The free time dillema. Are we doing it wrong?

Whenever I catch myself watching TV or browsing the Internet on my days off, I can’t help but feel like I'm smashing with a hammer a very precious cargo. Most days I end up wasting time trying to figure out what to do with it. It has to be something meaningful and intelligent with just the right amount of fun, that would leave me feeling both productive and refreshed.

Nine times out of ten, weekends exhaust me more than the work week in itself.

Those two days are jam-packed with workouts, reading sessions, museum and theater visits. To top it off, my husband and I split cleaning and meal preparation duties. There are days though, when all I want is to linger in bed, binge-watch TV shows on Netflix and eat Twinkies. Here’s the rub: they turn me into a ball of anxiety. How can this add value to my life? Am I properly nourishing my intellect? Maybe I should read a book or do some strength training instead; I heard it can prevent osteoporosis. Apparently, this is a common issue among people of my age.

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After seeing their parents making poor decision about pretty much everything from health to finances, Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2004, don’t allow themselves to take breaks from self-development.

At times, it may seem all they do is stare at a smartphone, but studies show they are avid readers as well, with an average of ten books devoured per year. Additionally, they love to max out free time by traveling. According to a nationwide survey by PGAV Destinations called “Meet the Millennials”, 58% say they travel for leisure with friends – 20 percent more than older generations. Knowledge is once again factored in when planning for a trip. “They do not take leisure trips ‘just because,’ but are looking for something that resonates with their need to make a difference,” explains Mike Konzen, Principal, PGAV Destinations.

Dress codes are the only reason Millennials tend to shy away from museums. “They don’t know if it’s appropriate to wear jeans,” said Meryl Levitz of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation in a Forbes article.

But no matter how enlightening such activities can be, regardless of age, our brains sometimes demand a hefty dose of plain old fun. Researchers from Direct Line Insurance discovered that, in order to be happy, we need seven hours of free time a day. Since this doesn’t jibe with real-life hectic schedules, they came up with a more flexible plan. It allows for one hour of TV watching, 18 minutes each for checking social media and online perusing plus a little over an hour of extra personal time. In other words, you truly can have your cake and eat it too.

Besides, playtime is not only enjoyable, but crucial for emotional development since early childhood. Peter Gray, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Boston College thinks that “adults who did not have the opportunity to experience moderately challenging emotional situations during play are more at risk for feeling anxious and overwhelmed by emotion-provoking situations in adult life”.

The U.S. hourly payment system doesn’t do much to ease adulthood's angst about off days. “Time is money”, a saying deeply ingrained in our collective belief system, urges us to be productive even when we should take it easy.

Women, especially, have trouble enjoying their leisure time. “The meaning of free time for men and women are quite different. Among mothers, free time may be too entangled with care-giving to be the ‘pause that refreshes,’” thinks Liana Sayer, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University and co-author of the study about gender differences regarding free time perception.

Conversely, in the last decade, more and more companies started to adopt friendly time management policies to avoid overworking their employees. Hubspot, Ask.com or Glasdoor, for example, offer unlimited vacation days to their workers. Others, like Expensify, spoil employees with exotic trips to expensive retreats and let’s not forget about Boogie; they embraced the 4-days work week model. These kinds of perks translates in low levels of stress and better productivity, which goes to show relaxation is a necessity, not a whim.

So what’s the best way to spend free time anyway? One must turn to psychologist in order to find the answer. Their latest discoveries speak volumes: go to concerts, trips, take piano lessons; invest in experiences. An article publish in the journal Psychological Science in September revealed that experiences bring people more happiness than possessions, in part thanks to the anticipation factor. “You can think about waiting for a delicious meal at a nice restaurant and how different that feels from waiting for, say, your pre-ordered iPhone to arrive," the authors explained.

Basically, what they are saying is, next time you have some free time on your hands, use it wisely. Go out and do something you think would make a great memory one month or five years from now.

Who can tame the customer service monster?

When we first got to America, four months ago, my husband feared that our savings might run out too fast, so he took the first job he could find. He worked full-time as a merchandiser for a national retail chain and though the payment was lousy, something else made his days at work unbearable. The extreme worship of customers. 
 

“They are taking customer services too far”, he told me one night, at the dinner table. I didn’t know what to say. After living my whole life in an ex-communist country where returning policies were basically non-existent, I was delighted to be treated like royalty whenever I purchased something, no matter how inexpensive. But I was about to change my mind. 

