The shift begins when she leaves her desk at 5 p.m.
She drives home, arriving at 5:45. Five minutes later, she’s starting a load of laundry; at 6 p.m. she changes into workout clothes. By 6:25 she’s on the treadmill for precisely 30 minutes. At 7 o’clock she grabs a grocery delivery from her front porch and unloads it. At 7:15 she makes an electrolyte drink. Shower time is at 7:25. At 8 p.m. she cooks up some salmon and broccoli; at 8:25 she plates her dinner while tidily packing up the leftovers. Not a moment is wasted.
This is one woman on TikTok’s version of the “5 to 9 after the 9 to 5.” Over the past couple of years, the vloggers of social media have taken to documenting their routines from 5 to 9 p.m. Some creators also make a morning version, the “5 to 9 before the 9 to 5,” starting at 5 a.m. These routines are highly edited, almost hypnotic, with quick cuts, each mini-scene overlaid with a time stamp. Hours pass in just a couple of minutes, and the compressed time highlights a sense of efficiency. The videos have big to-do-list energy; the satisfaction they offer is that of vicariously checking boxes.
In the past few weeks, I have lived months’ worth of compressed mornings and evenings with 5-to-9 vloggers. They are a self-selecting crew, certainly. But the sheer volume of hours that I consumed allowed me to see, in a big-picture way, how the need to be productive seeps into people’s leisure time—time that ideally would be free of such concerns. These videos reflect a truth that predates and will almost certainly outlive them: When life revolves around work, even leisure becomes labor.
One way to look at 5-to-9 videos is as the product of people trying to make the most of the leisure time they have. Given how many of these videos are made by people in their early 20s, I see in them a new generation entering the workforce and acclimating to the reality that time is limited. But in attempting to take control back from their jobs, many 5-to-9 video creators end up reproducing a version of the thing they are trying to distance themselves from. If you clock out, go home, and continue checking things off a list, you haven’t really left the values of work behind. One woman I saw details the “five nonnegotiables” for her 5 to 9, the things she must achieve each evening: exercise; a healthy, home-cooked meal; a shower; a skin-care routine; and a clean kitchen. After she ticks all those boxes, the night is nearly over. Not much time remains for anything unplanned. Many creators also use part of their leisure time to plan for the upcoming workday, laying out outfits for the morning or writing their schedule in a planner.
The threat of waste looms over many nighttime-routine videos—“X Number of Things I Did to Stop Wasting My Evenings” is a common title formula. (Recommendations include multitasking so you can get more done at once, and “Whatever you do, do not sit down.”) What exactly you accomplish almost doesn’t matter—a spotless house, a completed Pilates class, an “everything shower”—so long as you’ve been a busy little bee whom no one could accuse of wasting time. The idea that unproductive time is time squandered is not unique to the 5 to 9; it pervades much of the American approach to leisure. “In a capitalist society, we do feel like we have to prove our worth through our productivity,” Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist and the author of Real Self-Care, told me. By inverting the “9 to 5” formulation of a corporate workday, these videos present free time explicitly as another shift, one you hire yourself to work.
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero is an assistant professor of cinema and digital media at UC Davis who has written about other productive-vlogging trends on TikTok. In 5-to-9 videos, she told me, “the main message is not about how to rest, but: How do you operationalize rest to still be a productive part of your day?” Several evening-routine videos show the creators editing their content, and Sweeney-Romero pointed out that even the most relaxing vlog still has a whiff of labor about it—because someone had to shoot, edit, and post it.
Conspicuously missing from most of the videos I watched is any kind of socializing, which corresponds with the fact that Americans have been spending more and more time alone over the past couple of decades. After watching scores of solitary evenings, I deliriously started searching 5-to-9 friends and 5-to-9 community??? and found a handful of examples. The sight of people eating together, laughing, and walking outside in the sunlight was refreshing after hours of scrolling through videos of tasks completed alone in greige apartments with overhead lighting. But these videos were few and far between—other people can be an obstacle to running your life with the precision of a ticking watch.
In most 5-to-9 videos, we get little sense of people’s actual jobs, save for the times they log back on in the evening, or the glimpses they show of their side gigs as content creators. What they highlight instead is the way a work mindset can follow you home and shape your leisure in its image. For many Americans, work is the focus of life, the place to find purpose and a sense of self. My colleague Derek Thompson has dubbed this “workism”—the religion of work. A 2023 Pew survey found that a majority of Americans—71 percent—rated “having a job or career they enjoy” as an “extremely” or “very” important ingredient for a fulfilling life. Work also gets prioritized in many people’s lives out of necessity. Research shows that people in countries with high levels of economic inequality, such as the United States, tend to have worse work-life balance.
