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The warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister represent many historic firsts. They would be the court’s first prosecutions of leaders in a liberal Western democracy, and represent the first time anyone has been charged with the “crime of starvation”; the first time the court has accused a country of war crimes during a defensive war against an external invader; and the first prosecution of a non–member state at the bequest of a member that is not generally recognized as a state.

For all of these juristic innovations, the warrants also represent something entirely familiar: an international institution, created to serve high and noble purposes, succumbing to the temptation of pursuing an anti-Israel agenda. This phenomenon is on routine display at the United Nations’ General Assembly and Human Rights Council.

The charges are baseless as a matter of law and fact, issued by a court with no jurisdiction, alleging as crimes things that simply never happened, while ignoring settled international law and practice. But before turning to the Israel warrants, we need to understand what the ICC really is.

[Arash Azizi: The International Criminal Court shows its mettle]

The ICC, seated in the Netherlands in The Hague, was created in 1998 by a treaty known as the Rome Statute, to provide a forum where the perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities could be prosecuted, a kind of permanent Nuremberg Tribunal. The new court would not impinge upon national sovereignty, because it would have jurisdiction only over countries that voluntarily joined. In the optimistic decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11, some hoped that the court would lead to an “end to impunity” for mass atrocities—such as the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides—and lead to a “rules-based international order.”

That dream has never seemed further off. A quarter century later, most of the world’s population lives in countries that never joined the court—including the United States and China, India and Pakistan, and pretty much the entire Middle East. Many of the countries that joined the ICC face little serious prospect of engaging in armed conflict; for them, membership entails little risk, and is merely a feel-good ritual.

Despite a roughly $200 million annual budget, the tribunal has convicted only six people of perpetrating the mass atrocities it was created to address. Numerous high-profile cases have collapsed. Its indictments against incumbent dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been laughed off. The current and past presidents of Kenya both rode ICC indictments to reelection. (The cases against them had been dropped because of what the ICC’s presiding judge described as “witness interference,” a claim the ICC disputed.) Two countries have quit the court altogether, shaking belief in the inevitable, gradual expansion of The Hague’s writ.

The composition of the ICC’s membership has created a serious problem for the court. The largest concentration of member states is in Africa, but every defendant tried by the Court has been a sub-Saharan African, leading to a threat of mass walkout by African Union states.

The charges against Israel can be understood, in part, as a solution to this predicament. They serve to deflect criticism of the court as a Western tool, and were received with enthusiasm by international NGOs. And they come with a major advantage: As a non–member state, Israel can’t quit in protest.

But that also means the court should not, by rights, have jurisdiction over Israel. To overcome this obstacle, the court decided that Palestine is a state that can join the court, despite not satisfying the legal criteria for statehood. Such an exception has not been made for any other entity. It also controversially decided that Gaza was part of that state, in addition to the West Bank, despite each having had an entirely different government for nearly two decades.

Then the ICC ignored a second limitation on its reach. Its governing statute instructs it to intervene only when a state is “unwilling or unable” to prosecute crimes by its leaders, in order to shield them from responsibility. Not only is Israel’s attorney general willing to prosecute Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—she is already doing so in several high-profile cases involving alleged corruption.

The more likely reason the Israeli justice system is not pursuing the charges brought by the ICC is because they appear to be unfounded. The main thrust of the court’s claims (the details of which remain sealed by the tribunal) is that Israel purposefully starved the people of Gaza, as well as restricted electricity to the area. Yet in June, the UN’s own hunger watchdog released a report denying that famine occurred during the period addressed by the prosecutor. Nor does Israel’s allowing shipments of food into the Gaza Strip, which one estimate placed at more than 3,000 calories a day per person, suggest an attempt to starve the population, even if conditions in parts of the Strip have been dire.

Hamas controls food distribution within Gaza, and has been seizing aid convoys. Aid groups complain that Israel has been constricting the flow of food into Gaza; Israel counters that aid has piled up on the Gaza side of the border without distribution. Moreover, international law allows for besieging an enemy force, even if civilians are within the besieged area. Exceptions allow for the provision of essential medical supplies, but even those exceptions are suspended when there is a credible fear of “diversion” to the enemy force, as there surely is with Hamas. If anything, Israel is being blamed for Hamas’s starvation of its own population.

