I want to live in a country where people aren't afraid of casual free time

I dream of living abroad in Spain, London, Denmark, or France. Europe is attractive to me for many reasons — its connectivity, social welfare, fascinating history, and most importantly, its natural alignment with a healthy work-life balance.

Upon telling everyone I meet that I want to move to Europe, Im often met with the reaction of, “But you can make sooo much more money in the US, why would you ever want to move elsewhere??” Here is why: Yes, there are opportunities to make money, but most people are in survival mode, living for the weekends only. You’re free on a Friday night, you grab drinks on a Saturday, and maybe hit up some brunch on a Sunday. Enjoyable leisure with others is mostly centered around weekends.

Great, my weekend easily fills up with social plans, but there are four or five other days in which I am meant to suffer alone.

No, screw your pent-up weekend bender, I want to go out and dance to some weird music on a Tuesday night. I want to walk around a park, aimlessly, lost in conversation on a Thursday afternoon. I want to read outside for hours without a tinge of guilt. Let’s find a cozy bar and sip one or a few nasty martinis and not be afraid of staying out past our fabricated weekday bedtime.

In a life dedicated to the grind, we have become resistant, afraid even, of casual free time. Everything we do during the week must be productive and worth our valuable time. Always optimizing, never dawdling. I am not immune to the overproductivity plague either. I feel the pressure, so I join the race. But the race will never end, and I quickly become exhausted.

I arrive in Barcelona at 9-10 pm on a weekday evening. I’m walking to my hostel, feeling sleepy and finished with my day. Yet the streets I’m walking through tell a different story than my yawning self. Every block is alive with groups of friends huddled on corners, crowded around tables sipping tinto de verano, full of energy and life. Heads are thrown back in animated laughter without any indication of a stressed-out work week. People here have an innate desire to socialize with others beyond the scope of a 9-5. Even in the winter, when light vanishes at 4 pm, that doesn’t stop them from indulging in some good old-fashioned casual free time

Spain is a prime example of an admirable work-life balance. It’s a famously laidback culture that prioritizes community, not hustle. But even London, a notoriously dark and dreary place, still boasts post-work happy hour huddles around pubs, drowning out the frigid air by throwing back a few pints of hearty Guinness. Restaurants stay open later, conversations flow freely, with no submission to a constrained time limit of fun.

Whereas in the US, our allotted fun time typically has a limit. If you insist on grabbing a bite to eat on a weekday after work, it can only be for an hour, and then it’s back to a responsible nightly routine.

Meeting up for work lunch break? We’ll scarf down our food, share mutual grievances about how exhausted we are, and then be back on the clock in 30 minutes so we don’t risk falling behind.

It’s as if our 9-5 is the priority, and the rest of life is bent to fit around that.

Unrelated to writing this post, I listened to a podcast the other day about the creation of the 8-hour workday and the weekend. After finishing it, though, I realized its relevance to this very idea of a broken work-life balance system within the US. (I highly recommend listening to it, and the rest of this essay will be touching on what I learned from that podcast!)

For most of human history, about the first 200,000 years to be exact, “work weeks” did not exist. Trade was the economy. People worked as they needed to, and dedicated periods of rest when they saw fit. No boss or manager to report to, no time pressures to fret about. Work was organically integrated into life, in alignment with seasons and daylight. Yet the work was still time-consuming and tough, being primarily focused on agriculture, craftsmanship, and manual labor.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, which rapidly mechanized the economy, starting in England and spreading throughout the rest of the world. Work switched from communal and slow-paced to quick and efficient. At first, workers saw promise in large-scale industries, believing that mechanized machinery would reduce the need for manual labor and, in turn, allow them more free time. It was thought that no one would need to work more than a few hours per week, and people could then focus on things that really mattered in life. But instead of easing up the workload, it actually increased labor hours and intensity. Because, as it turns out, all that heavy machinery needed human hands to operate it.

This led to 12-18-hour work days for industrial employees, often with no breaks and no time off. Labor conditions were squalid, unsanitary, and unsafe. Wages were futile, and child labor was common. Factory owners viewed their employees as replaceable specimens, only useful to operate a machine. Work was completed according to the clock time, and time itself became a commodity, AKA, “time is the most valuable currency”. Basically, the Industrial Revolution robbed workers of their free time and capacity for leisure. In doing so, it changed our relationship with work forever.

There were two movements against the grueling work week happening simultaneously in the late 1800s. In the United States, American worker coalitions were focused on shortening the workday itself. No laws were yet in place to limit the number of hours an employer could keep their employees at work. Workers lamented that the only point of life seemed to be work, and so they fought for an 8-hour workday to strike some balance. A “work-life balance”, as we’d say now.

Unions formed across the country, gathering the support of people from all backgrounds and social circles, and they all fought for the same defining political issue: FREE TIME.