It wasn’t always this way. In much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, “the view was that leisure was the place where we would find the best things in life,” Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, told me. “This would be the place to realize our full humanity, outside of the economy.” Yet after World War II, Hunnicutt writes in his book Free Time, the workweek stagnated at the 40 hours we still know as standard today, and American culture shifted toward seeking meaning through work, rather than outside of it: “We moderns for some reason no longer expect work to ever become a subordinate part of life.”
Some 5-to-9 videos do seem to push back against hustle culture. Their creators mock the hyperproductivity of a typical morning or evening routine, instead showing themselves zoning out. One man’s “5 to 9” consists of flopping on the couch and scrolling on his phone for hours. Another woman, after shutting her laptop, pauses and stares into space “to process what just happened over the past nine hours and shove any trauma coming to the surface back into the far depths of my consciousness,” then goes “straight to my cat for at least 45 minutes of emotional-support cuddling.”
The joke is that their jobs have left them too exhausted to do much of anything at all. Yet even in this willfully unproductive use of leisure time, work hovers overhead like a ghost. For these people, and many others who don’t film themselves, free time may not be a reproduction of work, but it is a reaction to it. Work is still winning.
In 1948, the German philosopher Josef Pieper argued that time away from work is all too often still kind of about work. “The simple ‘break’ from work—the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer,” he wrote in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, “is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ‘new strength’ for ‘new work,’ as the word ‘refreshment’ indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.”
This is the trap of leisure in a culture fixated on work. Anything done consciously or subconsciously for the sake of recovering from or balancing out work is not entirely free from labor—even if it’s genuinely relaxing and enjoyable. When you take a bath to unwind from a stressful shift or get into crafting to offset all the screen time you have at your job, when you go to bed early so you’ll have energy for work the next day or wake up early to meditate and calm yourself before a commute, your rest is at least partly in service of your work. According to Pieper, that is not true leisure. “Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of ‘refreshment,’” he wrote, “will experience its authentic fruit.”
What would need to happen for people to experience their leisure as being in no way connected to labor? Certain policies might make work less central to people’s lives: universal basic income, for example, or a four-day workweek. But the experts and philosophers of leisure would suggest that a collective mindset shift is also required.
Achievement, optimization, and escape are all approaches to leisure that Lakshmin calls “faux self-care,” as opposed to the real self-care that she titled her book after. Faux self-care, she told me, is “prescribed from the outside,” or it’s a “reaction to being burnt out.” Real self-care, meanwhile, means “being engaged with your own reality,” she said. It’s less about what you’re doing than how and why you’re doing it.
Consider a yoga class, for example. You can go to one because you feel like you should, to get some movement after a sedentary workday, and spend the whole time comparing yourself with the more flexible person two mats over, and you’ve “checked yoga off the list, but you didn’t take in any of the medicine of yoga,” Lakshmin said.
When I think about it, many of my 5 to 9s aren’t that different from the ones I’ve watched: leave the office, maybe go to the gym, zone out with video games or TV, make dinner, work on my side hustle (writing a book), do chores, perform my nightly ablutions, read, sleep. Sometimes my evenings, too, are an exercise in box-checking, dissociation, and faux self-care, my body piloted by a brain that has never quite switched off work mode.
But I crave something else, something like what the artist and author Jenny Odell describes in her book Saving Time: At its most helpful, “leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it. Like a stent in a culture that can’t stand what looks like emptiness, it might provide that vertical crack in the horizontal scale of work and not-work,” she writes, “where the edges of something new start to become visible.” Because this is more of a felt sense than a behavior, labeling one activity leisure and another not is impossible. Odell writes that she has experienced this kind of leisure while “cooking, sorting socks, getting the mail.” But it won’t be found in a packed schedule. “True leisure,” she writes, “requires the kind of emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.”
For me, those vertical cracks seem most likely to form when I am spending time with other living things: people, mostly, but also my cats, and the natural world around me. When I go on a walk and admire the flowers in my neighbors’ gardens. When I linger over a meal with a friend long after our plates have been cleared. These are moments whose worth cannot be measured in output, that do not serve anything but themselves.
A common thread in the reading I’ve done on leisure is the conviction that forcing gets you nowhere. “Fun is a sneak and likes to catch people unawares; it simply will not tolerate wrenching,” the drama critic Walter Kerr wrote in 1962. The ethos of work is using time for something, turning it into a tool to drill your way to some desired outcome. Worshipping that too much precludes other forms of reverence, the peace and awe that can sneak up on you when you’re just existing.
