The Empty Hours: Overcoming the Aimlessness of Free Time After College
With the last of the 4,500 diplomas handed off and each of the thousands of graduates either bored, tired, hungover, hungry, or needing to use the restroom after the four-hour ceremony, the chancellor instructed us to move our tassels from right to left. At that moment, we traded in the label of college student for college graduates, class of 2017. The recessional played, the crowd cheered, and I fell in line with my fellow graduates as we marched out of the arena into the early afternoon sunlight. We emerged squinting, not because of the light in our eyes but because our futures were so bright.
That year, 1.2 million students received bachelor’s degrees. By the time college students reach their graduation ceremony, they have spent nearly twenty years of their life in some form of schooling. Once they receive their diploma, their identity as a student has been long-established, and the habits created during the formative schooling years are ingrained into the fabric of their being. This behavior is displayed when a recent graduate raises their hand in a work meeting or brings Tupperware to the company “lunch and learn” to take home leftovers. In some ways, the structure and routines of college prepare students well for life after graduation. In other ways, they fail them.
College Prepares Students to Enjoy Their Jobs
Inherently, college is a goal-oriented experience. Regardless of major, extracurricular involvements, and the number of parties attended in a given semester, every student shares the same goal of eventually graduating and entering the workforce. Students navigate a highly structured environment that guides them toward that goal. They follow teachers’ and professors’ rules and occasionally receive discipline in the classroom. They get feedback on papers, and their performance is routinely tested through exams. An academic advisor monitors their progress and instructs them about how to proceed. Student affairs professionals have the tools to look holistically at each student’s performance and ensure they thrive in various wellness dimensions (social, financial, emotional, physical, etc.). Higher education encourages students to try new things, succeed or fail, and learn about their interests and abilities, all while ensuring that guardrails are in place to continue moving students toward graduation.
Although generally effective, it is not a perfect system. The six-year college graduation rate across all institutions is 62%. Many factors lead a student to drop out of college, and the rising cost of tuition at most institutions certainly plays a role. College students whose families are in the bottom quarter of household income are 79.3% more likely to drop out of college than students with family incomes in the top quarter. Without question, higher education would better serve students if it were more affordable and if more students graduated.
Nevertheless, for the majority of students who persist through college and receive their diplomas, college graduation marks the end of a nearly twenty-year phase of life as a student. Talk to any recent graduate about what’s on their mind after college, and you’ll likely hear two words: job searching. It takes the average college graduate three to six months to secure professional employment after earning their degree. Some graduates work a job that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree to make ends meet during the in-between period, while others apply for jobs full-time while living off of savings, taking additional loans, or staying with family members. However they accomplish it, six months after graduation, most college students have landed a job. Despite the stress of finding that first job, 91% of recent graduates report satisfaction with their post-college employment.
That number might feel high if you’ve talked to a recent grad about their first job after college. Transitioning from a 9 or 10 am morning alarm to 7 am or earlier can be brutal. Most employees can’t skip their morning meeting and get notes from a co-worker. Two-hour afternoon naps are no longer an option. And, of course, there is the realization that summer breaks are a thing of the past. Despite these changes, most college graduates adjust well to the transition from backpacks to briefcases and textbooks to timesheets, and nine out of ten are satisfied with their jobs.
This should not surprise those of us who have graduated from college. At its core, college is designed to help us succeed in our careers. We make a significant investment in our career preparation and future earnings by choosing to attend college. The average college student spends between $77,000 and $135,000 on tuition and expenses to receive a bachelor’s degree, not to mention 1,800 hours in classes and 2,000 hours studying. The data suggest that college delivers a strong return on that investment:
- The unemployment rate for those with only a high school degree is double the rate for those with a bachelor’s degree.
- Young adults without a bachelor’s degree are almost four times as likely to live in poverty as those with a degree.
- A bachelor’s degree adds $335,000 to your lifetime earnings if you grew up in a low-income family. That figure jumps to $901,000 if you grew up in a high-income family.
