account, the problem arises when people cannot identify what the time provided, spend more of it than intended, or recognize that it displaced something else they valued.

Carolyne Heldman asked whether people can persuade themselves that scrolling, games, or other digital habits are productive uses of time. Holmes’s reading of the data was not that people successfully reclassify passive time as worthwhile. The relevant question, she said, is less the category of activity than whether it had a discernible benefit and whether it crowded out something more valued.

That is a corrective to the fantasy that abandoning all obligations would solve the problem of time. A radical increase in free time may relieve time poverty, but it can also expose a lack of purpose or connection. Holmes’s practical advice is to use discretionary time in ways that feel actively worthwhile and, especially, to invest it with other people.

Holmes also qualified the reach of this research. Most of her data to date, she said, come from the United States and the United Kingdom—Western, developed settings. The pattern is evidence about those populations, not a universal account of how all cultures experience time, purpose, or happiness.

Carolyne Heldman raised the pressure to optimize sleep, fitness, health, and perhaps even free time and meaning. Cassie Holmes responded that optimization becomes misguided when the thing being optimized is mistaken for the final objective.

Good sleep is a useful example. People may pursue it through tactics and worry about whether they are doing sleep correctly. But the relevant question, Holmes argued, is why they want good sleep: to have energy, feel well in daily life, and be available to people around them. In her UCLA course, “Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design,” a sleep doctor’s message shifted over time from explaining why sleep matters for happiness to offering tips and tricks for better sleep. Yet anxiety itself is often what keeps people awake.

Time can be treated the same way. Efficiency, speed, and squeezing more tasks into a day may be useful tools, but they can also make people more hurried and less attentive. Holmes’s earlier work found that drawing attention to time as a resource can increase happiness by making people more intentional about their choices. Her later conclusion is that attention to time is not automatically beneficial. A fixation on getting as much done as possible can sap the joy that time was supposed to make possible.

The corrective, in Holmes’s view, is to widen the temporal frame. Rather than asking only what must happen in the next hour, she encourages people to consider the years and the life they want to live. Her research indicates that this broader perspective highlights what is important and reduces reflexive responsiveness to what merely feels urgent.

That does not require making every experience meaningful, perfect, or performative. Heldman pressed Holmes on whether calculating the limited number of remaining coffee dates or full moons might take someone out of the experience by making them too intent on extracting meaning from it.

Holmes’s answer was that the more common problem is absence, not excessive presence. On the walk with Leo, her mind was in a future meeting. During a coffee date, even a visible phone can direct attention toward all the other things one could be doing. Intending to be present is different from demanding that an experience be perfect or “Instagrammable.”

Not every ritual will feel rewarding every time. Holmes recounted a student who tried a coffee date with a one-year-old and found it chaotic. The point is not to force a special moment. It is to make time for activities that matter, return to them, and give them attention when they can bring joy.

Cassie Holmes uses a “Times Left” exercise to counter hedonic adaptation: repeated experiences lose emotional intensity because people become accustomed to them. That capacity can help people adapt to hardship, but it also means they stop noticing good things precisely because those things happen often.

The walk to preschool felt like an everyday routine because it occurred every day. But it was not permanent. Within a year, Holmes’s son would begin elementary school, requiring a drive and a carpool arrangement. The slow walk, the flowers, and the possibility of conversation would disappear from the family’s routine. Had she recognized that only a fraction of those walks remained, she believes she would have paid closer attention while they were still available.

The exercise asks people to identify something that brings them joy and calculate, realistically, how many occasions remain. The calculation accounts for changing life circumstances, particularly when the activity depends on another person’s availability.

Holmes applies it to weekly Thursday coffee dates with her daughter, Lida. The dates began when Lida was in preschool as a practical post-carpool stop: hot chocolate for Lida, a flat white for Holmes, and a half hour before the next obligation. Over time, the stop became a ritual. But Lida is nearing adolescence, when she may prefer coffee-shop outings with friends; later she may leave for college and build an adult life elsewhere. Holmes calculated that she has about 36% of their coffee dates left.

The number is not meant as sentimental accounting. Holmes says it changes decisions in two ways. First, it makes a 30-minute ritual easier to protect against incoming requests when it is understood as finite. Second, it changes how someone shows up within that time. Scarcity can make a familiar activity newly perceptible.

The exercise is also a way to create a perspective that Holmes says tends to arrive more naturally with age. Her research finds that people who experience time as limited are more likely to savor ordinary experiences. Younger people, who often see their future as long and expansive, derive comparatively more happiness from extraordinary events. As people age, ordinary experiences become increasingly rewarding—eventually, in Holmes’s account, as rewarding as extraordinary ones.

Major events do not become less meaningful or enjoyable. The birth of a grandchild or a child’s wedding remains significant. What changes is the capacity to see happiness in the fabric of ordinary life: a recurring meal, a walk, a conversation, a weekly coffee date.

Aging, the death of a loved one, crisis, and the COVID pandemic can all make finitude more salient. Holmes’s aim is not to wait for a crisis to create perspective. The Times Left exercise brings forward the recognition that ordinary arrangements do not continue indefinitely.

