Society

Since 1974, the UK has suffered a four-decade decline in socialising. “Time-use diaries”, where individuals note down their activities each day in sequential ten-minute intervals, expose a widespread loss and distortion of our free time. In 1961, the BBC wanted to know when people were most available for TV and radio transmissions, so it commissioned members of the public to fill in printed structured diary booklets. A decade later, the social researcher Dr Jonathan Gershuny reanalysed this data, and began in 1974 to gather time diaries from 10,000 people. This large-scale UK survey is still collected today by the Centre for Time Use Research; it reveals how people aged eight and over spend their time. According to new analysis of time-diary data since 1974, shared exclusively with the New Statesman by the British centre-right think tank Onward, as a nation we are spending less time seeing our friends, eating at restaurants, going out, exercising and volunteering. [See also: The rise of scheduling free time] Anti-socialising behaviour On the days that we exercise, do leisure activities or socialise, the time that we do it for has decreased. When we host or visit friends, for example, we do so for a shorter time: the average duration fell from two hours and 26 minutes in 1974 down to an hour and 16 minutes in 2014/15. People spend 55 minutes less on leisure activities away from home, such as going to the cinema or watching a sports match, and trips out for food or drinks shortened by an average of 21 minutes. Time spent exercising fell from two and a half hours to an hour and 26 minutes. People watched 16 minutes less TV, and volunteering halved over the four decades. Time spent reading remained stable at just over an hour a day. [See also: Why your meetings are a waste of time] Time confetti Our free time is also more fragmented than ever. It’s increasingly contaminated by work and other obligations. “Free time” – according to the Norwegian social researcher Dagfinn Ås, writing in the late Seventies – is what’s left after “necessary time” (sleeping, eating, washing), “contracted time” (paid work) and “committed time” (time spent on life circumstances and choices, like childcare, home repairs, emptying the cat’s litter tray, etc). Today those other categories are spilling into our free time. Think back to when you last had some time spare – how did you spend it? Thinking back to last Saturday, a day off, each thing I did blended into another. Doing bits of housework in between writing I had to finish off for work; calling my mum while batch-cooking for the week ahead; stopping off during a cycle from an exercise class to have coffee with friends; catching up on work emails and co-ordinating diary dates with my boyfriend while on the bus to the pub. This is a phenomenon Brigid Schulte, an American journalist and author of the 2014 book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, calls “time confetti”: the fragmentation of leisure time into small, unsatisfactory scraps. The time diaries bear this out. On a weekend in 1974, for example, someone could expect to spend over five hours on leisure activities, broken up into four episodes across the day. Each of these episodes was, on average, over an hour long. By 2014/15, the number of leisure episodes had increased to seven, but only added up to four hours overall. This means the average length of a “leisure episode” has fallen from one hour 15 minutes to just 25 minutes. “We need to help people take back control of their time if we are to reweave the social fabric and revitalise civil life.” [See also: How the idea of a four-day week went mainstream] Technology has us constantly multi-tasking. In 2000, only 1 per cent of people used a mobile device or other technology while watching TV, but 14 years later this had risen to 17 per cent. The proportion of people using technology when spending time with friends rose from 1 per cent to 13 per cent. The novelist Ian McEwan recently lamented the loss of “those snatched moments, the 20 minutes when you’re waiting at the luggage carousel, [when] you used to have to do nothing except go into your thoughts – now we all take out our phone, we’ve been deprived of signal for a couple of hours on an airplane, and maybe we don’t have quite as rich an inner life.” Time confetti makes us feel rushed. A 2019 study showed that “bounded” activities (those with something scheduled afterwards) feel shorter than “unbounded” activities (those without anything scheduled afterwards). Participants with a “bounded” hour to read estimated that they could do only 40 minutes of reading, while participants with an “unbounded” reading hour felt they could read for 49 minutes. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

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