One of the fastest growing trends on social media is the “Day in the Life” TikTok, where content creators narrate what activities they do every hour of a day, usually accompanied by a montage of aesthetically pleasing images—gracefully waking up at five in the morning, eating a well-balanced breakfast, doing pilates and journaling before work. While these TikToks are often entertaining, the unrealistic perfectionism on display can be damaging to the self-esteem of the viewers, especially young adults.
It’s estimated that around 10.9% of young adults experience depression, a rate that is higher than any other age group. Young adults are also the most likely age range to use social media, with estimates around 84%. And despite social media’s potential to serve as a connecting force it’s become increasingly apparent that usage can also increase “dissatisfaction, jealousy, negative body image and loneliness.”
To one person, the “Day in the Life” trope may be entertainment; to another, it could be an unrealistic expectation that perpetuates feelings of self-inadequacy, painting an unrealistic picture of what it means to be productive and happy.
What if, instead of being bombarded by idealized versions of what an average day looks like, we could spread more accurate representations? And how does time usage actually correlate to life satisfaction?
We used data from the American Time Use Survey to examine trends in leisure time usage among young adults across different walks of life.
We all have various obligations that we have to fulfill in our everyday lives. Some are self-imposed, and some are not. To better understand the over choices people are making, we chose to focus only on leisure time: time that is completely up to you to allocate.
To make the data easier to understand, we split leisure activity into five categories:
- Screen Time: watching movies, watching TV, watching sports
- Social: speaking in person, calling people, going to parties
- Exercise: walking, weightlifting, playing volleyball
- Creative: visiting museums, arts and crafts listening to music
- Games: gambling, playing games
We also broke young adult respondents (who we defined as those between the ages of 18 and 25) into four social groups:
- Students: current students not in the labor force
- Working Students: current students who are also employed
- Employed: employed and not a student
- Job Seeking/Unemployed: without a job, and not a student
students: life with a soundtrack
average age: 20.0 | average leisure minutes: 368Hover over each section to see details.
Out of all categories, students listened to the most music, with an average of 20.6 minutes per day -- nearly twice the time spent by other social groups.
job seekers: face time > screen time
average age: 21.2 | average leisure minutes: 450Hover over each section to see details.
Okay, not quite, but it was close! Out of all social groups, the unemployed/job-seeking spent the most time socializing in-person, with an average of 104.82 minutes per day.
This group had the smallest gap between screen and social time — not because they used screens less, but because they socialized more. With more total leisure time, they may be showing us how others might spend theirs: not just scrolling, but connecting.
full-time employed: the real screenagers?
average age: 22.0 | average leisure minutes: 291Hover over each section to see details.
The full-time employed earned the dubious honor of being the only social group where screen time exceeded 50% of their leisure time usage (52%). Sometimes you just need a break, but…
it’s not the people who are working the longest hours who spend the highest proportion of their leisure time on screen time.
working students: class, a job, and a... horse?
average age: 20.8 | average leisure minutes: 296Hover over each section to see details.
Strangely, “Equestrian Sports” showed up as a significant time use in the “Exercise” category, with an average of 1.06 minutes per day. It’s a reminder that these plots, while interesting and insightful, display averages - numbers that can be influenced by outliers and may not be representative of the whole category.
And there we have it -- our favorite horse-loving working student.
a model for life satisfaction?
As the saying goes, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. So, could the way we spend our free time actually predict how satisfied we are with life overall? The American Time Use Survey includes just such a measure:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?
Using these life satisfaction scores and our time-use data, we built two Random Forest models: one based on time spent on each category, and one based on a proportional measure. But models based solely on leisure activities actually performed worse than chance, explaining a negative percentage of the variance in life satisfaction. A model incorporating health status and other factors explained a positive, though modest, 10.25% of the variance.
Leisure time activities were generally weak predictors of life satisfaction — far less influential than health or restfulness. The error in the model only increased by small amounts if each of the time-use categories were removed, and in the case of social time, removing the variable actually decreased the amount of error in the model. In other words, predictions of life satisfaction were more accurate without using time spent on social activities.
so... what?
One possibility that explains our findings is that the time use survey is inherently flawed. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, but respondents aren’t the only problem. As of its 2021 data, the American Time Use Survey had yet to include social media usage as its own activity category, alternately categorizing it under various social-related time uses and the vague “t120308: Computer use for leisure.” As mentioned earlier, approximately 84% of young adults are on social media. As the way we spend our time continues to evolve (especially online), our models and measurements may need to evolve too.
Or, maybe leisure time doesn’t matter as much as we thought—at least, there’s no one right way to spend your free time. Increased social interaction, for example, doesn’t necessarily correlate with higher life satisfaction scores. Under this theory, the data reveals something obvious: personal preferences play a huge role in both how we choose to spend our time and how fulfilling we view different activities to be.
There’s something deeply human that resists conformity. We aren’t carbon copies of each other, and that’s okay! Therefore, when you see someone’s picture-perfect “Day in the Life” TikTok, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to mold your leisure time around someone else’s ideals.