Enoh Ogbevire

The typical American guy working full time makes about $35 an hour, so every hour he spends on the couch with his best friend quietly costs him $35. That's the real reason men can't hang out without golf or the game on, and a Swedish economist figured it out back in 1970. His name was Staffan Linder. He wrote a book called The Harried Leisure Class, and the idea is pretty simple once you hear it. Every hour you have is worth whatever you could've earned with it. As a country gets richer and wages go up, your free time gets more expensive right along with your work time. Linder said people react by trying to squeeze more out of every free hour, and the easy way to do that is to stack stuff on top of it. So the hour turns into a round of golf, a game on the big TV, a fishing trip, a new grill you want your buddy to see. That's what Trevor is describing with "the third thing." When a guy texts "want to go fishing Saturday?" he's attaching something to the hour so it feels worth spending. The fishing gives him a reason to be there. Two guys on a couch just talking feels like nothing got done, so if you grew up somewhere wages are high, your brain files it as wasted time. Even though it's probably the best thing either of them will do all week. It also explains why Trevor's friends from the township in South Africa and from Trinidad don't have this problem. Trinidadians even have a word for it, liming, which basically means hanging out with zero agenda. An afternoon of doing nothing in Soweto costs a fraction of what it costs in Manhattan, so it never got squeezed out of anyone's week. Now do the math on an actual close friend. A University of Kansas researcher named Jeffrey Hall found it takes more than 200 hours together before someone becomes a close friend. At $35 an hour, that's almost $7,000 worth of time per friend. Some part of your brain runs a version of that number every time "just come over" feels like it needs a reason attached. Later in that same interview, Trevor tells a story that's basically Linder's whole book in one afternoon. Once he was hosting The Daily Show, a theme park offered him and his friends a pass to skip every line. They rode everything a few times over in about three hours, in a park that usually takes all day. He came home with a headache and his friends were dehydrated. They'd barely talked, and it was the most depressing theme park trip they'd ever been on. That night they tried to figure out what went wrong, and it hit them that the lines were the part they loved. Standing in a queue for an hour meant there was nothing to do but hang out and talk. That pass did to one afternoon what a big salary does to your whole social life. It got rid of all the dead time, and the dead time was what they came for.