There are certainly some caveats. Inequities in admissions practices (particularly with the 2023 dismantling of affirmative action) and the previously mentioned rising tuition costs pose a barrier for many disadvantaged and low-income students. However, for the sake of the argument that a college degree delivers value, the numbers paint a compelling picture.
Although colleges and workplaces are different in many ways, the fundamental dynamics underpinning them are not as different as they may seem. Workplaces are filled with goals, feedback, rules, and challenges. Those are the same structural norms students grow comfortable with across twenty years of schooling. Suppose someone is successful enough as a student to navigate their college experience to graduation. In that case, they have many skills necessary to participate in the workforce successfully.
Decades of research supports this argument. In the book Flow (which popularized the term “flow state”), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high) studied people’s satisfaction at work and in their free time. He asked participants to estimate the amount they enjoyed their jobs and the amount they enjoyed their free time. Not surprisingly, people rated their free time as more satisfying than their work and said they would prefer to work less and have more free time. However, when he surveyed people in real-time during their work about their satisfaction levels, they reported significantly more satisfaction than they had estimated.
In other words, people enjoy their work more than they think.
Csikszentmihalyi suggested a few explanations for this phenomenon. His study found that about half of the time people are at work, they are confronting above-average challenges and using above-average skills. Even when aspects of work are difficult or stressful, we feel good about ourselves and our abilities when we take on and overcome challenges. Somewhat ironically, the feedback, goals, rules, and challenges that cause occasional stress also help us enjoy our time at work.
Employees entering the workforce with a college degree are well-prepared for this type of environment. College, like work, is full of structure, feedback, and challenges. Students rarely think studying for exams or receiving critical feedback from professors is enjoyable, but the feeling of accomplishment, purpose, and growth when reflecting on the experience is satisfying. The key to a rewarding college experience and a rewarding career is finding a balance between insufficient and too much challenge.
Csikszentmihalyi was interested in understanding just how much challenge or stress a person can encounter and still enjoy the activity they are engaged in. He examined people engaged in tasks well within their abilities. This group completed the tasks easily and without stress, but they reported low levels of enjoyment. He also examined people engaged in tasks that were far beyond their abilities. These people gave up on the tasks in frustration and also reported low enjoyment. He then increased the difficulty of the tasks for the first group and reduced the difficulty for the second group. In both cases, he found that peak enjoyment existed when the task was roughly 4% beyond a person’s current ability. People did not immediately know how to confront these somewhat challenging tasks, but the solution was within reach. The participants completed the tasks through problem-solving and persistence and reported the highest levels of enjoyment.
How to quantify and control for a 4% challenge in your actual work, Csikszentmihalyi does not say. But the idea itself holds value. Stay in your comfort zone forever, and you will not be satisfied. Challenge yourself too much, and you will be frustrated. Csikszentmihalyi explains that “enjoyment emerges at the boundary between boredom and anxiety.”
This research uncovered an ironic truth about work. People reported some of their most positive experiences at work, so we might anticipate that those people would wish to work more and their motivation on the job would be high. Yet, even those who felt good about their work said they would prefer to work less and have more free time. When Csikszentmihalyi asked these people to estimate their satisfaction with their free time, they rated it as more satisfying than their work. However, when he surveyed these same people in real-time during their free time, they reported surprisingly low moods and low satisfaction — far lower than their estimation. In their free time, people reported more apathy, passivity, dullness, and dissatisfaction than feelings of physical or mental engagement and satisfaction.
In other words, people enjoy their free time less than they think.
The surprising finding that people enjoy work more than they expect and their free time less than they think led Csikszentmihalyi to a profound insight: jobs are easier to enjoy than free time because they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage involvement in one’s work. Free time is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something enjoyable.
College Does Not Prepare Students to Enjoy Their Free Time
It should not surprise us that many college graduates experience job satisfaction yet struggle to find fulfillment in their free time. College courses rarely, if ever, prepare students to succeed in their personal lives outside of work. Furthermore, free time in college is not a one-to-one equivalent of free time after college. When students have free time in college, filling that time with enjoyable and purposeful activities takes minimal effort.
