The pursuit of happiness requires free time | Danielle Roberts

0:00Can a democracy survive when its citizens no longer have the time to truly participate in it?

0:10You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I often feel like I don't have enough time. Enough time for the people I love, for the things that light me up, for actual rest. And I have a feeling I'm not alone. If you see a crowded calendar as a personal failing or something to fix with a better system or a new app, writer and work expert Danielle Roberts is here to help you rethink that. We like to call this a time management problem, right? But more Americans are working multiple jobs to survive than ever recorded before.

0:48How are you supposed to manage time that's not even yours to begin with? This goes far beyond a time management problem. It's actually a civil rights issue. In her talk, Danielle, who's known to her online community as the anti-career coach, argues that the pursuit of happiness we're all promised is meaningless without the time to actually pursue it. And that time has become one of the most unequally distributed things we have. And stick around for our conversation after I sat down with Danielle to dig into this idea further. We design work for imaginary people with unlimited capacity, and that's always going to fail real people with finite energy.

1:32So we need to treat ourselves with some compassion and kindness with the way that we show up in work. We get into the loss that first made her question the status quo of the workplace. Why she insists rest is infrastructure and not a reward. And a few small things any of us can do to take back more of our time. that's coming up right after a short break.

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4:13And now, our TED Talk and conversation of the day. So it's exciting and ironic that I'm giving a TED Talk about time in three minutes. But what's more ironic is the Founding Fathers promising us the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee of happiness, the pursuit. Which I think of as having the freedom to choose how you spend your days, the space and focus to pursue a new passion, or just the ability to be present with the people you love. All of which requires something that none of us has enough of. Time. My dad laid tile for 40 years. Do you know what he got for his retirement? Knee surgery.

4:59And he told me, I think I'm going to get another job to keep me busy. Now, if you've ever been out of work, you know how uncomfortable that feels. Now imagine something that feels far worse than that. Never having the time to truly live your life at all. We like to call this a time management problem, right? But more Americans are working multiple jobs to survive than ever recorded before. How are you supposed to manage time that's not even yours to begin with? This goes far beyond a time management problem. It's actually a civil rights issue. Can a democracy survive when its citizens no longer have the time to truly participate in it?

5:46And I'm not just talking about the hours, I mean the pace. Moments of connection have been replaced by convenience. We get everything delivered to our doors at record speed. We'll ride share to the airport rather than asking a neighbor. We put productivity on this pedestal to maximize the minutes that we do have access to. The last time we fought for more time and won was over a century ago, when workers marched and bled under a banner that said, eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will. I love that phrase, what you will. I think of letting the sun hit your face, flipping cars when your sports team wins, like we do here in Philly, or doing absolutely nothing and not feeling guilty about it for once.

6:41We cannot optimize the life out of our lives now, betting on a later that isn't promised. So I want to propose something new, a time amendment. And it's built on three resolves. First, that time is a civil right, and no one's access to it should be dictated by how much money they make or who they are.

7:11Second, that joy is proof a democracy is functioning the way that it was intended. During the AIDS crisis, Dan Savage said, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance is what kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. And third, rest is infrastructure, not a reward for a lifetime of hard work. It gives us the capacity to imagine and participate in our shared future.

7:50The pursuit of happiness is a promissory note in gorgeous penmanship. But a promissory note is only worth something if somebody pays up. And it is about time that we showed up to collect. Thank you.

8:08That was Danielle Roberts. Stick around after the break. Danielle and I get into the personal loss that set her on this path. She also explains why we've been trying to solve the wrong problem all along and shares the small concrete habits she uses to claw back a little time and a little joy in her own life. That's coming up.

8:32With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One.

9:10If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC.

9:41Danielle Roberts, thanks for sitting down with us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, let's get into it. Where are you joining us from and how do you describe yourself? Yes, I am joining from South Jersey in the greater Philadelphia area, and I would describe myself as a work design strategist, writer, and speaker, also known to my online community as the anti-career coach. Tell me what set you on this path of anti-career coaching. Was there a particular inciting incident that maybe started things on your path or changed anything for you? Yeah, I would say there are two.

