My quality of life has decreased immensely since I left high school. No wonder they say those are the best years of your life. My mother always told me to enjoy it, because I’d miss those years. She was right.

I have 24 hours in a day, but that isn’t enough to do everything I want. Let’s do some quick math:

  • 8 hours of work
  • 8 hours of sleep
  • 8 hours for myself

Seems fair… or is it? That’s what a perfect division would look like, which is not the case for 99% of people. There’s commute to work, lunch, and more. In my case, I live in Brazil, so my 8 hours of work doesn’t include lunch. Not to mention, I need to work 44 hours per week, which adds 1 extra hour from Monday to Thursday. My day actually looks like this:

  • 7 hours of sleep
  • 10 hours 40 minutes of work (including commute + lunch + 1 extra hour)
  • 6 hours and 20 minutes for myself

OK, I took 1 hour from my sleep so I could have an extra hour for myself. So I have 6 hours and 20 minutes… but in that time there is: shower, dinner, cleaning and cooking lunch for the next day. If I try to do everything fast, I can do these house chores in 2 hours, and then I have 4 hours for gym, reading, studying and relaxing.

That is simply not enough. Gym alone takes an entire hour if we include commute. How can people create art? Go out for dinner? Hang out with friends? Spend time with your partner?

So, “Time for myself” isn’t actually free time, it’s maintenance time just to keep myself alive and functional for the next work day.

There is the weekend, fine. But living one weekend at a time, isn’t that some kind of miserable outcome? Out of 365 days of a year, you can fully enjoy just 104 days?

I’m just married. Imagine if I had children? Then for sure I’d not be living at all. No wonder people don’t want to have kids these days. Not because they hate kids, but because they either can’t afford to have them or simply do not have enough time to properly take care of their child.

The irony is that in the 1920s, people thought the future would be a “golden age of leisure”. John Maynard Keynes predicted that within 100 years, technological progress would reduce our working hours to 15 hours per week --- that we wouldn’t know what to do with so much free time.

What a joke. Look at where we are now.

That is why I don’t believe Silicon Valley’s promises of a future where AI + Robotics leads us to Universal Basic Income, to a “golden age of leisure”.