Jonathan Clements in the Wall Street Journal explores the connection between the way we spend our time and our sense of well-being. His reference point is a new study entitled ”National time accounting: The currency of life” (abstract here, full PDF download here). The authors asked participants to track how they spent their day, and then to reflect on their emotional state for those activities (happy, tired, stressed, sad, interested, pain).
Clements finds most interesting the implication that one cluster of activities ranked higher on happiness and lower on stress than the others. Says he:
The standout cluster was what the authors label “engaging leisure and spiritual activities,” things like visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a cafe or going to a party. When we spend time on our favorite of these activities, we’re typically happy, engrossed and not especially stressed….
The obvious implication: If we devote more time to these activities, maybe we would be more satisfied with our lives. Yet the evidence suggests we’ve missed a huge chance to do just that — which may help explain why Americans are little or no happier than they were four decades ago.
While Clements focuses on that particular cluster (and arts managers probably should, as well), I’m rather fond of the others in the list, comprising the following six:
- unpleasant personal maintenance
personal medical care, homework, financial/government services, etc. - moderately enjoyable tasks
writing by hand, purchasing routine goods, walking, etc. - engaging leisure and spiritual activities
conversation, reading books, travel related to consumption, in-home social activities, out-of-home leisure, etc. - neutral downtime and cooking
watching television, food preparation, gardening, relaxing, doing nothing, etc. - mundane chores
laundry, ironing, cleaning, dressing, personal care, etc. - work-like activities
home or vehicle repairs, schooling, main paid work, care of older children, etc.
Despite the positive returns, the average percent of each day spent on ”engaging leisure and spiritual activites” has declined since 1965, and the average percent of ”neutral downtime and cooking” has increased. The study contains lots of detailed analysis, by gender, weather, social activity, and even day of the week. Well worth a browse of the tables at the end of the full report.
Another favorite measure in the study is the ”U-Index,” defined as ”the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state” [no jokes about New Jersey, please]. I can just imagine a competition among arts and cultural managers to see who can achieve the highest U-Index, even when working in a field they claim to love — stress and fatigue being among our primary indicators of professional success.
More to the point, consider the implications for marketing to arts audiences, using the study for a greater understanding of the claims that can be made.
This calls to mind Faith Popcorn’s theory of “Cocooning” — the notion that people now choose to spend their down time at home rather than engaging with the public through civic/arts related interests. Its definitely a marketing/audience development issue in the performing arts — as ticket prices increase, we have to fight even harder to get people to leave home at night/on the weekends.