Americans need a break. But can we take it?

Imagine it’s 2032. We are somehow even more stressed and pressed for time than we were in 2024. How will we find time to relax, unplug, enjoy our hobbies and afford our “free” time?

Studies have shown that Americans are generally working fewer hours than they were at the start of the 20th century. Yet the amount of time we have for leisure hasn’t increased as we spend more time on all those other things that are neither work nor leisure, like cleaning, traffic, schlepping the kids around, trying to fix our Wi-Fi routers and spending an hour on hold with customer support.

Does it count as leisure if you’re spending an hour trying to figure out if any of the 17 streaming services you subscribe to are showing the movie you want to watch? It’s no wonder Ipsos data shows that most people feel generally overwhelmed by their choices in life.

But even our leisure can be overwhelming. People turn to Facebook and mobile apps to map out and maximize every second they spend on their Disney vacations. A friend recently overheard a first date at the restaurant where she was dining. The goal-oriented guy told his would-be girlfriend, “I only read nonfiction because I want to learn new things.”

We yearn to travel, but there are tensions. Americans keep setting new records for the busiest travel day. Portions of the global tourism economy are booming but residents are revolting ––squirting water guns at tourists in Barcelona, Spain, on one extreme, and banning tourists entirely due to a lack of water in parts of Italy on another. Copenhagen is rewarding tourists for climate-friendly behavior. As we show on our cover, climate change might alter our desired destinations and clothing as we travel, or it might mean we spend more leisure time indoors.

If our leisure time is limited, or arguably even precious, how are we spending it? Professor Selin Malkoc, whom you’ll meet later, makes a useful distinction between active and passive leisure time. Passive time is all the time we spend chillaxing on the couch with our screens or a book. Active leisure time is the “going out” stuff. For now, Americans spend about a quarter of their weekdays on leisure, twice that on weekends. Will that change in the future? If so, how?

It’s probably not a good sign that we stress about our leisure time. Nearly half of Gen Zers say they have productivity FOMO when they’re relaxing. Many worry about having enough time for hobbies or being able to afford them. Or even about being able to get away from work long enough to take vacations. Almost one in five Gen Zers stresses about picking the wrong vacation destination. Whether that’s because it won’t look good on social media or some other sort of buyers’ remorse would make for good follow-up research.

So how do we spend our leisure time?

In short, we spend our time more passively than actively and overwhelmingly on screens. We often have several screens in front of us, but we still consume a lot of “TV” types of content on our actual TV screens.

As we saw in What the Future: Parenting, that screen time, when it comes to kids, is also a source of frustration and tension within households. Maybe that factors into the rise in the “get away from it all and unplug” vacation that appears in Hilton’s 2024 Trends Report, an annual global survey of travelers. That even includes sleep being a new activity in tourism. Often that just means getting away from our constant contact and streams of content.

Toward balance?

But that’s not the entire story. For some, blurring our work and our leisure affords us opportunities we want to seize. For those who can work remotely, “bleisure” travel, or combined business and leisure travel, has hung on post-pandemic, whether that’s working in exotic destinations so you can have your vacation but not have to take it all as paid time off (PTO) or taking advantage of work-paid airfare and tacking on a couple of days for fun.

Or it’s using credit card reward points racked up from work travel to fund personal trips — a perk that is currently endangered, as we’ll discuss later. And for still more, employers are experimenting (successfully) with four-day workweeks, where people trade longer workdays for fewer. Granted, Greece is trying a six-day workweek. About half in our Future of Leisure poll say that even one extra hour per day would help them achieve better balance in life.

How can brands help?

• We are a culture obsessed with managing and maximizing our time. Brands can help. Make the customer experience and the user experience simpler in any possible way you can. Reduce the overhead for your customers who interact with your services. Minimize the amount of leisure time spent navigating your website, looking for products on shelves, etc.
• Help people savor and enjoy their hobbies, travel, streaming and other leisure experiences. Help them share, not in a FOMO-inducing way, but rather in a way that connects them with friends and family.
• Reward people for their focus. Sure, ad breaks will happen in our streaming, but the constant alerts, pop-ups and flashes detract from what we’re all trying to do — namely, relax.

For further reading

• What the Future: Play
• We think entertainment is costing more, and it's impacting behavior
• Americans still want vacations, but will we take them?