I often hear it said, at second and third hand, that retired people tend to become very busy. "I've never been busier," the retired guy says. Or the young woman qutoes her mother as saying, "I don't know how I had time to live before I retired." Busy busy busy busy busy. Yes, indeed.
Do not be fooled.
Here's what happens. Instead of doing one thing for 9 hours every day all week -- that is, go to work -- the older unemployed people do 2 or three tasks, each of them different. And every day bring different tasks to do. The number of different tasks I give attention to over the course of 5 days may very well have increased. If that's the measure of busyness, I'm busy.
At the same time, each of those tasks gets my attention for half an hour, an hour, perhaps even 3 hours. If the measure of busyness is how many hours I spend on specific tasks, I'm idling away.
As I think back to being employed, I remember being "busy" at work because there were always many tasks at hand to claim my attention. (Most of them, by the way, were cancelled before or just after completion. Those that weren't cancelled became "busyness" for other employees.) If we counted all the separate tasks at work, I'm far less busy today even using the task counting metric for busyness. However, when I was employed I only counted employment tasks during work hours. Outside of work hours, I treated all of work as one, big, onerous task.
In those days, my daily tasks might include going to work and buying milk. Those tasks took 10 hours of my day. Today, my tasks (so far) include picking up a sleeping bag from the cleaners, buying a small appliance at the discount retailer, rewriting the script that creates these Actual Reality pages, and buying milk. That took 3 hours.
Obviously, I'm far busier today, which fully justifies sloughing off the next 7 hours to make up the difference.