"At least I enjoy it"

This chapter is mostly one question. What do you do in the late stretch?

I don't mean what you'd like to do with time of your own. Most people can answer that easily. They'd read, or draw, or play the guitar they haven't touched since March, or have a long bath, or ring a friend, or sit in the garden. I mean what happens between ten o'clock and lights out on an ordinary Tuesday.

For most people in this pattern the answer is some mix of television they're half watching and a phone they're half reading. There's often food they didn't much want. None of it was chosen, exactly. It was what needed the least effort from someone with no effort left.

The Dutch interviews found this too. The second of their three patterns they called mindless. Those people didn't decide to stay up. They lost track of the time, absorbed in whatever they were doing, and looked up to find it was one o'clock. Deliberate and mindless aren't separate groups of people. A common evening begins as the first and ends as the second. You decide at ten that you deserve another half hour. Then nobody decides anything else for the next two hours.

There's some research on how well this kind of evening works as recovery. A survey of 471 people looked at television and video games after a draining day. The more depleted people were, the more likely they were to see their own viewing or gaming as procrastination. They felt guilty about it. The guilt went with getting less recovery from it. The authors pointed out the irony. The people who most needed the recovery were getting the least of it. It was a survey, so it can't prove which caused which. But it matches something you may recognise. The late stretch is often spent with a background hum of "I should be in bed", and it's hard to enjoy anything much through that.

You might reply that some of those late hours have been lovely. I'm sure they have. A film you chose and stayed awake for can be a good evening. So can a long talk with your partner that ran on. This book isn't about those. It's about the default, the late stretch that happens because it's Tuesday and you sat down.

So here's a way to find out how much you enjoy it. Tomorrow morning, before you look at anything else, write down what you did between the tired point and lights out. Then give it a mark out of ten for how good it was. I don't mean how badly you needed it. I mean how good it was. Do that for the same week you're noting your times.

I don't know what your marks will be. If they're mostly eights, this book has less to offer you than I thought. My guess is that there'll be a lot of fours. If so, it's worth putting those fours next to what they cost, which is the subject of the next two chapters.