Cassie Holmes distinguishes happiness and meaning without treating them as opposites. She described a study in which one group of participants recalled an experience that made them happy in the previous month and another recalled an experience that was meaningful. The two sets of experiences overlapped so extensively that they were difficult to separate: what people regarded as happy was often meaningful, and what they regarded as meaningful was often happy.

Yet participants could also identify experiences that were happy but not meaningful, and meaningful but not happy. Some in-the-moment pleasures may be enjoyable without carrying much meaning. Difficult experiences, meanwhile, can acquire meaning without having been pleasant. Meaning can include a negative component: something bad happens, but a person eventually finds growth, connection, learning, or a changed understanding of themselves.

For Holmes, a rich life is not one in which every hour is positive. It includes genuinely joyful moments that are noticed when they happen, along with adversity from which people may emerge stronger or more connected. Her practical objective is to help people identify activities that are both enjoyable in the moment and satisfying to reflect on afterward.

This also limits the use of population averages. Research may show, on average, that social connection predicts greater happiness and work predicts less. But an average cannot determine what an individual person’s work, relationships, or solitary activities mean to them. Some people find substantial happiness in work; particular activities within a workday may be energizing while others are draining.

Holmes’s approach is therefore not to prescribe a universal schedule. Her course and book translate research into exercises that ask individuals to examine their own time: What has brought joy before? Why did it do so? Which activities feel meaningful, and which only feel urgent? The answers can change with life stage.

That shifting context matters when free time is imposed rather than chosen. A layoff, injury, retirement, an empty nest, or a partner’s retirement can replace demanded time with unstructured time. Holmes noted that retirees, people whose partners have also retired, and empty nesters may be especially exposed to the other side of the discretionary-time problem: too much time accompanied by a loss of purpose or connection.

Nor does nominally discretionary time always feel chosen. Social commitments can be experienced as obligations. A sense of control over both the amount of time available and its uses is, Holmes said, a significant part of well-being.

Cassie Holmes does not treat time poverty as merely a mindset. Objective demands—work, childcare, and other responsibilities—materially constrain people’s days. But the feeling of having too much to do is also shaped by subjective factors: how people organize their time, interpret obligations, and experience others’ expectations.

In the data Holmes described, women tended to report feeling more time poor than men after the analysis controlled for parental status, marital status, age, income, and occupational status. Holmes offered one possible interpretation from those data: men appeared more likely to link obligation chiefly to work, which could make nonwork time feel more like their own. For women in the data, work was one source of obligation among others, including childcare responsibilities.

Her point was not that objectively measured time use alone explains the difference. Even where people spend similar amounts of time, the subjective experience of demands, expectations from others, and expectations people impose on themselves may shape feelings of pressure, stress, time poverty, and lower happiness. Holmes identified this as the gender difference she had observed in her time-poverty research; she did not report a gender difference in people’s tendency to take a broad, life-span view of time.

Choice matters as well. Discretionary time is nominally time spent doing what one wants, but an activity can be classified as discretionary while still feeling socially obligatory. Holmes argued that when people have little say over either how much time they have or how it is used, that lack of control can undermine well-being.

Her focus is partly on the area where individuals retain agency: how they direct attention, make time choices, and practice them day after day. She described this not as a one-time correction but as a continuing muscle. She still finds herself pulled into the noise of daily demands and reacting to whatever presents itself as urgent.

Cassie Holmes treats social connection as central to what makes discretionary time worthwhile. In the time-use findings she described, social time did not show the same high-end decline in happiness as discretionary time overall. Holmes also presented loneliness as a serious challenge across age groups.

There is no single secret to happiness, Holmes said, because well-being is built through repeated daily choices. But she described real social connection as necessary: friendships or relationships with at least one or several people who know someone, whom that person knows in return, and from whom they can receive support.

That emphasis also shaped her answer about cross-national differences. Holmes is working with an international group studying happiness and meaning, including researchers from Scandinavia, Japan, and Bhutan. She described Bhutan as a country that has, for roughly two decades, considered gross national happiness alongside GDP and whose Buddhist traditions emphasize values such as respect for nature, care for others, and presence.

But Holmes cautioned against treating country-level happiness rankings as simple evidence that one culture has solved well-being. Scandinavian countries tend to fare well in average happiness measures, she said, in part because social systems reduce the number of people whose basic needs—for healthcare, shelter, safety, or education—go unmet. Yet she also pointed to declining happiness among young people in Nordic countries, concerns about cost of living and future independence, and loneliness among both younger and older people.

One barrier to friendship is what Holmes called the “liking gap”: people tend to believe that others liked them less than they actually did. After an interaction, someone may assume they came across badly and decide it would be awkward to invite the other person to spend time together again. Holmes suggested that remembering the gap can change how people enter a room or approach a new relationship. Expecting to be liked may make someone behave more openly, which she said can create a positive cycle in friendship formation.

The broader implication is not that every hour must be social or that connection eliminates the constraints of work, caregiving, or economic insecurity. Holmes’s account instead makes social connection one of the clearest ways time can feel purposeful rather than merely consumed.