Hacker News Reader

Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

"The findings suggest that spending money to save time may reduce stress about the limited time in the day, thereby improving happiness."

More time for doing non-boring stuff makes you happy. Who'da thunk it?

On a related note, the Norwegian central statistics bureau released today a study on free time and happiness, and in particular how happy various demographics are with the part of their free time when they can do whatever they like. "Me-time".

What stuck out very strongly to me is that they found a very strong correlation with age: couples over 45 were 30 percentage points more happy with their "me-time" than couples under 45, but this was completely independent of whether they had kids or not. Couples without kids vs. with kids were within 1 percentage point of each other in both age groups. I strongly expected to see couples without kids more happy with their "me-time", but apparently they're not.

View on HN

It's interesting given how common it is to buy stuff that ends up demanding your attention ("your stuff starts to own you"). Like I know people who accumulate media (books, magazines, netflix lists) that they have to catch up on, when it can be feel better just to let it go and spend quiet time doing nothing.

Plus all the time stuff costs when you're not even using it. You also need to organise those books, move house with them, find space for them, maybe sell or give away some you don't want. They might get stolen, do you need insurance for them? That shelf takes more time to dust...

I have decided that's part of a natural cycle. When you're young, you don't have money and you don't have stuff. You have yet to acquire transportation, furniture, dishes, etc because you can't afford it. So you keep things & accumulate.

Eventually, you have everything you need and you have to break out of that "keep everything" mentality because it's no longer appropriate.

That's interesting, we're programmed to be hoarders kind of like how we're programmed to store fat because storing up calories used to be a big concern before modern times.

Hilarious. The top comment insists the conclusion is wrong. And this, the second highest comment insists the conclusion is obvious.

This is why people perform experiments instead of concluding things solely from personal experience.

How did they take into account the age of kids? Couples over 45 probably had older and more independent kids, if that's worth anything.

That's what I thought. I would expect that couples with grown up kids are the most happy with their free time because in the past they had so little of it.

They didn't take age of kids into account. But I agree with your reasoning, so I'd expect that there was a large difference for below 45 kids vs. no kids, and smaller difference for above 45. But no, in both age groups, kids vs. no kids had absolutely no effect.

Back in the day, parents delegated boring tasks to their children. Now childcare is just another task. Funny.

So your expectation could be clickbately phrased as "couples with kids are less happy"? Why did you expect that?

That's been widely reported in the past.

I see. How does that reconcile with the survey parent described?

I've seen previous reports that the "parents are less happy" finding is mainly isolated to the US, due to nonexistence of things like paid parental leave, free healthcare and free education systems. This latest survey is consistent with that.

Edit: link: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/brief-parenting-happiness/

As the parent already wrote, it doesn't.

Not all research findings fit with each other.

Why are you totally ignoring the limited scope of "happiness" looked at?

> particular how happy various demographics are with the part of their free time when they can do whatever they like

It wouldn't seem all that surprising if parents wished they'd have more of that, and is something totally different than "couples with kids are less happy".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com