TEMPORAL ASPECTS OF LIFE SATISFACTION

ABSTRACT. Time pressure is a familiar phenomenon. The quantity of spare time people have clearly effects their satisfaction with their leisure and with their life as a whole. But so too, we show, does how much control people have over how much spare time they have. We measure this through an indicator of ‘discretionary time’, which proves to be equally or more important than spare time itself in these connections. KEY WORDS: discretionary time, happiness, leisure satisfaction, life satisfaction, spare time, time use Whether ‘time pressure ’ has actually increased in recent years is contro-versial, both among time-use researchers and among sociologists of post-industrial society more generally.1 Indisputably, the amount of time spent in paid labour has grown into one of the major differences between the US and Western Europe over the last couple of decades (Jacobs and Gerson, 2004; Alessina et al., 2005). And certainly dissatisfaction with time pressure has grown ever more strident. The ‘leisure class ’ increasingly complains it is ‘harried ’ (Linder, 1970), Americans that they are ‘overworked ’ (Schor, 1991), working wives and mothers of a ‘time bind ’ as they put in a ‘second shift ’ at home (Hochschild, 1989, 1997) and people generally that they are ‘time poor ’ (Vickery, 1977). The aim of this paper is to probe that subjective dissatisfaction with time pressure. We identify two distinct sources, typically conflated in ordinary time-use research.2 One is how much or little ‘spare time ’ remains after all the time people actually spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour and personal care. The other is the amount of ‘temporal autonomy ’ that people enjoy in those respects. We operationalize the latter through a notion of ‘discretionary time’, defined as the amount of time remaining after the time people strictly need to devote to paid labour, unpaid household labour and personal care