Supporters of the ICC should be embarrassed that its decision was cheered by Hamas and Hezbollah. Those groups understand that the court’s indictments of Israeli officials will make it more difficult for Israel to defend itself. Yet the ICC cannot deter dictators and warlords, because they can fall into its hands only if they lose power. If they remain in power despite their atrocities, a minor crimp in their travel plans is more than offset by the power and wealth they will enjoy.  The three Hamas leaders indicted by the tribunal have already been killed by Israel; they might have preferred a cell in The Hague.

Leaders of democracies must make different calculations; they rotate out of power, and their private benefits in office are relatively minimal. ICC warrants against them, even if entirely unjustified, could deter them from vigorously and lawfully prosecuting defensive wars, for which their civilian populations would pay the price. Thus, the prosecutions of Israeli officials will actually make war crimes more likely, by tipping the scales against liberal democracies.

All of this poses a threat to the U.S.—as a non–member state that engages in a high level of global armed conflict—as well as to its leaders and soldiers. The ICC could recognize the Islamic State in the Levant as a “state” for purposes of its jurisdiction, just as easily as it recognized Palestine, and investigate American officials for alleged crimes during the U.S.-led campaign against the terror group. That campaign, started during Barack Obama’s presidency, included battles in Mosul, where an effort to evict approximately 5,000 ISIS fighters in the city led to perhaps 10,000 civilian deaths and the destruction of the city. The ICC did not have jurisdiction, because Iraq had not joined the treaty—but the Palestine precedent shows that this is not an insurmountable problem.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

The ICC’s disregard for law also threatens American troops on counterterror missions in countries that have joined the ICC. Washington has long relied on treaties signed with such countries as a safeguard against Hague jurisdiction, but the tribunal’s boundless view of its powers gives no assurance that those treaties will be honored.

This is not far-fetched: The ICC is already investigating alleged U.S. crimes in Afghanistan. Indeed, the ICC prosecutor recently suggested that sitting U.S. senators may have committed crimes against the court’s charter by speaking out in support of bipartisan legislation that would impose sanctions on the body.

Not all efforts to solve the world’s problems work—some backfire. The high aspirations with which the tribunal was founded should not shield it from the consequences of its decision to pursue other agendas.

Passing judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never going to be simple for the International Criminal Court. Even harder than acting fairly and impartially would be appearing to have done so, in a conflict that stirs fierce passions the world over.

On top of that, equality before the law is a basic principle of justice, but until this point, the ICC has mainly prosecuted authoritarian and non-Western leaders. Almost all of the court’s top funders are Western democracies or their allies. Now, for the first time in its history, the ICC would be asked to assess the actions of a democratically elected government allied with the West, and to show that it could do so without special favor.

Last Thursday, the ICC rose to this challenge. A three-person panel at the court approved arrest-warrant requests for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The Israeli officials are accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder and starvation of Palestinians.

[Eugene Kontorovich: The International Criminal Court’s folly]

Back in May, prosecutors also asked for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, who stand accused of extermination, murder, rape, and sexual assault against Israeli citizens during the attacks of October 7. Two of the three (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) have since been killed by Israel. The ICC issued the arrest warrant for the third, Mohammed Deif. Israel claims to have killed him too, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The three judges who made the decision hail from Benin, France, and Slovenia, but were elected by all 124 member states of the ICC and went through a rigorous vetting process. Their months-long deliberations included engaging with the Israeli government and assessing its claim that its own courts could handle the matter.

Since its foundation, in 2002, the ICC has investigated crimes all over the world. It is limited in both the types of crimes it can investigate (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression) and its territorial jurisdiction (restricted mostly to its member states, which include countries in the European Union, Latin America, the antipodes, and half of Africa). Yet it has managed to levy charges for crimes committed in 17 countries and issue arrest warrants for despots such as Vladimir Putin, Muammar Qaddafi, and Omar al-Bashir.

For years, however, many non-Western leaders have accused the court of having a pro-Western bias. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders offer the ICC an opportunity to prove otherwise. But much will depend on how seriously countries allied with Israel take the court’s orders.

The court’s members include the majority of Western countries, which will now be obligated to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if either sets foot in their territory. Canada, one of the court’s biggest funders, was among the first to commit to doing so. Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Spain, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Slovenia have followed suit. Most other Western countries have treated the warrant with vagueness, generally agreeing that it is valid without committing specifically to arresting Netanyahu and Gallant.

