Of a 168-hour week, 56 hours are typically spent sleeping and 40 hours earning money. That leaves 72 hours every week to watch cat videos on YouTube  -  this we call spare time.

Spare already suggests its secondary priority. A left-over. Optional. Work comes first, while spare time mercifully receives the few hours in between to fill. And granted, work is important. One can feel satisfied after and even during an accomplished day at work. Furthermore, the earned money enables the benefits of modern society, such as a roof over your head or an avocado in off-season. However, work only contributes to a portion of one's happiness, while it is often given a disproportionate amount of time and energy. We might call midlife-crisis the realization of our excessive investment into work.

So how much time should we spend working? What if instead of working for money, we work for wants? We invest some of our time in return for an explicit favor. For example, the employment contract lists food and shelter in return for 10% of our time. Feed additional dependents such as a spouse or child for 3%. Three weeks of vacation per year requires 2%. Want more things or yoga classes? Your employer will make that happen for a few more hours of your life. Since this requires you to specifically list what you are working for, it places spare time back into the center of attention. Working more is only sensible if new desires emerge.

Personal tastes therefore define the amount of work necessary. Some might enjoy hiking in the local woods, while others prefer ridiculously expensive skiing in the Swiss Alps. It is highly unlikely that the required work sums up to 40 hours for all individuals. To justify the one-size-fits-all work week, society invented the concept of "savings": accumulated money for later use. An overflow-tank. A voucher for everything to do sometime, but which cannot be concisely pin-pointed yet. By accumulating money, one can indefinitely postpone the difficult introspection of one's deeper desires. Simultaneously, one is deceived in working for a meaningful goal, even though it is only vaguely defined and likely never actualized. 

It can become so habitual to just accumulate money, that the first time people deeply think about their desires is retirement. It seems peculiar to have this predefined time in life at which everyone so abruptly changes their lifestyle. Like New Year's resolutions postponed for 40 years until each year's unfulfilled intentions finally collapse into this gaping void of retirement. By that time unfortunately many options are physically impossible. Equally frustrating is discovering an activity late in life that brings immense joy, only to realize that it requires almost none of the accumulated money sacrificed so much time for.

Temporarily overlooking the details of our daily routines might expose patterns in the greater picture of our life. So let's lay aside our To-do list for a second and think about the deceitfulness of money, the scarcity of time, the absoluteness of death. And also, check out this video of a cat and cucumber.