A Day in the Life of Americans

[40acres]

I wake up @ 4AM most days to get my work out in. Walking to the gym gives me a glimpse of a different America. It's mostly men, white guys in my city, they are all middle class looking dudes. Loading up trucks at the nearby grocery or beginning/ending their shift, maybe some security guards once in a while.

There's some homeless people every once in a while but for the most part they don't seem to be active. There are no cars in the streets and it feels like a movie set. Always an interesting hour, 4 AM.

[joejerryronnie]

3am is when the really strange things happen. It's too late for most people to be out after a night at the bar and too early for even the earlybirds to be out and about. The last time I regularly saw 3am was my first couple of years in college when we were experimenting with things that make it tough to sleep.

[mmartinson]

Curious, do you manage to fall asleep by 8 or 9? I'd love to get up early more regularly, but I find it tough up turn my mind off before the world quiets down.

[floren]

It's a wonderful time to be out driving on the streets. You often have even the biggest thoroughfares to yourself in a quiet world.

[loganfrederick]

Like everything else, there's a TED Talk on 4 AM: https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m

[abenedic]

> It's mostly men, white guys in my city

I am sorry, I am not American, though I live here. Does this not in itself contribute to the uncomfortable feelings of women and minorities in your city?

[purplezooey]

what exactly is an 'active' homeless person

[em500]

If you're mostly interested in the breakdown of time spend, rather than these animations between activities, the charts at the data source are much clearer: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts.htm

[fogetti]

For me it's very strange to see that a huge portion of the population sleeps until 9am (and a big number even until 10am!). I worked in many countries before and in most workplaces you had to show up at least by 9. Of course there were some exceptions but in general that's how it was.

[chrisco255]

Yeah, well there's a lot of businesses that operate late into the night. You think 24/7 pharmacies, retail, restaurants, etc operate themselves? There's also emergency personnel, security, even night construction crews.

[kasey_junk]

You have clearly worked in ‘white collar’ environments.

2-10 or 4-12 shifts frequently involve waking up at 9 or 10.

[mjevans]

I think it also depends a LOT on if you're an early / late morning or even night person.

I find it much easier to stay up later than to wake up earlier; for others it's the opposite.

[charmides]

Seems like my sleeping patterns are a lot different than those of most other people.

Also, I felt depressed to see that people spend most of their lives sleeping and working or in some transition thereof.

[steveklabnik]

"8 Hours for Work, 8 Hours for Rest, 8 Hours for What We Will" was a slogan in the labor movement, fighting for the eight hour day, coined in 1817.

[gascan]

Well, we spend a third of our lives sleeping by design (which, you should rest reassured, improves the quality of your waking hours).

As for the third spent working, for as long as we have liked eating & having a roof over our heads, that has required steady effort.

[mancerayder]

Even more suspicious or chore-seeming to those that are more productive during the evening, which studies recently suggest this could be how some of us are wired. There's this, I think Anglo-Saxon fixation on early mornings being where productive and good people do things.

Maybe a cultural byproduct of regions of the world with short, dark winter days?

[learc83]

I think people might not be recording their sleeping times accurately in the time use survey they used because there is a cultural desire to be seen as an early riser.

[qubax]

It the worst during winter. Wake up it's dark. Come home it's dark. Hello darkness my old friend...

[pitaj]

The animation is a little hard to follow because the "balls" get stuck in different places for a while, and the colors aren't easy to distinguish or attribute to certain activities.

[purplezooey]

I like the guy who goes into work at 5am then goes back to 'sleeping' at 7:15am. heh.

[new_hackers]

pager duty, lol

[swaggyBoatswain]

That was some pretty dope animation

I was surprised the numbers at work around 1-3 PM only tops off at 30%. It said the diagram was for ages 25 to 34, most of these people should be working 9 to 5 jobs though.

I thought the numbers would go upwards of 50% to 60%

[jondubois]

It's extremely surprising that by 3pm in the middle of the day, there are as many people enjoying leisure time as there are people working (about 30%). Where are these people? I don't see anyone leaving the office at 3pm where I work. I'm pretty sure that the 'average day' doesn't mean weekend.

I thought it might be night shift workers, but then during the night, only about 1% of people are working.

[mysterydip]

I would have agreed with you before I got a job in the public sector. I'd say a quarter of the people in the buildings around here are gone by 3, with hardly anyone still here by 6. Some of those people start their day at 6 too, but there are also some "in by 10, out by 2" kinds of people. Nearby DC seems to be the same way from their rush hour traffic patterns.

[bonniemuffin]

The American Time Use Survey covers all the days of the week, so these numbers represent averages across all the days.[1]

If you work a five-day week with a two-day weekend, then 28% of the time you're also not working at 3PM, so don't get too jealous of all the lucky stiffs having 3PM leisure time. :)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/tus/

[ofcrpls]

Previous discussion in 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10738607

[11thEarlOfMar]

I'd be curious to see different countries at the same time of day. Would be quite illustrative, I believe.

[known]

The U.S. is the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World

https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product...