Initially, only one EU member, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy,” outright opposed the warrant and even asked Netanyahu to visit. But on November 27, France declared that it considered Netanyahu immune from the ICC’s order because Israel is not a member of the court. If this principle is to be applied elsewhere, Putin, too, should be considered immune, given Russia’s non-membership in the ICC. The United States is also not a member of the court and is in fact openly hostile to its operations. The Biden administration has declared its disagreement with the arrest warrants, and surrogates of President-Elect Donald Trump have accused the court of anti-Semitism, promising a much tougher approach when Trump comes into office.

Netanyahu, like many others wanted by the court, will probably never appear before it. But that doesn’t make the ruling meaningless. International law has always been aspirational, in part because the world lacks an international law-enforcement agency (Interpol serves only to coordinate among various national police forces). But international justice has more significance in the world today than at any previous time in human history. Dozens of treaties obligate countries around the world and are referenced every day in national and transnational courts, sometimes leading to real results for victims and perpetrators. Viewed from a long historical perspective, this is a grand achievement. And last week’s ruling, by demonstrating an equal application of international law to a Western country, advances that cause.

In Governing the World: The History of an Idea, the historian Mark Mazower writes that the quest for a global court began before the First World War, with an enthusiastic, international group of peace activists who hoped that arbitration could bring an end to war. President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of that movement, helped give tooth to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, founded in 1899 at The Hague. But advocates’ hopes soon crashed into the gory realities of the 20th century. The First World War killed millions. The League of Nations, created in its aftermath, was soon overtaken by events: Liberalism retreated behind fascism and communism in the 1930s, and a Second World War followed the first, culminating in atrocities with little precedent in human history.

[Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel]

Still, the quest for international justice did not die. The defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan, and the revelation of the extraordinary extent of their crimes, led to international trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo and the foundation of the United Nations.

Nearly a century later, the International Criminal Court was founded during the optimistic period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Democracy appeared ascendant, maybe even inevitable. The genocides in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia tempered that period’s hopes—but they were met with international tribunals, which held out the promise that war criminals could no longer expect impunity. A United Nations conference in 1998, attended by representatives of 161 states, adopted the Rome Statute, which established the ICC four years later.

Many of the legal professionals who went to work for the ICC had been shaped by the experience of working for the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were relatively successful in delivering verdicts against human-rights offenders. For example, the Iranian Canadian lawyer Payam Akhavan served as a legal adviser at the tribunals for both Rwanda and Yugoslavia and then argued cases before the ICC, where he represented post-Qaddafi Libya as the country attempted to bring officials of the former regime to justice. In his book, In Search of a Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey, Akhavan describes the establishment of the ICC as the consummation of the idea of justice propounded at Nuremberg.

But the ICC has been bedeviled by controversy for much of its short life. In its early years, the court focused largely on African war criminals, because many of its member states were African. This led to allegations of bias. In the years since, it has expanded its operations across the world. And yet, most people live in countries where the court has no jurisdiction. Powerful nations such as China, India, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia never joined. The United States, Israel, and Russia signed the Rome Statute but then withdrew their signatures. The year the court was founded, the United States adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, in which it promised to take any necessary measures to release “any U.S. or allied personnel” detained by the court.

A far simpler way of denying the court’s authority is to ignore it. In 2015, South Africa refused to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir despite an ICC warrant. Earlier this year, Mongolia all but rolled out the red carpet for a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ICC’s warrant for his arrest notwithstanding.

But none of this means that the court, or the quest for international justice more broadly, is ineffectual. Putin has had to skip many an international summit (he skipped the recent Group of 20 meeting in Brazil, just as he did last year’s BRICS meeting in South Africa). And the ICC’s legal work can be used by other courts to prosecute alleged perpetrators. In the case of Israel, Netanyahu and Gallant are unlikely to ever be tried in The Hague, but the world has become much smaller for them. The warrants also provide an opportunity for Israel’s judicial system to prove its mettle: The ICC has declared that if Israel chooses to prosecute the allegations in its national court system, the warrants will be dropped.

The quest to have human conflicts decided by men and women in robes and wigs, and not just those in berets and boots, should resonate deeply with Israel’s founding ideals. The state’s declaration of independence in 1948 promised that it was “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” But it anchored this right in international law, pointing to the newly formed United Nations, which is mentioned seven times in the declaration.

Israel’s first government was led by nationalists and socialists. But the country’s first justice minister, and the architect of its judicial system, was one of the few signatories of the declaration who defined himself primarily as a liberal. A Berlin-born lawyer, Pinchas Rosen had moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1926, at the age of 39, having earned law degrees in Germany before the country’s liberal traditions were destroyed by Nazism.

