How We Spend Our Time, Building Relationships, and More
This week I stumbled upon a couple of graphs and couldn’t stop thinking about some of the data.
TIME SPENT
Think about what you see on this graph:
- Teens: As teens, we spend significant time with friends, parents, siblings, and extended family.
- 20s: We spend less time with friends, siblings, and parents and more time with partners and children.
- 30s to 50s: The majority of our time is spent with partners, children, and co-workers.
- 60s and older: There is a significant drop in time spent with co-workers and an increase in time spent with partners and alone.
- Interaction Peak: The number of people we interact with peaks around age 40, then declines as we age. By age 40, you’ve spent most of the time you will with your parents or children. If you feel you’ve missed out on that time, perhaps now is the time to catch up.
- Time Alone: We spend a significant portion of our adult life alone, so make sure you know how to be friends with yourself. Choosing to be alone reflects a broader trend across all age groups globally, particularly among older adults.
- Choose your partner wisely: Your life partner is the person you’ll spend the most time with (other than yourself). It is a person who will influence the direction of your life. Needless to say, choose wisely.
BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
- Four years ago, the US Surgeon General warned of an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”. Setting aside governments’ tendency to declare all sorts of “epidemics”, the Surgeon General relies on data suggesting that a lack of social connections affects more Americans than, say, diabetes or obesity.
- The longest running study on happiness (by Harvard) seems to support that conclusion. The quality of our relationships predicts the quality of our lives. Building strong relationships at a younger age will impact your physical, mental, and emotional health later in life.
- Since we spend the majority of our time with our life partners, we often put a lot of pressure on them to be everything for us – they’re supposed to be our creative inspiration, our sexual partner, the co-parent to the kids, and also our best friends – a tall order. The answer to not feeling lonely or not putting too much pressure on our life partners is friendship. Building and maintaining relationships is a skill. It requires a conscious effort. Here is a How To.
WISDOM
About the author:
Olga Koroleva is a founder and CEO of Capital Brain, a company that builds AI-powered products. She is also a high-altitude mountaineer who likes to climb mountains with double-digit death rates, University lecturer, and a public speaker on leadership and risk taking. Sign up to her self-leadership newsletter at https://capitalbrain.co/blog/
