Sometimes reducing one’s mood is an active process. More often it is essentially passive: a matter of not doing things. The question, of course, is what to do instead. Simply sitting still is boring and hard to maintain. Mindfulness meditation may make you less miserable rather than more. You need an alternative. Fortunately, vast media industries have arisen to help occupy your mind while time slips away.
Consider television. The citizens of most Western countries spend significantly more time watching their screens than interacting with their partners, friends, or children. Smoking, it is said, shrinks the average person’s life expectancy by ten years. But why stop there? Spending thirty-four hours per week watching television (the United States average) will occupy fully 30 percent of your waking hours—twenty-three years of the average person’s conscious lifespan. This sounds intolerably dull, but viewing can become habitual, nibbling away at your life until you believe wholeheartedly that you do not have time for any of the things that might lift your mood: learning, reading, exercising, contributing to your community, seeing friends and family, cooking, or cultivating your interests and hobbies.
If you spend eight hours a night in bed, you have 112 waking hours a week. Spend thirty-four of them watching television, and you still have seventy-eight hours left that might inadvertently improve your life satisfaction. If you cannot bear another reality show, an alternative readily presents itself: the Internet. The average American usage is twenty-six hours per week or higher, depending on the study. Most surveys explicitly exclude Internet usage that is a part of paid employment, so the vast majority of those hours are voluntary.
How should you spend your time online? Surely you do not need advice on this front, but here are some options:
And—come on—much, much more.
Now then: fifty-two hours a week remain. How about computer gaming? Now a bigger moneymaker than the film industry, gaming occupies an average of thirteen hours a week for Americans twelve to twenty-four years of age. “Extreme gamers,” about 4 percent of the gaming population, spend forty-eight or more hours per week.3 Gaming is growing in popularity, and larger game-design firms employ experts whose primary role is to figure out how to get more women, young children, and older people to spend their lives shooting at other people’s online avatars. Many people would not accept a job with such long hours as hard-core gamers are willing to put in.
At one point, it was believed that newer media would simply supplant older forms of electronic entertainment, taking over the time that people used to spend staring at Bewitched. But no. Television watching has remained relatively robust, particularly if one includes the viewing of the same programs online. Gaming and the Internet have not eaten television; they have instead consumed people’s social lives, shared meals, and time spent out of doors. In Canada, spaces at limited-access wilderness areas are easier to get each year, perhaps because it is so difficult to play World of Warcraft in a canoe.
Total it up: fifty-two hours minus thirteen makes thirty-nine hours. Add a job, and we have successfully eliminated all unpaid conscious hours from your life. Is there a risk of fulfillment here? Apparently not. There are no studies indicating that gaming, Internet surfing, or television are, on balance, mood-improvers. To walk the path of misery, it turns out that walking isn’t required at all. One must merely sit, spellbound, before a flickering screen that feels so important, so encompassing, that you simply do not have space in your life for anything else.
Take some time to calculate your weekly leisure screen-time ratio. It’s easy to do. Simply add up your screen time (Television + Non-work Internet + Gaming), all divided by your hours of unpaid consciousness (168 hours in a week, minus the hours you spend in bed or at work). Let’s say you watch television 3 hours a day, surf 2.5 hours a day, spend 2 hours a week playing computer solitaire, lie in bed 8 hours a day, and work 40 hours a week. This amounts to ((3x7) + (2.5x7) + 2)/(168—((8x7) + 40)) = 40.5 hours of screen time / 72 non-work waking hours = 0.563, or 56.3 percent of leisure time spent on screens. Not bad, but this still leaves you with 31.5 hours a week of non-screen leisure. Bump up your television and Internet just to the US average, and this will get you to 62 hours, leaving virtually no time for anything at all that might inadvertently boost your mood.
What could be easier?