Israel was hardly a liberal paradise in its early years. It enforced a military rule over its Arab citizens until 1966. But Rosen did establish a robust court system and was adamant that the State of Israel was to be a state of law. The country joined the United Nations and, with such legendary diplomats as the British-educated Abba Eban, overcame the isolation of its early years to establish a seat for itself at the table of international law. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 has rightly called that commitment to the law into question; but it has also been the subject of contestation within the country.

[Gershom Gorenberg: Israel’s disaster foretold]

Practically all of Israel’s political leaders have condemned the ICC’s decision. But some voices of dissent are audible. Naama Lazimi, a progressive member of the Knesset, called Thursday “a sad day for Israel” and put the blame for the decision on Netanyahu, not the court. “This was unnecessary,” she wrote on X, adding that it could have been avoided if the Israeli government had undertaken an independent inquiry and pursued a settlement to end the war and return the hostages held by Hamas. “But Netanyahu chose and still chooses his own position and cynical and personal interests,” she concluded: “The Hague has come out against Netanyahu, Netanyahu against Israel.” The Israeli organization Peace Now has taken a similar position, blaming the country’s leadership.

The long-term interests of Israel and those of enthusiasts for international law need not diverge. As a small country with many ill-wishers, surrounded by militias that clamor for its destruction, Israel often feels itself under siege and classifies any action against it as an unforgivable betrayal. But the country owes much of its past success to its recognition under international law and its membership in the community of democratic nations. Illegally occupying the Palestinian territories, and disregarding competent international forums such as ICC, serve to undermine that status. A world where liberal democratic norms, such as respect for international legal institutions, are more prevalent will ultimately be a safer one for Israel, especially if it wishes to fulfill the dream of its founders to be a Jewish and democratic state.  

The call from The Hague should thus be seen as an urgent message that the country needs to correct its course and step back from the campaign it has pursued since October 2023. True friends of Israel are not those who attempt to shield it from international justice. They are those who remind it that as a sovereign nation, it has the right to defend itself—but not the right to be immune from legal judgment.

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This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. The first episode in this collection is from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life. The Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans talks with host Arthur Brooks about how to think differently about the time you crave and the time you actually have.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber. I’m one of the co-hosts from How to Know What’s Real. This new season of the How To series is a special one. We’ve assembled some of our favorite episodes from past seasons: a best-of collection around the themes of slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives—things I know I can use some reminders about. Each week over the next six weeks, we’ll be sharing an episode from our archives. And here’s the first. It’s from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life, and it’s called “How to Spend Time on What You Value.” Take a listen as host Arthur Brooks and producer Becca Rashid explore what might be holding people back from finding and taking advantage of the free time we all seem to crave.

[Music]

Rebecca Rashid: Okay, Arthur, I have a question for you.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah?

Rashid: If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

[Music]

Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

Listener Submission 1: If I had an extra hour a day, I would spend it sitting somewhere in nature.

Listener Submission 2: Wow. I’d find time to FaceTime my mother.

Listener Submission 3: If I had one extra hour every day, I would spend it walking around my city aimlessly.

Listener Submission 4: For me, sometimes my commute requires me to leave when it’s dark and then to get home when it’s dark. But if I had an extra hour, it would be beautiful to walk down, you know, a light-, sunlit-drenched paths with my wife.

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: How would you use it first? And then I’ll ask you how you should use it.

Brooks: I’d use it to work.

Rashid: Oh, no.

Brooks: I would work more. Yeah. For sure. And look, it’s not that bad. I love my work. I’m crazy about my work. I dream about my work.

Rashid: Hm.

Brooks: It’s great. I, I—look, I’m working right now. Can you believe it?

Rashid: Right. [Laughs.]

Brooks: It’s the best thing ever.

Rashid: That’s true.

Brooks: But it doesn’t mean that endless hours of work are going to give me what I need, because it’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be thinking back to the episode of Anna Lembke. What should I do with the hour? I should use it in communion to build love in my life. I should use it to pray, to read scripture, to spend time with my wife because now we live alone—now that we’re empty nesters—to talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it. And, you know, maybe I would, actually. You know, come to think of it, when we’re done here, I’m gonna call a friend instead of going back to work.

