My wife, i don’t know where she gets the energy. Up by 6, does her work, hits the gym, goes out with her friends, i don’t get it
People that do these things generally have a ton of energy, are incredibly disciplined, do things quickly, and to a pretty large amount, box-checkers and/or future-borrowers.
If you’re a 45-60 minute showerer, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you have threesomes during the week, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you are the type of person who needs to actually feel peaceful the majority of the time, trade-offs
The ADHD person needs more hours in the day. For everyone else, there’s half-assing it.
Priorities are everything. There isn’t enough time to get everything in life. A lot of us have fallen con to the box-checker’s quantity and compare ourselves to that. It may take some self work, but figuring out what actually makes you happy and what makes that sustainable is a pretty big, but worthwhile challenge. I’m in my 30s and still working on it, for what it’s worth. Different people figure this stuff out at different rates, and my hypothesis is that your availability of resources and birth privileges are big factors in the time it takes to figure that out.
In other words, stop worrying about what makes other people happy, and focus on what makes you happy. There may be overlap, but there also may not be. We’re all different and that’s okay.
Yes but my commute is 10-15 minutes by bicycle, and my kids are all adults now.
I prioritize making time for sleep, exercise and sex in my day, and let everything else work around those. So some of my exercise comes from commuting but I do also do yoga about 4 hours a week and try to lift weights at least once.
When my kids were young, NO it is impossible to do alone. Even if you do have carpool help and aftercare and all, it’s hard. There were years I had to get up at 5 and run to get exercise and other years it was the gym at 22:00 after a night class. But I have always found that it works better if you make your priorities (exercise needs to be one of those) and make a commitment to do those.
I usually have had jobs that were more than the 40 hours, and am NOT a work hard play hard person at all. But if you have one of those 8 hour a day jobs and sleep for 7.5 hours and take half an hour on each end of that to get ready and (critically important) don’t have some hours long commute, there’s plenty of time in the day. I remember when I first got a job that ended at 1700 and having time to cook, feed everyone and go to yoga, or hustle to the 1730 Jazzercise class after work and then still have time to make supper after, instead of feeling so terribly rushed all the time.
Now my day is: wake up around 7, leave for work around 9 after a nice leisurely morning. Work 9:30 to 6:30, ride home and get ready for yoga, go exercise and come home and make supper by 9, eat and have a Pokemon go walk or read or listen to music, (I cook, my husband takes care of the dishes after) then get ready for bed and try to sleep 23-7, sometimes this is midnight to 7 but I do need a solid 7 hours, too much sleep is migraine trigger unfortunately but I sleep well and soundly for that 7 and wake up pretty naturally. It feels like a balanced life.
I still think the 40-hour work week is inherently tied to the idea of the american nuclear family. The answer is that there simply isn’t the time to do any of these things unless one person is doing the 40-hours a week office job and the other is doing the 40-hours a week “taking care of shit with the house/kids” job.
Most of the people I know who do this consistently / longer-term are young adults and/or on drugs. Not like street drugs, but some combo of legally prescribed stimulant/anti-depressant/performance enhancing/hormone/weight-loss stuff. Modern medicine has the answers (for some).
A common scenario I’m seeing is that folks in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are being diagnosed with things like ADHD for the first time, and suddenly once they’re on the proper stimulants, they can full throttle, always be doing something. I’m also seeing this a lot with folks who go on GLP-1 drugs. They lose a bunch of weight in a short amount of time and suddenly feel a lot better, mentally and physically. The other thing I see going on is people getting on hormone replacement or starting performance enhancing drugs a bit later in life, seems to be a real motivating factor for them since they’re suddenly feeling 20 years younger.
So, maybe the answer is be young and if you can’t be young, do drugs?
The adults are gonna be alright
guess that’s where many go wrong… be young and do drugs
It’s pretty easy if you’re not on social media and don’t invest time into things that aren’t aligning with your goals. I.e. I eat very basic food, I moved close to my work, I do chores while winding down for the day, etc.
But you are on social media! You’re here!
Yea, I hit up Lemmy a couple times a day while eating/etc (i.e. right now I’m getting some takeout before my flight and killing time). But unless my night has fallen apart and I have no motivation to work, you won’t catch me doomscrolling the front page :p
You… you do chores… WHILE winding down…?
I’m pretty close to getting all these done most days but the only reason it’s possible for me is because I work from home and make enough money to be slowly getting ahead.
I’m in a similar boat. Its definitely a luxury that comes from making decent money at a job that respects your personal time.
But also it does require some amount of focus on improving your own lifestyle because many people spend so much time scrambling to get their finances in order when the world is setup to separate one from their money that by the time you have your finances in order you can be too exhausted to try to do anything with yourself
That’s a good point and I can’t take credit for having my finances in order. My partner is amazing and much better at budgeting than I am. I think that is another big factor for me. Having a supportive partner to encourage and grow with makes a night and day difference. I’m lucky and grateful but also work hard to have a better life.
Not with two kids I ain’t doing all those, no.
Each day, I am just happy to have survived and have like 1 hour time to sit on the couch before going to bed at 9 pm.