10:19I was working in advertising when I was 23. Very common to pull 60 or 70 hour weeks. You work with those people. You play with those people after work. They're your entire world. And at 23, I got this text from my mom that she wasn't feeling well. And within nine weeks, she had passed away from cancer. And I had three days of bereavement leave, found myself back at my desk, and everything was kind of running like normal. but I had changed and I said, maybe I just need to find a new job. And I continued to just work really hard for the next decade, trying to make my life count as much as I possibly could.

10:59And then I moved a thousand miles away from home and got laid off from my tech job one month later. So I had to start asking myself some different questions about work and life and what I wanted to do with my time. And then how did it lead into one of the big questions of your TED Talk, which as a reminder to listeners, the question of your talk is, can a democracy survive when its citizens no longer have time to truly participate in it? We always return to that document, you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I kept thinking about time in relation to the pursuit of happiness and promising freedom to people without giving them the time or capacity to pursue that happiness is kind of a beautifully wrapped empty box.

11:51Right. And as it relates to the workplace, organizations are investing over$60 billion a year in corporate wellness programs, but only 20 % of the workforce is engaged globally. So we are working on solving the wrong problem. and I started to think about time in relation to, like we all have the same 24 hours in a day, hypothetically, right? But our capacity is different. Our capacity to show up for ourselves and the people that we care about or our communities and society at large really depends on our mental, emotional, physical and time ability to show up in those spaces. Before you started this work that then led you to the TED stage at TED Democracy, what was your relationship to time and leisure?

12:39I didn't have much of a relationship to leisure. I have been a high achiever my entire life. I graduated the top of my high school class, top of my college classes, and I put off joy in every single aspect of my life and told myself I just needed to work harder. I just needed to succeed more. I worked in higher education for over five years and I was in marketing. So I would constantly be advertising to students, you know, work hard and find your dream job, and then you will be happy and successful. And then after that, I worked in ed tech and our products helped career changers 10 plus years into their careers to switch to something future-proof.

13:22The same people that I had said, Hey, find your dream job. We're now miserable and unfulfilled. So I was like, you know what, there's, there's something here in relation to how we are using our time, how much we equate our self-worth in our work, how much of our time we spend at work, and how that impacts us on a human and existential level. So that kind of developed into coaching, which developed into work design strategy and speaking, and here I am. What do you feel like were the most important things that you learned about kind of achievement culture, our relationship with time, and what's kind of broken about it?

14:08The biggest thing that I have learned is that we have value regardless of how much we produce or how much we accomplish. We are alive in the same way that nature is, right? And we have seasons of rest. We have seasons where we're not going to be productive and we cannot treat ourselves like machines or we're going to fail every single time. We design work for imaginary people with unlimited capacity, and that's always going to fail real people with finite energy. So we need to treat ourselves with some compassion and kindness with the way that we show up and work. and within the workplace, I think we need to start saying this isn't a burnout problem.

14:58This isn't a wellness or a resilience problem or an individual time management problem. This is a capacity problem because if one job is not enough to survive, the only solution is to work more and you cannot create more time. Someone making some minimum wage could literally work around the clock and still not be able to afford the median apartment right now. So I think in relation to time, it's these bigger questions of, you know, what is our purpose here? Are we just existing to work? That and then are our public policies sufficient, you know, in this kind of, in this day and age? Yeah. And you look to other countries, other societies, and the way that they build infrastructure around protecting time and capacity.

15:51And there are right to disconnect laws where it is now illegal to contact employees outside of working hours, or they're going to get a fine. People in Iceland have moved to a four-day work week. Bereavement leave has been extended to account for the emotional capacity that people lose when they are grieving someone that they love. There are so many different ways that companies can build in infrastructure to not only just be more human, but return human capacity. And the kicker is like, they're more profitable when they do that. So when we just say work harder, work more, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, we're giving that advice for a world and a workforce that no longer exists.

16:35In your talk and in your answer just now, you mentioned that our lack of rest is often pegged as just a time management issue, but you debunk it. So why isn't it true? Why isn't this about managing time? Because if it was a time management problem, that would have worked by now. I think it takes a reframe of what time management is and how we live. So for example, standard work week is 40 hours. The average American is working more than 40 hours, and that does not include commuting time or the times you get ready for work. And then you think about what it takes just to run a normal life, right?