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My husband’s employer had a skewed manner to stimulate its staff. Three times a day, my husband was required to take part in team meetings, a masquerade really. They were given candy and instructed to cheer and clap as the team leader enthusiastically talked about “vibing with the guests”. In other words, stalking clients in the name of perfect costumer service. 

Freshly brainwashed, they were encouraged to go on their day like construction workers from Lego Movie did, with a giant, dumb smile on their faces. Maybe even humming the “Everything is awesome” song. Not fun. And totally ineffective. Instead of building enthusiasm, they were depleting it.

In many ways, this customer service training approach harms us all, clients and retail workers as well. The frustration felt by employees each time they are force to drop whatever they are doing and hunt down people who just want a carton of milk snowballed into a much greater damage. Customers started acting like spoiled brats. They are no longer asking, they demand. And a sense of rude ownership took place to their common sense. Mountains of returned products are collected each day by the retail employees, who first have to clean the mess people leave behind. 

I was a witness of all this one night, when I happened to step into a popular clothing store near the closing hours. Dozens of pairs of shoes sprawled on the floor, right next to their empty boxes; clothing racks bursting with tangled hangers. It looked like a tornado hit the store minutes earlier. What shocked me the most was seeing people shopping careless, blind to the clutter disaster surrounding them. No one was trying to pick something up. After all, they did exactly what retail chains got them used to do. They were the mighty Costumer. 

But since when being attune with a natural instincts of cleaning your own mess is a violation of customer etiquette? Just like Rome, this self-absorbed image of a typical American costumer as we know it wasn’t built in a day, rather than decades.

For starters, the 80’s brought in the industrial revolution and thus the need for customer service teams. Companies came up with ideas to reward loyalty and to measure buyer’s levels of satisfaction; Coca-Cola released the first discount coupon. All this expanded with the launched of Internet, in the early 90’s. Nowadays, even the modest companies have a person in charge with social media, also known as the dead seat considering the huge volume of complains released online. 

A survey conducted by The Social Habit, a well-known social media research group, shows 42% of people who ever contacted a brand for costumer support via Twitter or Facebook expected a response within 60 minutes. Furthermore, 57% expect the same speed of response at night and during weekends.

On the other hand, we have a ridiculous number of stories about costumers who successfully returned soiled clothes simply because they were allowed to do so. In the last years though, famous department stores like Bloomingdales have taken measures to corrected breaches in their return policies and put an end to “wardrobing”.

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That’s not to say retailers must treat buyers like burglars or that they should obliterate return rules all together. It may be them who opened the Pandora box, but costumers have the power to seal it off for good. Particularly Millennials. 

A handful of surveys performed by Luxury Institute revealed Millennials (people in their mid-twenties, who make up about 25 percent of the U.S. workforce) gravitate towards user-friendly return policies, but don’t exploit them. They are also on a budget, which forces them to think twice when purchasing something. They don’t care much about overly friendly cashiers or servers; they look for efficiency. In fact, while they browse around retail store, most of their actual shopping is done online, shows research by Accenture, a management consulting company.

Possibly the most revealing study about Millennials’s buying behavior was conducted earlier this year, by The Intelligence Group.

Instead of spending on things they don’t need or can’t afford, this complex breed prefers renting everything from movies to cars and houses. If they do make a purchase, they don’t return it; they sell it on EBay. “They watched their parents work, work, work, buy the big house, and then lose their pension and have it taken away from them. They’re looking at that model and thinking, ‘I want to do this differently,’” says Jamie Gutfreund, chief strategy officer of the Intelligence Group.

If he's right, let’s hope Millennials get along with their parents. Because those Target and Walmart employees could really use a break from being real-life Lego Movie characters.

The overlooked power of binge-watching TV shows

Which one was it? Scandal, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Lost, Grey’s Anatomy? Because if the latest studies are any indication, you too did it at some point of your life. You binge-watched TV shows.

What a nasty manner to define a rather harmless and dull activity like this, huh? After all, it is human nature that makes us go nuts on what starts as pleasurable things like food, alcohol or video games. 

But unlike other addicts, notorious binge-watchers feel no shame in zooning out in front of the computer. According to a survey conducted by Netflix, the Promised Land of any TV show enthusiast, typically American millennials, a whopping 73 percent survey of respondents said binge-watching it’s a guilt-free activity. In fact, they love to brag about it.