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, labor unions were focused on shortening the work week. Sunday was already a free day, as it was the holy day of worship for Christians. Other than that, factory workers busted their butts for 6 days a week, up to 18 hours a day.

And as it proved, binge work leads to binge play. Our modern-day “weekend benders” are good examples of binging from deprivation. A similar binge cycle manifested during this British labor movement. Workers would go out drinking on Sunday night, after their one day of rest, and be so hungover on Monday morning that they would unanimously refuse to attend work on Mondays. Long work days made people crave more free time, so they created their own day off. Factory owners became fed up with their employees not showing up on Mondays, so they made a deal: workers would receive a half day on Saturday, which would merge into their free Sunday, and in exchange, they needed to promise to show up on Monday. Lo and behold, the first formal record of a defined “weekend” as we know it was born in 1879.

Factory owners in the US did not acquiesce as easily to the labor unions’ fight as they did in Britain. After a violent, bloody strike with union anarchists and police forces in Chicago, the 8-hour workday dream fizzled.

Then in 1914, came a man named Henry Ford, who revolutionized factory working conditions and paved the way for our modern-day work week. He raised wages and turned squalor into order, in the belief that better conditions would lead to more productive work output. He even got so radical as to give his workers 5-day work weeks. But his choice to do that wasn’t in empathetic solidarity with the labor unions’ mission. No, it was a much more economical reason. Ford believed that giving his employees more money and free time would lead to increased participation in consumerism and thus stimulate the economy. Leisure creates wants, and wants contribute to new markets. By giving his employees more free time, he was enabling them to spend their money on things like a new Ford Model A car.

This was real progress towards the fight for more free time, but the timing was rather unfavorable. Right around this time, the stock market crashed. So ensued the chaos and societal tragedy of the Great Depression. It wasn’t until the turmoil of that economic collapse started to settle that a fair work week was considered again. And finally, shortly after FDR released his New Deal reform, came the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. In this act, the 8-hour workday and 5-day work week were officially mandated in the US. In the following decades, other countries followed suit, marking the legal indoctrination of a weekend and work-life balance as we see it today.

But the irony is that after all of this fighting for the work-life balance… we now seem to have lost sight of that balance, as the lines between work and free time are often eroded.

Where do the boundaries remain sturdy in the US?

29% of Americans say they perform paid work on weekends, which is 3x the rate amongst Spanish workers. Only 34% of Americans say they’re happy with their work-life balance, compared to more than 50% of Europeans.

US workers stay in the office past 5 pm, or work on weekends to meet deadlines or do whatever overtime work it takes to impress their bosses. Not to mention all the unrecorded work time from checking emails, stalking LinkedIn — it can easily add up to over 60-hour work weeks.

In the States, there’s this representation of overworking oneself as being cool and admirable. Take, for example, the GirlBoss archetype with an entrepreneurial work ethic who never has time for friends because she’s always grinding. She’s working day in and day out, but it all looks like an aesthetic productivity routine on her social media1. Or the tech/finance corporate ladder guy who vapes all his stress away, but at least he’s making 6 figs at the age of 24.

There are also some uncanny parallels between our work culture now and the work culture of the fed-up factory workers during the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners did not give a crap about their replaceable machine-operating workers, just as corporate CEOs don’t give a crap about their replaceable data-crunching employees. And, just as the Industrial Revolution was going to promise workers less work and more free time, we seem to be entering a similar era with AI and tech. The AI revolution shows a hopeful avenue to streamline our work economy and relieve some labor from employees. But what is really happening? Companies are working even harder to create the next ingenious code or AI technology. Budding entrepreneurs are racing to stay ahead of the curve of innovation, and in doing so, their minds are occupied with work much more than anything of lesiure.

People seem more worked and more stressed out than ever. There’s no time to rest or have fun when everyone’s constantly outcompeting each other. And if you do indulge in some casual free time, it won’t even be worth it with all the guilt of “falling behind” you will feel.

I feel all this pressure, all this compulsion to exceed exceptionally. I see it in my friends, and they are exhausted. I saw it in my dad, who retired early for the sake of his sanity and health. Truthfully, it scares me. It’s the reason why I am increasingly less interested in moving through a career here. Constant stress taints the creative mind, and I don’t want that.

The podcast ends with an incisive quote from historian Benjamin Honeycutt, who talks about The Forgotten American Dream:

“We have forgotten what used to be the better half of the American dream. In our rushing around for more, we have lost sight of the better part of freedom.”

So, yes, I want to live in Europe. Because the American dream no longer sounds like a dream, and I value my creative, free-roaming, energetic, fluid, sane brain more than money. I also value casual free time, and I want to enjoy it without feeling guilty.

Xoxo