Traditional college students are surrounded by peers and friends outside of classes, making consistent socialization the default. For some college students, it is more difficult to find quiet solitude than a room full of a dozen people to spend time with. Intramural sports, music ensembles, and student clubs allow students to build relationships with peers interested in a particular activity. Proximity to other college students allows for easy access to parties and other off-campus functions, and most schools host on-campus events every night of the week. University staff members lead travel courses, volunteer service trips, and weekend excursions for students to explore their community, country, or the world. For many, college is the only time they are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of similar-aged single people, significantly increasing the opportunity for casual relationships or finding a long-term partner. Besides mustering up the courage to submit an interest form, attend a meeting, or ask someone on a date, finding something to do with others during free time is rarely challenging in college.
The great irony about free time in college is that it is never truly free. There are always papers to work on, exams to study for, and homework to complete. Even when students are “caught up” on their work, they know they could always work ahead or put in more study hours. When college students talk about free time, they are often describing an allocation of their time away from primary priorities (classes, studying, working, sleeping) and towards secondary and tertiary priorities (exercising, napping, consuming content, spending time with friends, partying, scrolling on social media, etc.). None of these secondary and tertiary activities are inherently bad. In fact, many of them provide a mental, physical, and/or social reprieve from the monotony of classes, assignments, and studying. But even during a Netflix binge, the deadlines and expectations loom. This is another reason why college graduation marks a significant turning point in the lives of young people. As they enter the workforce, the exams, papers, and studying go away, and graduates anticipate relaxing in their free time outside of work, guilt-free, for the first time in years.
I remember that feeling well. As a newly minted graduate, I filled my free time with everything that made me feel guilty in college. Most days after work, I came home and took a twenty-minute nap. Then I looked at Instagram for a while to wake up before cooking dinner. I would pour a glass of red wine to unwind and turn on a basketball game. I loved playing board games, so I would play a game of Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride online before getting ready for bed.
I indulged in this routine for the first few months. I could fully relax for the first time in years without deadlines looming. After putting in so many hours to succeed in college, I felt like I finally deserved to enjoy my free time. For a while, it was glorious. But after a few months, these free time habits started to feel somewhat aimless.
I started and stopped a few hobbies, but nothing stuck. I consistently fell back into the same free time routine, but watching sports and playing games wasn’t as satisfying as it was right after graduation. I still enjoyed my job, but feelings of aimlessness and lack of purpose outside of work were becoming overwhelming. I had not experienced anxiety during college despite balancing challenging classes, a busy extracurricular load, a social life, and part-time jobs. Yet six months after graduation, I felt anxious whenever I had more than a few hours of free time in a day. I found myself aimlessly floating through my free time with no plan, structure, or idea of how to give my free time the same feeling of purpose I felt in college or at my job. The hours outside of work began to feel very empty.
At the time, I thought I was alone in that struggle. In fact, many recent graduates report significant feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety in their free time. Part of the puzzle involves the social dispersion that recent graduates experience after college. Friends fan out across the world for jobs or graduate school, ending a chapter of convenient college hang-outs. Making new friends can be challenging, especially in a new community. The chapter of life immediately after college graduation is one of the most socially isolated across the average lifetime, and I could have been a great case study.
I began considering the differences between my overwhelmingly enjoyable college experience and my surprisingly aimless post-graduation lifestyle. My first realization was that most activities (and people) I filled my free time with back then only existed in a college setting. My hobbies, social outlets, and organizational commitments disappeared after graduation. I thought back to my college years and tried to recall anyone warning me that this change was on the horizon. Many older friends and professional mentors gave me great advice about my career, finances, networking, and other skills that would be useful after graduation. Still, I could not recall a conversation or piece of advice about how to create purposeful leisure. This led me to my second realization: my college experience failed to prepare me for success in my free time after graduation.
