Lazy Sunday

My husband loves a lazy Sunday. Nothing on the calendar. No rush to get out of bed. Just time. It used to drive me crazy.

I needed to be up early, go for a run, tackle errands, clean the house, prep for the week. How could he be so at peace with so much nothing to do?

Recently, I came across the term time affluence. It means exactly what it sounds like: being rich in time. It’s the feeling that you have the freedom to engage in leisure or meaningful activities— without urgency, without pressure. And it turns out, it’s one of the strongest predictors of happiness.

Time affluence is the opposite of what most of us experience (and what our culture often rewards): time famine. The chronic feeling of being rushed, overbooked, productive, exhausted. We’re more likely to be praised for how much we got done over the weekend than how much we rested. For how many tasks we checked off, not how deeply we checked in with ourselves. For how many meetings we packed into a day, not how many hours we slept at night.

We often measure affluence in money, but rarely in time. Yet when it comes to well-being, how free we feel might matter more than how much we earn.

This isn’t to say that being productive or making money is bad—it’s not. But let’s also stop treating rest, leisure, and joy as luxuries or laziness. They’re essential. Doing “nothing,” or doing something simply because it brings you joy, is a valid and valuable use of your time.

Maybe we’d all be a little happier if we spent our Sundays more like my husband—doing less and living more.