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Comment by all_blue_chucks | Hacker News Reader

Who has time to play golf? Even though we can afford it, we are constantly in back-to-back "sprints" during the day and tied to our computers so we can respond to pages for "devops" at night.

In the rare downtime we get these days, the pace of modern highly paid professions leaves us too exhausted for lengthy sports like golf.

Leisure is dead and will stay dead until life takes precedence in work-life-balance again.

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This is a reflection of your own personal experience and is not reflective of all or probably even most peoples life. I would say the majority of people have plenty of time in their weekend for a game of golf. They may have filled their weekends up with other activies but if they wanted to play golf they could.

The golf industry disagrees. Lack of leisure time is one of the key factors driving the steep decline in the golf market.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/why-a...

People don't lack leisure time at all. They just spend it fiddling with their phones.

I don't like golf, but I do like the idea of playing a relaxing yet challenging game outdoors which takes 4 hours to complete. Beats the shit out of fiddling with your phone.

I saw the stats on how long per day the average instagram user spends on the service and its mind blowing. Pretty much everyone has lots of free time but its just crammed full of social media.

The article didn't even say that. It just said that the game cost too much and other sports were winning out over it. The closest that it said was people wanted shorter games. That doesn't mean they don't have time for a long game but likely that they just don't want to spend 3 hours on one game.

The average person now has more free time than ever before, they just pack it full of stuff. Almost everyone could find much more free time if they dropped other activities like watching tv shows or social media.

Disagree. As a senior software engineer, I get in about 50 full rounds of golf a year. Young and older people choose their hobbies accordingly, and I choose outdoor activities while everyone else is out power drinking at the bar.

I'm happy for you. I take it you don't work for a FAANG. They dump money on us, but they make sure they get their money's worth out of us :-/

The way I saw it, people simply had no backbone to decline work. I don't know why. Maybe they had an (irrational) fear of being fired or not promoted on a timely basis, but that never was an option for management really.

Not only I could work as much as I want in Amazon and Microsoft, but at any time you could get an extra vacation.

Well, then go get a job with work/life balance that pays less.

The average that real knowledge workers work per day is probably closer to 6, including meetings. I did a simple poll of HN a while back. Here is the result: https://imgur.com/qdSltlM

It's a normal distribution around 4-8 hours. There's no correlation with hours worked to seniority.

Poll language here: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1

I specifically included meetings, etc, in the time counted.

If you took anecdotes from office workers IRL you'd think everyone was in the top quintile. You can argue that its an unrepresentative sample (people browsing HN) but I'd postulate that people not on HN are using downtime elsewhere.

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