Recall Csikszentmihalyi’s profound insight: Jobs are easier to enjoy than free time because they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage involvement in one’s work. Free time is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something enjoyable.
We have established that colleges and universities effectively apply rules, feedback, and goals to shape students into successful working adults who enjoy their jobs. The same dynamics applied to a person’s free time can turn that time from aimless to deeply satisfying. Yet, faculty and staff rarely provide the same guidance, structure, and feedback toward their students’ success outside of work. A lack of education about the importance of structure, goals, and challenges in free time after college may be at play for graduates struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Enjoying the Empty Hours
After spending time in self-reflection mode, I was ready to make a change. I began by listing my default choices. These are the activities I do in my free time when I’m not trying to accomplish anything productive. In other words, when I say I’m not doing anything, this is what I’m doing. At the time, my list included watching sports, looking at Instagram, watching Netflix, and playing board games online.
When I engage in default choices, I do whatever feels good at the moment. My default choices often help me relax, but they lack purpose beyond that. That’s not to say that my default choices are bad things and I shouldn’t ever do them. Unwinding after work with activities that help me relax is good for me and anyone who has to interact with me that evening. But a pattern of these default choices filling up my free time often coincides with anxiety and the feeling that my time lacks purpose.
Cal Newport, Georgetown professor and author of Digital Minimalism, calls default choices “low-quality leisure time.” Newport recommends scheduling low-quality leisure time to combat our natural inclination to let these activities take up all of our free time. During these scheduled times, binge Netflix, get on Instagram, play video games, etc. Outside of these times, he recommends staying off and doing demanding activities. This sounds intense, but Newport defines demanding activities as anything other than passive consumption. For example, exercising, socializing, creating art, playing music, reading, or writing. To this point, he suggests something that initially sounds counterintuitive:
“Expending more energy in your leisure can energize you more. You don’t have to save energy during your free time just to have energy at work. All your mind needs is change, not rest until you sleep.”
I decided to try scheduling my low-quality leisure time. When I felt very motivated during my work day, I would write a small note and put it in my pocket for later. Here’s an example:
5:30–6:30 — Read
6:30–7:00 — Yoga
7:00–8:00 — Cook and eat dinner
8:00–8:30 — Play the piano
8:30–10:30 — Relax (default choices)
10:30 — Sleep
To my surprise, I usually followed this schedule when I got home. Even more surprising, I found that Newport’s idea was spot on. I used more energy in the evening, but I still got to engage in my default choices for a couple of hours, and I went to bed feeling satisfied with how I used my free time overall. Rather than dreading having free time, I began to look forward to it.
A year after I began this experiment, I had completely transformed how I spent my free time. That first year I read 52 books, ran 100 miles, did 43 hours of yoga, published a website, and learned a new language. It took a period of anxiety and aimlessness to trigger the change, but since then, I have completely transformed my free time.
I used to think I needed low-quality leisure time to recharge my brain for the next workday. I quickly discovered that using my free time purposefully gave me more energy at work. Because I had a better day at work, I had more motivation to use my free time purposefully when I got home. This positive feedback loop has dramatically impacted my life and helped me learn a lesson that Newport points out in his book: The rewards of doing nothing are overrated.
2022 was a great year of free time. I trained for and finished my first half-marathon. I read another 44 books and started writing one of my own. I joined a volleyball team and the board of a local non-profit. And I still had plenty of time to watch college basketball, look at Instagram, and beat people at board games online. College may not explicitly teach us how to enjoy our free time, but it helps us set goals, build habits, and structure our lives. Adding these dynamics to our time outside of work allows us to fill our free time with purpose. It only takes a few small changes and a good system.
Name your defaults.
Set goals.
Build productive habits.
Challenge yourself.
Break the cycle of aimlessness.
Enjoy the empty hours.
Transform your free time.
—
Thank you for reading to the end. I would love to know your thoughts about the article in the comments.
You can learn more about filling your free time with purpose at whatismynextthing.com.