17:20Groceries, laundry, cleaning, caregiving, all of these things that we would consider life in the work-life balance bucket, but are actually the unpaid work of living. And that all takes the same amount of capacity that our jobs does. We have minimal time left for rest or restorative rest, which is just sleep and being able to close our eyes. And then the hobbies and the recreation and the relationships that fill our cups back up to allow us to return to work fully focused and creative and able to problem solve. So it's not a time management problem because the way we view time is the same way that we viewed time 100 years ago.

18:03And technology has evolved. What we're capable of within that timeframe has evolved. And our advancements in technology and productivity have not yet yielded any time back for the worker. So it's more of a systemic problem than a time management problem. Yeah. So individual failure. Right. Because shouldn't all these tech tools, especially now with all the conversations that we have about AI and actually what AI is doing, shouldn't that allow for more rest and leisure for humans? I mean, ideally, wasn't that the promise of technology in the labor force? Yeah. Hypothetically, that's been the promise for every single technological advancement.

18:44What do you think has happened instead? Are we just having to work more or are our tools failing us? No, it's an infrastructure and an operational infrastructure problem. We are working and more productive than ever. We have yielded more time, but the time that we get back just gets filled with more work. It does not get funneled back into rest. And oftentimes in a capitalist society who is benefiting from our labor and our productivity is the top 1%. That's why you're seeing the wage gap be insane right now. That's why you're seeing so many people struggle. At the time of my talk, more Americans were working multiple jobs to survive than ever recorded before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

19:35So that tells us, the data tells us that something is not working. In your talk, you propose a time amendment. So let's, you outlined the three pillars. Let's talk about them a bit more. What inspired them in the first place and take us through the pillars? It was inspired by the Declaration of Independence, right? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And what do we need to actually pursue that happiness? So time as a civil right is essentially that time is a universal human right. We chase money and success, but time is the one thing that we cannot make more of. And somebody who has access to pay for a housekeeper and a nanny and a driver has different access to time than a single mom that has to work two jobs.

20:23So it should never be determined by what your economic status is or your background. As far as joy goes when it comes to time, historically marginalized groups also don't have the same relationship with time as other groups. Much of what we have to do is spend our time fighting for the right to access the same joy that other groups have. So if not joy, what is the point of life? We need that space to rest and connect and be creative and playful. And finally, rest being infrastructure. We trade so much of our lives to work and we have retirement to work toward where we can finally rest and feel rewarded for a lifetime of hard work.

21:14but people are burned out. 82 % of the workforce is at risk of burning out. People are disengaged and building rest back into infrastructure gives us that mental, emotional, and physical capacity to show up, not just in our communities and in our own lives, but in our work to, and participating in our shared democratic future. We need that bandwidth to imagine what the possibilities are. And too much of our capacity right now is being spent just on survival. So these three tenets really try and reframe how we think about time and how we use our time a little bit differently than we're used to.

21:54What do you think it would actually take to implement something like this? And how might it be different community to community? Because obviously, you know, America is huge, and made up of lots of diverse peoples and backgrounds and neighborhoods? Yeah, great question. So what my work aims to do is go in at the organizational level and work with organizations on how to free up organizational capacity for the work only humans can do. So I think it's getting organizations to really think differently and implement different operational workflows, operational policies to free up human capacity. I think if we can do that at a structural level, whether you're a leader or an hourly worker, salary worker, gig worker, start having these conversations.

22:44What does that look like in practice? Like, does that mean just kind of reducing the work week? What might that look like? Or what has it looked like at organizations that you've worked with? Yeah. So I think the exciting thing about this is it's never really been done before in our society. So we have an opportunity to shape something new. There are so many different things that people can do, right? On an individual level, it could be looking at your calendar and seeing how much time you spend in meetings on a given week and saying, how much do I speak up in this meetings? How much do I take away from these meetings?

23:16Do I really need them on my calendar? Or can I maybe do an asynchronous update? And can I remove that from my calendar and block it for focus time instead, deep work instead. It could look like talking to your manager or having a manager look at the team's workflow and seeing what is our standard of communication here? And are we relying on pings and constant email and after hours messages to get work done? The average worker gets interrupted every two minutes and it takes us a while to refocus. So how can we take some of that time back to unlock more creative problem solving? At the operational level and the company level, it could look like four-day work weeks.

