American Idle: An examination of leisure guilt, time use, and well-being

“We’re becoming vacation-phobic” (Lipman, 2018). According to research from the U.S. Travel Association, more than half of residents in the United States did not use all of their vacation days, amounting to 768 million unused vacation days in 2017 (U.S. Travel Association, 2018). A more recent survey showed that only about a quarter (27%) of employees in the United States used all of their paid vacation time last year, and nearly half of them (49%) responded that they worked at least an hour a day during their vacation (Qualtrics, 2022). People are hesitant to take their time off and many report feeling worried and bad about themselves during vacation and have trouble fully ‘unplugging’ themselves from work (Wong, 2020). It would seem that for many, time away from work is distressing, even stressful. Why? Across five studies, I propose and test the psychological sequelae of a novel psychological construct: leisure guilt, defined as an experience or state of feeling guilty, distressed, or bad about spending time leisurely over productively. I focus my examination on how leisure guilt may shape everyday leisure experiences and time use. First, in Studies 1a and 1b, I used Natural Language Processing techniques and examined what leisure activities make people feel happy and guilty, respectively. Unexpectedly, there was a significant overlap between activities that make people happy and guilty (e.g., watching TV, playing games), suggesting that activities that people enjoy may also be their source of guilt for wasting time. In addition, findings show that people with high tendencies to feel leisure guilt were more likely to report an overlap between happy and guilty leisure activities––indicating that when people with high leisure guilt engage in enjoyable, pleasant activities, they tend to feel guilt more.\nNext, in Study 2a, I developed a Leisure Guilt Scale to assess individual propensities to experience guilt, distress, or anxiety when engaging in leisure. Results indicate that people high in leisure guilt were willing to spend more time on work and less time on leisure than they currently do. With the Leisure Guilt scale, in Study 2b, I further tested and found that people who show high levels of leisure guilt reported less enjoyment from their last leisure activities and greater tendencies to avoid having leisure time. These results did not substantially change controlling for theoretically relevant variables, such as guilt-proneness, leisure ethic, or protestant work ethic––confirming the discriminant validity and predictive power of leisure guilt. Furthermore, I investigated potential antecedents and consequences of leisure guilt. Findings reveal that people who are anxious about their socioeconomic standing in society report greater leisure guilt, which in turn was associated with various adverse psychological and health outcomes (i.e., subjective well-being, stress, anxiety, self-rated health). \nLastly, in Study 3, I used an Experience Sampling Method to investigate how leisure guilt plays out in everyday life. Replicating findings from Studies 2a and 2b, experiencing guilt when engaged in leisure was linked to lower enjoyment of leisurely moments, greater negative emotions about oneself and current time use, and more willingness to subsequently spend time productively. Furthermore, confirming Studies 2a and 2b results, people who are high in leisure guilt (trait) spent less time leisurely and more time productively. When people high in leisure guilt were spending time leisurely, they were more likely to feel leisure guilt, feel worse about themselves and their current time use, and greater willingness to spend subsequent time productively. In light of these findings, I then tested whether spending time productively would make individuals high in leisure guilt feel better about themselves and the current time use. Findings indicated that when people high in leisure guilt were engaging in productive activities, they still reported negative feelings about the current time use––effects that held significant when controlling for relevant covariates. This pattern did not differ whether the current productive time was by “working” or other productive activities (e.g., household work). Interestingly, however, currently spending time productively was not associated with willingness and the actual likelihood of spending subsequent time productively, suggesting that being productive at the moment seems to assuage the preoccupations that they should spend time productively next. \nAccording to a recent survey, while Americans’ commitment to various traditional values is in decline (e.g., patriotism, religion), “hard work” remains among the utmost cherished values (Waldman, 2023). The findings from the current investigation suggest that this cultural ideology of moralizing hard work may actually create a psychological obstacle to a good life by making people feel guilty about their everyday leisurely moments.

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