Most people work a 9-to-5 job, Monday through Friday. That leaves a very specific amount of free time on the weekend and little time during the weekdays. David Cain, writing for the creative digital magazine Thought Catalog, argues that this specifically designed lifestyle funnels us into a pattern that makes us lazy, inactive consumers.Businesses create services to help us do the things we can't find the time or desire to do on our own because we're almost or actually burnt out. Entertainment takes place on the weekend because most people have the time to indulge then. When we have time off, we're supposed to fill it with entertainment because that requires only as much time as we have and costs something. Physical activity, relaxing, and other free activities often have a higher time cost, plus we're tired, and so we opt for what is advertised to us. It's just easier.A non-standard work schedule, however, helps to solve this problem. If your "weekend" falls during the week—at least partially—you get to spend your free time when advertisers don't expect it. You end up with less direction in your day. That said, you still suffer from limits. That's why it's so important to set time boundaries at work—so you don't burn yourself out. You can also ask your boss to let you work four days instead of five. If you can get just as much done and keep your quality of work equally high, you don't need to work for 40 hours. Instead, you can use that time to stay healthier, happier, and start to avoid sinking into the standard workplace trap. It isn't a perfect solution, but it's a start.Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed | Thought CatalogPhoto by Andrey Arkusha (Shutterstock).The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.
There are so many great video games out there, and so little time to play them. HowLongToBeat is a community-based site that predicts how long you'll need to get through various video games to help you better plan which one to play next.Once you navigate to the site and create an account, you can browse through a list of thousands of video games. Click the one you're interested in, and the site will tell you how long it should take you to complete the game if you're only interested in the main quest, if you want to complete the side objectives, and if you want to truly discover every nook and cranny the game has to offer. The times are all based on community members' reports, so popular games probably have more accurate data, but I couldn't find a game that wasn't at least listed.For the curious among you, you can dive deeper into each game's page to find discussions and user reviews, see what platforms people are playing it on, and time yourself against the fastest-reported speedrun. Once you complete a game yourself, you can add your own time to the database to keep improving the service. If HowLongToBeat taught me anything, it's that I own far more games than I have time to play, but it at least helped me prioritize which ones I might get through during this long weekend.HowLongToBeat via MakeUseOf