Rashid: The “how you would use time” and “should use time” is the big struggle, right? I think, especially since the start of the pandemic, our relationship with time has changed so drastically. There is either too much time that you don’t use wisely or you feel crunched for time in a way that all the things you would want to do are no longer an option. There’s no right answer, but I’m curious, are you applying yourself in a way that’s useful in every waking moment?

Brooks: When you have a time problem, like the coronavirus pandemic gave us all, where we became incredibly unstructured, we could use our time much, much more according to our own desires than we were ever able to before. It sounds great, but it turns out that it separates people more or less into two groups. You can call them the strivers and the fritterers, and again, you can’t necessarily tell them apart in the workplace when there’s things that you have to get done and there’s an exoskeleton that’s called your workday in the office. You got to get your work done. And so you’re a responsible professional and you do it. You don’t just, like, waste all your time and not go to the meetings and people are waiting for you. You do those things, but when your time is yours, you figure out which is your vice. Now the world pats you on the back when you’re a striver. Congratulations. It’s unbelievable. So it’s a problem when relieved of the exoskeleton of the traditional workplace, your work sprawls across your entire schedule. That’s my problem. The fritterers are a little bit different when you’ve got that extra hour. It’s just too hard to get to the thing when you just have to get your work done. So a lot of people have found that they fall behind. They get a lot less done. They doomscroll a lot …

Rashid: Right.

Brooks: And if you waste it, woe be unto you because that’s the perfect pattern for actually frittering away the day.

Rashid: Mm.

[Music]

Brooks: Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means, but it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all. How can we bridge the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? Let’s dig into the research on why people like me overschedule themselves and become too disciplined, while others feel like the days, months, and years are kind of slipping away.

Ashley Whillans: I think everyone should go to therapy.

Brooks: I don’t want to! I’m not a Millennial.

Whillans: I am. [Laughs.]

Whillans: My name is Ashley Whillans, and I’m an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money, and happiness.

Brooks: Ashley Whillans is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.

Whillans: You know, a lot of research is “me-search,” and we study the things that we struggle with. And as a happiness researcher, I was doing all of this academic research when I started my job five years ago on the importance of prioritizing time for happiness, for personal relationships. Meanwhile, my relationship was totally falling apart.

Brooks: Ashley studies one side of the time problem, the one that busy strivers face—those who try to make the most out of every waking moment. And you know who you are. She’s a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps: the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time on work and productivity. So I want to figure out what explains this. And what to do about it.

Whillans: So I had this partner of 10 years. We were going to move to Boston, start a new life together from Vancouver. And this person left me in Boston after three weeks because they said that I was spending all my time in work and that there was no relationship to be there for. And meanwhile, I was giving talks all over the country on the importance of valuing time. I was, inside, crying about this, like, dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life, and then preaching about the importance of putting time first. Eighty percent of working adults report feeling “time-poor,” like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we’re making progress on personally important goals.

These are the time traps that can make us time-poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol, this cult of busyness that’s pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar, we confer to those people high status. Wow. If they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society.

My data suggests that the most time-poor among us are, in fact, those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’ve done research in Kenya, in India, in the U. S. among single-parent households. And we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time-poor because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and child care. So this is a whole other conversation, a whole line of work where I’m trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well.

Brooks: And it’s interesting, you know, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody and the icebreaker is, “What do you do?,” which means What do you do for a living? What do you do to spend your time? And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a CEO; I work 80-hour weeks.” People think you’re a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is “Where are you going on vacation?” It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant to say, “How do you make your money?” Right? And yet, you’re suggesting that this is really not about money. It’s really about time. It’s really about the fact that we’re so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we’re highly in demand. And so the root of this problem philosophically is—well, it is philosophical, isn’t it? Because it’s the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right? Isn’t that at the root of what we’re talking about here?

Whillans: Yeah. This doesn’t happen in European countries like Italy, where actually it’s the opposite. People who have more vacations seem to be doing something right in life. I’ve talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, “Well, I thought, you know, when my kids moved out and went to college that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead I just filled those additional hours with work. And I don’t know why.”

And then we would have these conversations about how productivity has become our habit, and we don’t even know how to enjoy our free time. We’ve lost this habit. And they asked me, “How do I start to pursue a passion? So that I don’t fill every spare moment I have with work, because that’s all I’ve been doing.” And it is like we have to almost retrain ourselves to have leisure as a habit so that our defaults are not work emails, work meetings, but instead our defaults are family, friends, exercise, active leisure activities. And we really, especially in North American culture, need to be pushing against work as our default mode of operating.

