Lower income people spend more time watching TV cause they can’t afford other activities like browsing at the mall or gym memberships.

Jim

But, I can speak to this one from experience. I grew up around poor people (come to think of it, I was one of them). And I currently live among a very affluent and wealthy community. I wouldn’t say one works any harder than another, but they certainly have very different priorities and spend time in very different ways.

The poor people I grew up with, worked not for fullfilment or opportunity, but simply because it was necessary to put food on the table. Their jobs were usually hard, unpleasant, and boring. And they were often supporting large, fractured, inter-generational households, in other words, complicated family situations. When they got home, their idea of leisure was to completely leave work behind, and totally chill out on the couch, in the lawn chair, on the porch, and shoot the breeze with family and neighbors. Big, spontaneous, all-day barbeques (always in sweltering, humid weather) were a major feature of summer.

By contrast, the relatively wealthy people I live around don’t have time to hang out and chat too much. Schedules are packed with work, commuting, shuttling kids to this that or the other practice/lesson/play-date, or to see grandparents, then off to the weekend house. Social bonds are developed more by activities in common than by neighborhood geography (i.e. your kids are in the same play so you get to know each other). And work and play are kind of inter-mingled in a way that makes play seem more like work. There is a kind of work hard, play hard, competitive mentality that makes it difficult to truly relax (at least in my observation which may be quite biased to big city lifestyle). In fact, relaxation in the form of sitting on one’s rear-end and doing absolutely nothing (unless forced at gunpoint by the wife to sit on a beach and read a novel), does not seem to be part of the wealthy mindset. And even on the beach, one might be required to take a conference call or two.

I’d certainly rather be wealthy than not, which is how I’ve focused my priorities. But, it’s not at all how I thought it would be. When I was a kid, I dreamed that once you made it, that was it. I figured it would like hey: You made it, you proved yourself, you’re the bigshot, you could take 3 hour lunches and be at the country club yukking it up with your buddies by 4pm. But, even the guys I know worth mega-bucks don’t have that lifestyle. By and large, self-made people are doers and they can’t just turn off that compulsion to be productive. Even the trust funders I know, are driven people, bent on proving that they aren’t just relying on family money.

Somewhere, I’m sure there is somebody living the wealthy life of leisure. Wherever they are, I wish they’d let me in on the secret password.

Jerry
http://www.leads4insurance.com

Speaking “stereoptypically”, it would seem that poor people do not work as hard as people who are better off, this is why they are poor.

As a society, if we where less driven to improve our financial situations, we would all have more “leisure time”.

The goal is to find a balance between working too hard, and not working enough to maximize the quality of your leisure time.