The Daily Valet. - 9/17/21, Friday

✔️ Embrace Your Free Time

September 17, 2021

Friday, September 17th Edition

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor in Chief of Valet.

I’m definitely ready for a weekend of free time.

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor ⋯ @coryohlendorf

Today’s Big Story

Embrace Your Free Time

How we use and think about our leisure matters more than the number of hours

Last month, Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter posed a provocative query: “What if people don’t want ‘a career’?” It was a rumination on burnout and the rising frustration in the job market. It’s an existential question of whether our sole focus in life should be to dedicate the majority of our waking hours to a corporation.

Warzel said this week that the essay not only was three times as popular as anything he’s ever published in his newsletter but also spurred a reaction that was “violently split” between people for whom the topic resonated and those who “saw career skeptics as entitled, coddled complainers looking for handouts and, in the process, sullying the American work ethic for good.”

According to Business Insider, Americans are fleeing their jobs in record numbers. We’re in the midst of what’s being called the Great Resignation. The pandemic’s WFH boom made it clear that many employees worked too much and felt they had too little power over their own time.

Is there a magic number of optimal work and leisure hours? A new study, published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF], offered what seemed like counterintuitive findings: that both too little and too much leisure time were associated with lower subjective well-being.

This led to a flurry of headlines proclaiming that too much leisure is dangerous. “Study links too much free time to lower sense of well-being,” the Guardian reported. And The Hill offered “Scientists find too much free time is bad for you.”

But according to Vice, the actual findings of the paper are much more complex (and interesting). The authors did find a modest negative relationship between well-being and free time when it exceeded five hours. But they also showed that when people used their free time in meaningful ways—like socializing, or activities that felt purposeful, not passive like scrolling social media or binge watching TV—that negative relationship vanished. Then, the relationship to free time became linear: More was better.

What we can learn from this research is that providing people with tons of extra free time won’t always automatically make them happier. That doesn’t mean we should strive to stay within a certain hourly range of leisure but that we need to better learn how to be leisurely in the first place—a skill that we Americans are clearly lacking.

↦ FYI: More than half of Americans don’t use all of their paid vacation days, according to an annual report from the U.S. Travel Association. And those who do report feeling “vacation guilt.”

Migrants Are Huddled Under a Texas Bridge

The temporary camp in Del Rio has grown with staggering speed in recent days

Dense crowds of Haitian migrants who have crossed the Rio Grande in recent days are sleeping outdoors under a border bridge in South Texas, creating a humanitarian emergency and a logistical challenge U.S. agents describe as unprecedented.

According to the Washington Post, more than 10,000 migrants have arrived at the impromptu camp, and they are expecting more in the coming days.

Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state police and the National Guard to assist border agents in Del Rio, saying the federal response had not been enough to quell the surge in crossings. Bruno Lozano, the city's mayor, described on Thursday squalid conditions under the bridge that more so resembled a shantytown, with little access to clean water and food and just a few portable toilets.

The squalid conditions are reflective of the humanitarian challenge facing Biden as border arrests hover around 20-year highs. U.S. authorities arrested more than 195,000 migrants at the Mexican border last month, according to government data released on Wednesday.

↦ Meanwhile: Thousands of Afghans on American military bases are awaiting resettlement.

The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Rolling Stone just overhauled the influential list for the first time in nearly two decades

In 2004, Rolling Stone published its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It became their most widely read and circulated article of all time.

But a lot has changed during the past 17 years; back then the iPod and MP3s were still relatively new, and Billie Eilish was just three years old. So they decided it was time to give the list a total reboot.

To create the new list, Rolling Stone polled musicians, producers, music industry professionals, critics and journalists, who each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs. Of the almost 4,000 songs that appeared on these lists, they pulled out the top 500, which feature a lot more hip-hop, indie rock and R&B (among other genres) than the original list.

On the extreme ends of the spectrum, Kanye West's “Stronger” ranks at 500 and Aretha Franklin's “Respect” comes in first. “Music changes so fast, the pace of change within the music space is incredible,” Rolling Stone music editor Christian Hoard told NBC News. “It's reflective of what Rolling Stone is these days, it's not (just) classic rock. It's a broad spectrum of music.”

↦ FYI: See the full list at Rolling Stone.

Subscription Tacos?

Taco Bell is testing a ‘Taco Lover's Pass’

Even Taco Bell, fast food's wild child, is becoming a tech company now.

In about 20 participating restaurants across an Arizona test market, customers can pay between $5 to $10 per month for a Taco Lover's Pass, which gives subscribers one taco a day for 30 days. The app-based program is currently active through the end of November.

Subscription services are more common for streaming, but restaurants have also experimented with them. Panera has an $8.99 monthly program that lets customers get a free hot or iced cup of coffee every day. Burger King had a similar coffee subscription, but has since scrapped it.

Of course, they're not without their rules: The only way to become a certified Taco Lover is by buying the pass through the Taco Bell app; no, sorry, the Chalupa Supreme is not part of the deal. A company spokesperson told The Atlantic that “there's no guarantee” the subscription service will become available nationwide, “but when it comes to Taco Bell innovation, we never say never.”

In Other News

↦ Biden Angers France and European Union With New Australia, U.K, Initiative

↦ Instagram Boss Says Social Media Is Like Cars: People Are Going to Die

↦ Philip Morris Is Buying an Asthma Inhaler Company. Health Groups Are Suspicious

Other Things We’re Talking About Today

Getting “Pratted”

The new GoPro

This horrifying coloring book

A Weekend Pairing

Prisoners of the Ghostland + Unfiltered Sake

One of the most intriguing, and certainly weirdest, films from this year's Sundance festival was Prisoners of the Ghostland, which hits theaters and streams on Amazon Prime Video today. The descriptions range from “surreal sci-fi gonzo samurai action epic” to “a mashup of neon-streaked Tokyo fleshpot and Mad Max-style wild west dystopia.” Nicolas Cage stars as a prisoner tasked with finding a sleazy governor's missing granddaughter in an atomic wasteland populated by mannequin-faced time slaves. (Hey, why not?)

If he's able to rescue her from these supernatural beings in a region called the Ghostland, he can go free. If he tries to harm her, explosives in his arms will go off; if he gets sexually excited by her, he's got big problems below the belt. Oh, and he has to do it in just five days. The New York Times says that if the combination of Nicolas Cage and the director Sion Sono “suggests a special kind of lunacy, this sunbaked samurai western more than delivers.” And Screenrant says the highly-stylized movie is destined to become a cult classic.

↦ Your Pairing:This wild ride of a movie doesn't need some over-the-top cocktail. How about some mellow unfiltered sake? The cloudy spirit isn't as strong as the clear stuff. In fact, Yaegaki's perfectly blends a peppery radish spice with sweet notes of pineapple and mango.