23:57It could look like right to disconnect laws. It could be expanding bereavement and caregiver leave. There are so many different applications for how we can do this. But this all sounds like it could work certainly for salaried workers at a giant corporation or something, but what happens in the case of so many of the service workers and gig workers, especially I'm thinking gig workers who just don't have the same protections over their schedules and often end up working the longest hours in order, frankly, to make ends meet? What could be done on their behalf? Yeah, for sure. And that's a great question.

24:31It's going to require getting creative. I think too, I speak to a lot of healthcare and hospital associations and some of them, obviously they are super burnt out, especially since COVID. A lot of people left the industry and the people that remain are taking on the workload of everybody. So I think it is infrastructure again for healthcare as a human right. Conversations are starting to be had about universal basic income to make sure that our basic human needs are met. So I think it's those types of conversations and normalizing those types of conversations to free up the capacity to imagine what that looks like.

25:11I need to speak directly to service workers to understand what their ideas are, right? I need to speak to healthcare workers to understand what their ideas are because they know their industries and their challenges the best. I think of the service workers that I know, or, you know, or I guess what was called frontline during COVID. And what I'm imagining is that if they had more time, they might take on more work. That essentially after, okay, well, if I'm maxed out for a certain number of hours at this one job, I'll just take another job, which is true of other gig workers as well. So that doesn't really solve the time capacity problem, right?

25:49Because when you're opening up time, you're filling it up. Yes. And that on the individual level, it's hustle culture, right? We have convinced ourselves that if we are not spending our time being productive, we are somehow lazy or incapable, lazy, incapable, entitled. And that's just simply not true. We are all worthy. Yes. Just by existing. Yes, of course. It's literally not true. It's like, where did I learn this when I'm sitting on the couch and I can feel that my body just needs 10 minutes to relax? like is that voice mine telling me to like get up and do something or is it a voice that I inherited from society and from culture I grew up in a Roman Catholic household and we heard things like idle hands are the devil's work and things like that and you should give your life in service to other people always but we cannot continue to show up and do our work if we are running on empty We need to take care of ourselves in order to make what we are doing sustainable.

26:57So we've historically poured ourselves back into more work. We get more done than any generation in history. And we need to challenge ourselves to say, like, no, I can rest in these 10 minutes. I can do something that restores me. I am entitled to that. It is my right. Right. Right. What do you think is really at stake here? I would love to know what we are losing when we are losing our time and our sort of agency over our time from two different perspectives. One, what we're individually losing, the personal implications, right, of a time deficit. And then two, societally, like what does this mean for our democracy that we are so pressed?

27:42Yeah. So individually, I think it means not having the capacity to figure out how you want to spend your life, to figure out what creative hobbies you want to pursue, to build relationships and truly hear people. we are spending so much time on social media and that steals so much of our energy and our attention that we don't get out into our communities we are isolated we are lonely we there's a term called social atrophy where when we don't have the time we've reinvested into like low energy tasks that aren't filling our cups back up so it it has physical implications It has mental and emotional implications.

28:28It affects our motivation to even care at all, right? Like why work hard if it's not going to give me anything back? Why even bother? So I think we're experiencing kind of a crisis of capacity and purpose with people's individual agency. And then, you know, systemically, our society is at such a critical juncture right now. And what I want to offer to that is productivity is all about speed, volume, and visibility, right? And it is great at refining what is already known, but it is not innovation. We can use these tools to get faster, but the only thing that is actually going to unlock creative problem solving, new ideas, innovation is not AI that just uses current information or previous information that we already have.

29:24it is the work that only humans can do. It is connecting the dots. So I think we lose our ability, not just as a society, but as a country to compete globally or continue to help globally what we are capable of, what we are able to sustain as a human race. All right, Danielle, through this work that you've been doing, and you kind of touched on this at the top of our conversation. How has your own personal relationship to time and leisure and rest, generally, I guess you don't have to be doing any sort of thing to be resting. How has that evolved as you've done this work? Yeah, I would say it's still evolving.