 

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“I watched entire seasons of Lost in what I would call My Lost Weekends”, an anonym commenter nicknamed ‘Curtise’ wrote on this meh.com forum. And why wouldn’t they boast? In a “Do it all” worship era, it’s a proof of mental sanity to act like a slob for a couple of days. Basically, an “effing” statement of freedom shouted by the most overworked developed nation on Earth. Perhaps knowing that the binge-viewers are smart makes it more socially accepted.

Just like lobster, once considered a poor man’s food, TV series are no longer reserved for the average Joe, but savor by the intellectuals as well. According to Derek Thompson, a writer from Atlantic,  “it’s no coincidence that the programs selected to please small, educated audiences are celebrated by the small, educated TV writers who ignore what everybody else is watching”.

TV show plots are becoming more alluring than ever, even for people who despised television to start with.

The offer is simply too good to pass up: a swirling concoction of adrenaline-inducing experiences everyone is secretly hoping to face one day. Crash with a plane in the middle of the jungle, partake in a bank burglary, survive in a world taken by zombies. 

  

Admittedly, for most of us, TV shows are the closes thing to a backstage pass to the salacious lives of drug dealers, doctors, politicians and journalists. You don’t really want to switch places; you want to lurk around. It's what binge-watching is all about.

And it’s a pretty good deal if you think about it. What other addiction has the same soothing effect as a warm blanket, with the added benefit of a mental boost, like you madly devoured a 400-pages manual of criminal investigation or political strategy. Yes, you could pace yourself, digest one episode at a time, but it won’t give you a similar high. 

Besides, let’s face it. Our brains crave quick, easy lessons about world and sometimes books don’t make the cut. Enter TV series. You’re not going to perform an open heart surgery any time soon just by watching Grey’s Anatomy every night after work, but some basic medical terms will stuck with you. The same way, Breaking Bad can teach you a thing or two about looking past appearances. 

More important, TV series deliver what “self-help” literature and Oprah struggled for years to enshrine in modern culture. The “Yes, you can” factor.

An inevitable sense of relentlessness gets passed onto us after watching our beloved heroes overcoming obstacles again and again. Because no matter how horrible a situation may be, these shows convince us everything is repairable. A brilliant thing to get hooked on, don’t you think?

So I think I can be an intern for Chicago Magazine

Dear Mrs. Elizabeth Fenner,

Before writing these lines, I stared for a couple of seconds at this picture of you. “She looks like a tough lady (gulp!)” I said to myself. But there was no way I could back out.

You see, there are probably at least a hundred of college kids making a bee line at your door for an internship. Many of them Chicago natives, studying at Columbia or Loyola. Why would you choose me then, a European journalist, who didn’t work a day in an American newsroom?

Because I have the one thing journalists lack nowadays. I have guts. Audacity. Grit. You name it. It was courage that nudged me to leave a comfy career at the biggest Romanian newspaper and move to the other side of the Earth to become a self-thought English writer. My love for stories didn’t end when I changed continents. Instead, it grew stronger and wilder, like a stubborn backyard weed. I had no choice, but cave in and learn how to write in your language.  

Sporting a red scarf, during an interview with Romanian Minister of Education

Knowing the human attention is pretty limited, I feel compelled to go extreme with my own story.
 

You know how transgender people say they were “born in the wrong body”? That’s how my husband and I felt about Romania, our home country. But since we had zero contacts in America, legally moving here was a Sisyphean task. It took us five years, $10K, one blog, hundreds of e-mails sent to U.S. companies to ask for work and one lucky submission to the Diversity Lottery Visa.

It doesn’t hurt to have a person like this in the team. Put me in charge of making coffee for everyone and I’ll deliver the best hot drink that ever crossed your lips. Send me to cover a major story and I’ll spend an all-nighter writing the most original article. Besides...

I strive for creativity. Just read this and this.

I don’t return empty handed from the dullest conference. This one was pretty interesting

I aim for subtle humor as well. See here and here.  

I take time for complex stories. Like this one.

I write about pretty much everything under the sun. Like getting lost in a Chicago forest.

Why Chicago Magazine? Why not. Since when is dreaming big considered a sin? I want to be inspired by my coworkers, to walk in the newsroom with a shiver of excitement, not knowing what the day will bring. I also want to blossom in the journalist I was meant to be.

What can I write about? My writing can be shoehorned best in the life&style columns. As a legal immigrant, a wife, a foodie, a fitness lover and a former anorexic, I can cover anything from health and eating tips to marriage and travel adventures.

I am not sorry for bothering you, though I am honored!