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Leisure Doesn’t Make Us Happy

Leisure Doesn’t Make Us Happy

Last updated on: July 14, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Leisure Doesn’t Make Us Happy 2026-07-10T14:02:36-04:00 Gene Veith

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Summertime and the living is easy. Vacations. Lying out on a beach. Doing nothing and then taking a nap.

Wouldn’t it be great to always have leisure time like this? Not having to work. Devoting oneself to constant entertainment. Wouldn’t that be finally reaching the goal in our pursuit of happiness?

No, actually. Leisure doesn’t, in fact, make us happy.

That was the finding of a study reported on in the Washington Post by Maggie Penman entitled Does Leisure Make Us Happy? Often the Answer Is No. (Behind a paywall. But you can read the syndicated article here.)

The original study by psychology professors Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia and Mirka Henninger of the University of Basel is entitled What does a good day look like?: An interpretable machine learning approach to the American Time Use Survey. They crunched a large amount of survey data from 15,000 participants, seeking an answer to the question, “What differentiates a happy day from a typical one?”

“Surprisingly,” reported the researchers, “spending any amount of time on relaxation and leisure was associated with a lower probability of having a good day.” To be sure, the nature of that relaxation and leisure may be a factor. The researchers said that 70% of people’s leisure time is taken up with watching TV and movies. Still, this is telling. Why do we spend so much of our leisure time just watching TV even though we don’t get any real happiness from doing it?

Evidently, we need some kind of work in order to make us happy. According to the researchers, “Time spent working ranked as one of the most important variables in predicting whether people had a good day.” But not too much work. When we work more than six hours, the satisfaction our work gives us declines.

We also need to be interacting with other people. “Time spent socializing, time with family, and time with friends were in the top six most important predictors.” Time with family came in at #1.

We also need exercise. “Time spent on sports and exercise was positively associated with having a good day,” say the researchers. Up to a point. If you spend more than 5 hours a day exercising or playing sports, the happiness levels off.

The Washington Post article quotes Yale psychologist Laurie Santos:

Santos said that working – whether at a day job, or doing another effortful activity, especially if it involves connecting with other people – often makes us happier than being idle. In particular, she said, scrolling on our phones or binge-watching TV might be a recipe for loneliness.

Yet given the choice, people often choose the easier route, one of the many ways people tend to be misguided when predicting what will make them happy, she said.

Santos goes on to give us some advice:

A little bit of effort or challenge is better than pure ease.

We tend to enjoy things more when they require a bit of work. If you have a free afternoon, you’re more likely to take pleasure in a hike outside rather than scrolling or watching TV alone.

Pretty much everything is better with a friend.

Even if you’re just running errands, invite a friend, and look for opportunities for small moments of connection, like chatting with a clerk in a store rather than ordering things online.

I report these findings as a public service to you readers. But also because it speaks to two preoccupations of this blog:

(1) Notice the centrality to human well-being of vocation. This particular research says nothing about the importance of religion to happiness. It doesn’t include any questions about that on any of the surveys. But it does show the importance of our multiple vocations: For their own happiness, as well as for the good of their neighbors, human beings need to work. As was said above, this is not just a matter of our “day job,” what we do to earn a living, but also other kinds of “effortful activity”–projects around the house, volunteering at church, cooking, making something, etc.

We also have vocations in our families. And spending time with your family (which would include spouse, children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.) ranks as the biggest happiness factor.

We have vocations in all of the estates–household, church, state, to which Luther added the “common order of Christian love,” the informal relationships we have with others, including neighbors and friends. These relationships too can make us happy.

(2) Notice what this does to the heralded AI paradise. Elon Musk is among the techno-optimists predicting that an AI-driven world will make work optional, sort of like a hobby, and that people will be supported by a government-provided, work-free universal income. As a result, “People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,” says Musk. “Certainly more leisure time.”

I suppose if AI takes all the jobs and the government puts the entire population on welfare, at least 70% of us will spend our time watching AI-generated shows on streaming television, perhaps supplemented by listening to AI-generated music and reading AI-generated books. Will we be happy?

Photo by Nicole Lee via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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