Brooks: For happiness reasons, is what you’re talking about.

Whillans: For happiness.

Brooks: Yeah, for happiness reasons. Let me get back to this really interesting question of you. So you were thinking about time and then you experienced the bitter fruit of not having enough time for your personal relationship. So, you know, no doubt it was more complicated than that. But did you make any life changes pursuant to that really terrible experience?

Whillans: Yeah, but I think my life changes don’t sound that dramatic. I’m just trying to adjust a little bit around the margins to make sure I have time for things that matter to me outside of productivity. So I don’t work on the weekends very much anymore. I have a kid who’s one year old. I have a husband that I love. I also don’t work for the first hour in the morning. I will use that time to invest in myself, read, meditate, go for a walk, exercise. That first hour is mine, not my employer’s. And as a function of those two rules, I have to be a lot more careful about what I say yes and no to. But I’ve tried to almost have a quota strategy. I’m not hard-and-fast about this, but I will work on one paper at a time where I’m really working on it every day, not 15 papers that I’m sort of working on, kind of all the time. So I think the experience of being at the lowest point in my life and trying to put some of these strategies into practice are about small things that I do every day that are nonnegotiable for my happiness.

Brooks: You’re clearly putting your work within boundaries, and this is a key point that you’re making, is that work is within boundaries because you’re setting up your budget and you’re living within your budget. Treat [time] like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income, because you’re really on a fixed income of time. So has it hurt your work or has it made your work better and made you more efficient? Is there a cost?

Whillans: So one thing that I learned early on—and there’s research to substantiate this—is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself, as opposed to compare yourself to others. So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well. What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people’s successes? Because in my field, there’s “no good enough.” Nothing you’re going to do is going to feel like enough, is going to be enough, is going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Absolutely. Especially since having a kid. No question, I am not as fast.

But I also don’t hold myself to those same standards as when I was working all the time, and I think that’s really key for my own feeling of satisfaction. My ideal self looks different now—there’s research on this too—my ideal self used to look like working all the time, being on a plane every week, and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self, and my actual time use looked pretty close to that. And then I realized that might be good on one dimension of my life, productivity, and really hurt other dimensions of my life: well-being, social relationships that I know as a happiness researcher matter a lot for happiness.

So I changed my ideal. My ideal now looks like publishing a couple of impactful papers on projects I care about that I think are going to matter. Not traveling very much and making sure I have time to spend with my friends and family and investing in myself every day. So I also had to change the aspirational goal. I had to change what my ideal self looked like so that my time use now is matching a different ideal than what my ideal was before.

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Brooks: For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of your career, but never stopped. And she’s confessing to me that she’s got a cordial relationship at best with her husband. She doesn’t know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn’t been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don’t trust her decision making, because it’s not as crisp as it once was.

She’s like, “What do I do?” And I said, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You need to use your time differently, you know, than you are!” And I said, “Why don’t you do what you know you need to do?” And she kind of stops and says, “I guess I prefer to be special than happy.” How much of that is going around?

Whillans: At least she admitted it. I feel like something that’s very difficult is that to have this realization, right? You have to understand what you care about and want, like truly, what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talked to, she did truly value being the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she’s actually somewhat self-aware about that, right?

My economist colleagues say: “Write down a model, Ashley. Write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy.” I say, “I can’t do that because I don’t know what you value.” So for us to be spending time in the so-called right ways, we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first. And then once we know what we truly value, research suggests that the more that our lives on a regular basis look like our ideal. So what your last seven days looked like in a time diary, and how close that is to your ideal time use, minimizing that discrepancy is hugely important for life satisfaction and for the amount, on average, of positive mood you experience on a regular basis.

Brooks: You know, for a lot of people—they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families, but they don’t actually know how to do that. Using your time in leisure is a very special thing. It’s, you know, you look at it philosophically: Aristotle made a big comparison, or made a big distinction, between work, recreation, and leisure. Now, work is productive activity. We all know what that is. Recreation is a break from work to make you ready to go back to work. Leisure is, in and of itself, something worth pursuing. Now, Josef Pieper, the great 20th-century philosopher said that leisure is the basis of culture. I mean, these are people who elevated leisure, and yet, you got to know how to do it.