🫂 Hoping things turn around soon/eventually.
I’m doing all of those things but not actually having any fun…
Not while also being a parent. Most of my hobbies and leisure / friend time has taken a giant shit since I became a dad.
I found a good friend group of families with similarly aged children within walking distance of my home. We meet up maybe once a week at one of the local restaurants with patio space and let the kids play while we catch up. That space of 2-3 hours does triple duty: catching up with friends, getting the kids out of the house to do high energy activities with friends, and feeding everyone for dinner on a weeknight.
Having that kind of social group is key. My parents had church, but I’m not religious, so it was important to at least find a way to replicate that social sense of community somehow when I had kids.
OP where did you share this image from? Curious to know which app generates images with this much whitespace all the time. It’s starting to become very annoying for some inexplicable reason.
I prefer them that way I prefer squares to rectangles
No, all this at once is not possible with any worthwhile kind of focus
You don’t have to do everything every day
Yes exactly. Hobbies can be enjoyed once a week or two weeks or even once a month! Or they can be practiced more frequently but for less time. 20 minutes a day practicing a musical instrument can do a lot for your learning in so little time. The hard part is sticking to it!
Yeah.
There are 168 hours in a week.
I sleep about 7.5 hours, but am usually in bed for 8 hours. Let’s just call that 56 hours.
I work about 45 hours per week. My commute takes me about 15 minutes each way, so that’s a minimum of 2.5 hours per week of biking (this also serves as light cardio). More realistically, I do about half the pickups and dropoffs for my school age kids, so each one of those adds about 45 minutes, so that’s another 3.75 hours. That’s a total of 50.25 hours on work stuff.
I sneak in about 3 or 4 workouts per week during my lunch break, adding about an hour to each workday that I do that. On days I don’t work out, I might run errands or eat lunch with friends. So let’s just call that 5.
Let’s add 7 hours to our morning routines, where I generally have to wake up an hour before actually leaving the home. And another 7 hours for my kids bedtime routines.
That leaves just under 43 hours per week of everything else. I’m generally able to fit in social activities like meeting up with friends two or three times per week (10 hours), cooking and meal prep (10 hours, may overlap with social activities like when I’m hosting a BBQ), miscellaneous chores (5 hours), a decent chunk of TV, movies, or reading (10-20 hours per week depending on what sports season it is), other kid activities (10-20 hours per week, may overlap with other social activities).
So the ordinary workweeks are a bit tight but doable. Vacation/holiday weeks tend to give a bit more time, but also tend to add on the parenting responsibilities.
And if I’m feeling time pressure, there’s always places to get a bit more time: outsourcing some of the cooking and cleaning (not necessarily by hiring someone to come to the home but simply by eating out so that someone else cooks and washes dishes).
I also have kids. IMO, the way you’re accounting for hours doesn’t reflect the boom/bust cycle of the 5 day work and school week.
A day in my work week is:
- wakeup around 6:15, feed kids, get their stuff ready for school and my stuff ready for work
- three days a week two neighbor kids come over at 7:30 so their parents can get to work on time
- I get the kids on the bus two days a week and work from home starting at 8:30 or drive into the office the remaining three days and get there around 8. Although I drive to work, I am able to sneak some exercise having walking conversations with coworkers thanks to being in a large building
- if I went into the office, leave my desk at 4 and get home around 4:45. If I worked from home the kids get off the bus around 3:45 but I’ll still need to finish up my work day
- cook dinner, referee a heard of wild kids when they swarm through our house, get our kids to do their homework
- most days tend to have a kid activity thrown in the mix: baseball practice, swimming lessons, robotics club, etc that needs to somehow fit in with homework and dinner
- bath time around 7:00, story time runs till 8
- the kids are usually asleep by 8:30, which gives me 2.5 hours of time monday-friday that’s work and kid free before I have to go to bed. I can’t be too loud or I’ll wake the kids up. Combine this with having been up for 14.5 hours and I’m not very inclined to do what used to be my main hobby, making things and tinkering, due to noise and/or mental energy levels. My wife is fine with me sneaking out a day or two a week for a bit, but I don’t do that very often due to proximity to friends and many other friends having their own kids and routines
Things will probably calm down some when our kids are a touch older, but right now the week days are very hectic.
My kids are younger than yours, which has some advantages (no homework, not really any extracurricular activities, longer sleep) and disadvantages (not really able to feed or clothe themselves, need parent help for bathing, still need some assistance on brushing teeth, need to be read to instead of being able to read on their own).
During busy weeks (like when one of us parents is out of town for work or something) we’re quick to switch from home cooked meals to takeout or eating out, may hire cleaners, and push off some of the social interactions, but I also recognize that I’m working with a pretty nice buffer in that I’m already hanging out with friends about 10 hours per week.
10 hours worth of hangout time with friends sounds nice. Our kids are 5 and 8, which means they’re vaguely more self-sufficient and also means we can go on more adventurous trips, but they still require quite a bit of looking after due to bickering and what not.
It’s only really feasible if your fitness activities are also your hobbies and you have friends who share said hobbies. For example, rock climbing, running.
