Consider a normal life. A person gets up around 7:00 in the morning, goes through their morning routine, and hits the road in time to be at work by 9:00. They then leave the office around 5:00 and are home and have had dinner by 6:30 with the rest of the evening in front of them. Hoe much of that time would be spent watching TV, movies, playing video games, or reading.
It is that last I’m most interested in. It isn’t hard to imagine someone using their free time to do a combination of the above activities and perhaps a few others, but I wanted to see just how much I do read in a day. Both my wife and mother-in-law belie my assertion that a person can never get in trouble for reading as they have both mentioned my reading all the time whenever I’m at home. Well I have discovered that simply is not the case.
Last year the average book length for a book I read was 414 pages and the average human reads at a pace of two pages a minute and I read 91 books last year. Do the math on all that and it turns out that I read for around three hours and a half hours a day last year. This year I am at around three hours and six minutes a day if you figure the same book length and remove the seven audio books I have listened to.
So during the pandemic year when I was at home more than normal a little less than 1/6 of my day was spent reading and in a year where business has been ticking up I have spent less time than that reading.
Consider again that normal life. The life of the 9 to 5 job with a little time in the morning and a massive chunk of time in the evening. Is it so hard to imagine someone spending around three hours a day pursuing some form of entertainment? I do not think it is. I feel as if my entertainment time during the day is on par with the majority of the world.
Trust me. I understand my wife’s frustration. The kids are devils, but I cannot read when they are acting up. That is when the book ends up face down on the coffee table and I am there helping to calm the children. At least when I am at home.
My wife is not a tireless mother. She is very tired. Like all fathers I try, but we are not mothers. We do our best, but there is just something about a mother that makes them extra special. In order to keep my sanity from work and the kids I need my entertainment time. I need to get away from everything and read a good book. I don’t think around three hours a day is too much. It sounds manageable. Especially when it is broken into several sessions, and trust me there isn’t much TV watching or video game playing getting done. Now I understand why. Three hours is about all the entertainment time a person can expect in a day.
David Huzzard Writes 