Whillans: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s something that we do have to build a habit around, and that’s where trying to change 10, 15 minutes, 30 minutes seems a lot more possible and achievable. Going back to behavioral-science literature, you want to be thinking about setting a concrete goal. And part of the reason, in my research, we often trade money for time—so we’ll go after money instead of going after time, because money is concrete. We know the value of $1,000, and we know how to count or track three hours, five hours, 10 hours, and turn that into productivity in our minds. What does it mean to have more free time? That is an abstract concept.

What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we’re trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract, like spending time with friends and family, we need to concretely write down what that means.

We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Hsee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work, why can’t we do that for our leisure time, too? Setting a goal of one hour of exercise.

Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering 15 to 30 minutes—mapping out what 30 minutes more of social-connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion, because as soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less.

Brooks: And now at the same time, of course, I mean, exactly the contrary: You can overschedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. I was a CEO before, and it was just, it was a grind, man. I mean, it was. I missed a lot of my kids’ childhood. I just did. But at the same time, I made a commitment. So I get up in the morning. I exercise every morning for an hour. I go to Catholic Mass every morning with my wife, and I do travel most weeks. I travel about, you know— I make about 50 weekly trips a year and that’s a lot, but I’m never traveling on the weekends. I probably missed three weekends a year, and I don’t work at night. And part of the reason is because I learned all these things that you learned at 32—I learned at 55.

And so, you know, woe be on to me. Nonetheless, my quality of life has dramatically increased for exactly putting those boundaries in place. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it, which is one of your points as well. You got to stay flexible on these things. Part of the benefit that you’re getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right?

Whillans: Yeah. I love the research that shows that if you schedule too many leisure activities in a day, it literally feels like work and it sucks you out of the present and then you worry if you have enough time to drive across town and meet your friend for brunch after you’ve had coffee with another friend or family member. And so you want to actually—exactly—capitalize on this idea of building in flexibility. So if we start to be too rigid with our personal goals, that makes them feel like work, and basically what my research shows is that when you’re in the experience of doing something, you have some free time, you want to do activities that you say are intrinsically motivating, that you feel like you’re doing because you enjoy it. That’s how you’re going to capitalize on leisure.

It doesn’t matter as much what the activity is. And there are some leisure activities which generally are better for well-being—like exercise, socializing, volunteering, tend to be better, on average, than things like passive leisure activities, like watching TV, resting, relaxing, which aren’t as enjoyable or don’t produce the same gains in mood. But it also matters how you feel about that activity. So really what matters is whether you feel like you’re doing the leisure experience because you want to, or you feel like you’re doing it for some other reason. So these people who are walking around, convincing themselves to go to church because it’s good for their productivity are not going to enjoy the experience of church to the same extent as someone who’s going because they truly enjoy it.

Brooks: How about, you know, we’ve touched on this a little bit, these semi-leisure activities. You know, there’s leisure and then there’s leisure. Remember, Aristotle says there’s work, there’s recreation, and there’s leisure. And recreation is to get you ready to work. And so, yeah, restorative to what? Restorative to life? No. Restorative to go back to work. And a lot of people will say, “Why do you work out so much?” They say, “You know, it’s just great for my work.” But what about people who are using work as a pretext for leisure? Are they sucking the life and happiness out of their leisure by turning it into just recreation?

Whillans: When you’re in the moment of a leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. And extrinsic motivation is, definitionally: You’re doing something because someone else told you, or you’re doing it for an external reason, like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity; you think you should because your mom wants you to—

Brooks: Are you going to make money? Are you going to get more fame? Are you going to get more power? Or whatever down the line. And a lot of the studies will assume that spending time with your family is intrinsic and going to work for money is extrinsic, but that might be exactly the opposite. Is there a difference in time scarcity and busyness and status between people my age and people, let’s say, in their early 20s today?

Whillans: My data suggests that we get better with time as we age. So this is also consistent with Laura Carstensen’s work on socioemotional selectivity theory. We start to gravitate toward things that are meaningful as we get older and we’re less likely to seek out, do this novelty-seeking exercise. And so in my data, reliably, people who are older tend to be more likely to value time over money and happier as a result. And part of what’s driving that isn’t simply the realization of what matters to us. It’s also that we’re typically more financially secure. So there is this very real component in my data whereby financial insecurity, not feeling optimistic about our financial futures, drives this need to fill every single moment with productivity. And that is more common among younger people with school debt trying to move up the career ladder.