30:05It's very hard for me. It's very ingrained and I really care about the work that I'm doing. But when I look back at when I started this work, I am a completely different person than I would be at my laptop around the clock late into the hours. Like I need to do this. I have to do this. And it's really as simple as like, I don't need to do this. I can close it, my laptop for a little while. And I'm going to read a fiction book, not a personal development or a self-help book to try and optimize my infinite potential in this universe. It's like, no, I'm just going to do something for joy. We're getting toward the colder months, I've found a love for 3D puzzles where I can just slow down and be with myself, something that is away from a screen.

30:52So I've noticed to pay attention to myself more. And like I said, ask myself the question of like, is this my voice saying that I need to do this or is it mine? And now that I have the rest thing down and I'm feeling like I have more of that capacity back, I feel more inspired to get out into my community and kayak and volunteer and things like that. So it's not an overnight fix. Right. And I feel like folks have to actually get clear or clear enough of the hurdle of just nonstop triage, you know, with their time before they can even get to the point of like, oh, wait, I like this. And I needed this and my body needed this.

31:36Yeah. Yep. Slow down and get regulated a little bit before you can actually make a sound decision for what comes next. Do you have any practices that you incorporate to make sure you're protecting your free time that our listeners could take away? Yes. So I would say first and foremost, if you can keep your phone out of your room or out of your grasp and reach when you first wake up, that will be a game changer. You will start your day with your nervous system more regulated than if you just like start with the dopamine machine right away. And then I've also downloaded a couple of apps that lock me out of my apps during specific times of day because social media, again, it steals our attention.

32:24Our attention is the currency. That's why these platforms remain free. So we need to be mindful of our digital use overall. I also, I'm kind of old school. I have a paper planner and I sit with myself every single Sunday and I say like, how did the last week go? What do I want this week to look like? And like, what is the one or two things that would make this week successful if I got done? Like, what are the top two things? And I don't move on to anything else until I focus on those two things. It'd be really easy. Like, Oh, I'm going to procrastinate and clean off my entire desk because I don't want to write, but trying to, you know, build your agency back into your own life by not giving yourself a ton to do and focusing on the most important tasks.

33:08And then also having some type of log off ritual when it comes to work. Um, whether that is like putting on your favorite song or getting up and like, just shaking it out, taking a walk around the block, just something that creates a little bit of space for yourself to separate work from home life when you jump right into that domestic labor. Just to remind yourself that we can build these little pockets of joy in for ourselves while we are working toward greater collective change. Before we wrap up, I'd just love to know, what's a small gratitude or a practice that you have in your life that kind of keeps you going day to day that you wouldn't mind sharing?

33:47It could be some of the things that you just listed? Yeah. Oh, that's such a great question. I am very grateful for my dogs. I have two dogs and spending time with them and being able to pet them and just pay attention to how they exist in the world brings me so much joy. Like they are just happy to exist and eat and play. And like, they're just like, Hey, I'm here. I don't pay any bills, but like, I've got you. So I think that just they are a reminder to like be able to enjoy life. And that life is very finite. Our time is finite. They don't get nearly as many years as we do. So they really, really keep me grounded.

34:29And even when we humans get like 83 years or something, I was listening to an interview. Somebody talked about how at the end of their mom's life, you know, she was in her 80s, but she was like, gosh, it went by so fast. There was so little time. Yeah, so little time. And so it does go by fast. And your talk and this conversation is such an important reminder of protecting that time that we have. Danielle Roberts, thank you so much. Thank you. That was Danielle Roberts at TED Democracy Philadelphia in 2026 and in conversation with me, Elise Hu. And that's it for today. If you're curious about TED's curation guidelines, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines.

35:12TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Lucy Little and Maria Alexa Cavanaugh. The TED Talks Daily team includes Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivam. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.

35:47This episode is brought to you by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is making more breast cancers treatable. A few years ago, MSK's work led to the first targeted therapy for a form of breast cancer that had almost no options, and this year that treatment was approved for even more people. That's the kind of progress that once seemed impossible. Gifts from people like you make these kinds of advances possible. Flexible support gives MSK's researchers the freedom to pursue new ideas and turn them into real treatments for people facing breast cancer.

36:23And right now, every donation to MSK is tripled. Give before October 31st and your gift goes three times as far. Give now at msk.org slash TED Talks Daily.

36:36With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile.

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