Why you choose Netflix over hiking
Applying behavioral economics to your weekend choices.
It’s 7PM on a Sunday. The sunlight in your living room is dimming. And it hits you: The weekend is over.
Your free time, that special currency that you’re free to spend however you wish, is gone. Where did it all go?
The importance of TGIF
We all know that free time is important. There’s a reason why we don’t say TGIM. We’ve yet to hear of a “case of the Fridays.”
Recent studies suggest that we’re on to something. A review of positive psychology research found that:
“Leisure activities and recreation satisfaction have even been shown to be greater predictors of life satisfaction and quality of life than sex, education, religiosity, marital status, age, health, employment status, and income.” (Newman, et al. 2014)
So not only is free time scarce, but it may be more important to our well being than money and health. How do we decide how to spend it?
Spending like Monopoly money
If we were rational, we’d lay out all our options, coolly evaluate their possible outcomes, and choose the one that comes out on top.
But as anyone who has refreshed their Instagram notifications twice in a second can tell you, we’re not rational.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his model of how we irrationally choose among uncertain prospects. It’s called Prospect Theory, and it tells us a lot about how we spend our free time.
To illustrate, let’s use an example of a Saturday afternoon. We’re trying to decide between:
a. Drive 30 minutes for a hike with family and friends
b. Stay home and binge watch a TV show
Prospect theory tells us that we make the following mistakes:
1. We overreact to unlikely negative outcomes. If we drive to that hike, there’s a 5% chance that we’ll run into a soul crushing traffic jam on our way back. Prospect Theory tells us that we overreact and that 5% feels more like 50%.
2. We overvalue any outcome that is 100% certain. TV is TV. We know we’re getting an entertaining time waster 100% of the time. Prospect Theory tell us that we overvalue any option with this kind of certainty.
3. We compare each option to a “reference point.” We don’t compare hiking to TV — we separately compare hiking and TV to “do nothing.” Compared to doing nothing, TV doesn’t look so bad. And the only thing worse than doing nothing is actually a possible outcome of the hiking option — getting stuck in the traffic jam.
So the traffic jam is looming in our minds. We know what we’re getting with TV. And besides — TV is better than nothing, right? Before we know it we’re in our living room at 7PM, watching the sunlight dim and trying to ignore the existential dread of Sunday night.
How to choose better
Fortunately, there are solutions in the rubble:
1. Ask the waiter for advice. We like the TV option because we’re 100% sure what we’re getting into. We can combat this by learning more about the hiking option.
Think of it like ordering food at a new restaurant. The escargot pizza may be life changing, but who wants to take that risk? This is why we ask the waiter — if she tells us it’s mind blowing, we’re much more likely to stray from the house burger.
So ask friends who have already done the activity you’re considering. Consult online review sites. Anything you can do to raise your knowledge of what to expect is another step away from your couch.
2. Consider the hourglass, not the calendar. There are 2 ways we can think about the value of our free time — the calendar and the hourglass.
If we consider the calendar, every Saturday is one of an infinite number of Saturdays on the calendar. We can always do it next Saturday.
But if we take a step back and realize that each moment of free time is a rare gift, we find ourselves considering the hourglass. Every Saturday is a grain of sand, and we don’t know how many grains we have left.
When we consider the hourglass, we’re likely to change our reference point from “do nothing” to something more like “make the most of our precious free time.”
Then a day spent watching TV falls way below the reference point, and that adventurous outing looks better and better.