And research suggests that we undervalue our future time. So this can also make it difficult for us to choose time in the future when we’re planning our schedules. We know that the value of $500 is going to be as good as—well, okay, we might have to inflation adjust these days, but okay—the basic idea is that the value of $500 now is going to be the same now, three months, six months, a year from now, that’s how we think about money. We just know it’s going to have value across time. That’s pretty invariant. Now, when it comes to time, we’re like, Time right now really matters. I’m so busy, overwhelmed, a million things to do. Time in three months? Nah, I don’t really need more time then. Look at my calendar; it looks free compared to now. Six months, even freer. So the extent to which we value or give our lives meaning through work directly is correlated with how time-poor we feel and the extent to which we fill our calendars as a way to give our lives meaning.

Brooks: Now say something to our listeners here who might be saying, “I don’t know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can’t think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me, because I’ve been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I’m a Homo economicus. I’m just, I’m a machine.” What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley.

Whillans: Yeah. do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What things did you do across the day, and how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through gratitude—so there’s research on this showing that people who take time to reflect on what they’re grateful for tend to be more self-aware.

So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful. And in that day, maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking That was pretty great. Maybe it was listening to a really interesting podcast on a topic you hadn’t heard before. And then you’ll be like, Oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably try to do more of them.

It seems simple, but honestly, it wasn’t really until I started to create some separation in my life such that I wasn’t just getting up every single day working and then trying to decompress at the end of the day by drinking. Because let’s be real. That’s what happens. There was no space in that schedule that I used to have of “work, work, work, drink, go to bed, work, work, work, work, drink, go to bed” to even have a thought about What in that day did I enjoy? Because I wasn’t even taking a second to pause, reflect, and think about what was bringing me joy and satisfaction on any one particular day. And this is also good for work, right? Because it’s going to give you a sense of the things at work that you love and enjoy. And maybe you should try to do more of those and less of all the other stuff.

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Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who helped make this show what it is. We asked how you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding. And here’s what you said.

Listener: If I had an extra hour each day, I would go home to my studio apartment, I would close the door, put on the little bolt lock to make sure I’m safe, and then I would just sit in that silence. And do absolutely nothing. But I think just that within life, there are all these things you need to do just to survive and maintain some level of relative sanity—like eat, which means you have to cook food; and sleeping; and connecting with people, which means driving your car to see friends; and calling your parents; and doing all these things that, um, I guess we tell ourselves we want to do it because we have to, and in a way it creates happiness, whatever that is. But I feel like all of that keeps us from actually sitting in the moment and thinking, like, What is happening? Why are we here?

Brooks: If you look back in the old days before we were so unbelievably distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days too. You know, when I rode the subway in the 1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I wasn’t just, I’m going to go on the subway and stand there doing nothing. I had a book. I had a newspaper. I was, you know, whatever—I was listening to my, to my Walkman. Remember those?

Rashid: Yes.

Brooks: And I have to say, I get the sentiment of the caller, which is, Here’s what I would do if I had an extra hour. Well, guess what? You have 10 minutes where you could do that and you probably aren’t. And that’s the difference between would and should. Would and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is, what’s the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour and that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves. And this is one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners, people who are sitting in meditation and the only direction that they get is “think of nothing.” You know, “Empty your mind.” Well, you know, it’s hard to do.

Rashid: Why is it so hard?

Brooks: Because we’re not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend Marty Seligman, who teaches, who’s one of the pioneers in the science of happiness field. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens; we should call ourselves Homo prospectus because our state of nature is for our brain to engage in all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. “What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse?” And that occupies us so very, very much that even when we’re trying to do nothing, we’re not doing nothing.

Ashley Whillans told us about how to use our time in a smart way. That means scheduling these things that are ordinarily unscheduled. How funny we go through life and say, I’m going to treat my happiness as a nice-to-have. And if I have a little bit of extra time, I’ll think a little bit about it. No, no. [Laughs.] This is serious business. Put it in your schedule. Put it in your schedule. Absolutely. Every single day. Learn how the science works, and then take the serious time that it takes. Be time smart, as Ashley Whillans calls it, and take the time to do that work, because the payoff will be potentially greater than the payoff for anything else you could do in that time.

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Rashid: That’s all for this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.

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Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to Season 3, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special best-of collection about how to slow down, we’ll look at what it means to really rest.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: There is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right? The idea that there are connections that we can make or things we can understand about ourselves, our place in the world, the nature of our lives that only come when we’re resting or, you know, when we’re still.