What does the average human do every day?
Roughly eight billion humans live on the planet, and each one experiences the 24 hours of the day a little differently. That amounts to 190 billion unique hours of human life lived during each rotation of the Earth.
While each of us has a decent conception of how we spend our own time, the actions of our fellow humans — from our next-door neighbors to people living in faraway countries — can seem quite mysterious. Do they watch as much TV? Work as many hours? Fiddle with their smartphones as frequently? Cook as often? Spend as much time watching their kids?
In an unprecedented analysis published in 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from McGill University attempted to answer that question. They aggregated data from 145 countries collected between 2000 and 2019. The data included time use surveys, national statistics of employment and working time, and international records of youth education and employment. This herculean effort revealed what the researchers termed the “global human day” — that is, “a complete estimate of what humans are doing, averaged over time and across the entire population.”
First and foremost, the average human spends about 9.1 hours sleeping or resting. That might seem like a lot to the sleep-deprived adults out there, but remember that the study includes data from children as young as newborns, who catch a lot of Zs.
