How Much Time Spent with Family Do We Really Get? A Book Review

How Much Time Spent with Family Do We Really Get?

I was scrolling X last week. Someone had posted a chart. It was from a book called The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.

The chart showed how much time Americans spend with different people, by age. Children. Partner. Family. Friends. Coworkers. Self.

I looked at the "children" line. My son is 11.

Right now, he still runs to hug me. He still makes funny faces at dinner. He still dances when a song he likes comes on. In a few years, that changes. He becomes a teenager. Then an adult. He'll have his own life, his own problems. He'll still love us. But he won't need us the way he needs us now.

The chart told me exactly when that shift happens. I already knew it in my gut. Seeing it on a graph still hit hard.

That's how I found the book.

I bought it. The chart was so interesting, I thought the whole book would be full of insights like this. I thought it would be amazing to read and learn.

I got through about 65 pages. Then I started skimming the pages.

The book is dense. Frameworks, jargon, stories, exercises, one after another. A lot of it is borrowed. Ideas from other blogs, other books, other psychology theories, wrapped up and repackaged. Even the opening chapter, called "1,000 years of wisdom," is really just conversations with 10-11 people in their 90s. The math works out to 1,000 years. But it's not research. It's interviews.

I'll say more on the book itself later. For now, here's what matters: the chart pulled me in more than the book did.

It stayed with me. Not just the children line. The whole thing. Partner, family, friends, coworkers, self, each one told a story I already knew, somewhere, without ever seeing it laid out like this.

I thought about my own life. My wife. My son. My parents. My friends from school, from engineering, from IIMB, scattered across the world now. I thought about how much of my day goes to people I didn't choose, coworkers, and how little goes to the people I did.

One chart did more for me than 65 pages of the book.

The most interesting part of the whole book, for me, was not the book. It was six charts. One for each of the people we spend our life with: coworkers, friends, family, children, partner, and ourselves.

Here they are, one by one, with my own take on each.

A Note on the Data

X-axis: age, 15 to 81. Y-axis: hours per day.

The data comes from the American Time Use Survey, run by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2003. Our World in Data pulled it together into these six charts. For more, see ourworldindata.org/who-do-americans-spend-time-with-over-their-lives.

Why does it start at 15? Because that's where the survey itself starts. Anyone younger isn't counted. So there's a part of every life, birth to 14, that this data simply can't show. I'll point out where that gap matters, chart by chart.

One more thing. This is American data. Other countries will likely show similar shapes, but with their own cultural nuances. I'll point some of these out too, especially for India.

Coworkers: Time You Don't Choose

We spend the most time with coworkers of anyone we didn't choose. Monday to Friday, sometimes ten hours a day, for thirty five years or more, from your first job at 25 to retirement at 60.

The chart shows it. Time with coworkers rises fast in your twenties, holds steady near 3 hours a day through your thirties, forties, fifties. Then, past 60, it falls off a cliff. Almost to zero by your late seventies.

In my own life, very few real friendships came out of all those years. Most of it was proximity, not choice.

Here's the part that matters more than the hours. It's not the time you give coworkers. It's the mindspace. Thinking about what someone said in a meeting. Rehearsing what to tell your boss. Replaying office politics while you're sitting with your family, or lying awake at night. Giving your time to coworkers may be unavoidable. Giving them your mind, after hours, is a waste.

Friends: How Fast They Drift

Childhood friends feel permanent. You tell yourself you'll be friends for life. You'll do anything for them.

The chart says otherwise. Time with friends peaks around age 18, near 2 hours a day. By 30, it's under an hour. It stays low for the rest of life and never comes back.

I spent my life in hostels, Sainik School from 10 to 17, engineering after that, then IIMB. Looking back, my closest friendships came from Sainik School. Maybe those were the years before life got competitive. After that, friendship changes shape. It gets harder to make new friends as you get older. And even old friends drift, once city, country, and career pull you apart.

I have a group of 4-5 close friends from IIMB. All of us live in Bangalore. We meet once a year, only when a friend from Hyderabad visits.

That's the real chart. Not hours in a day. Distance, and how little it takes to end a friendship that once felt unbreakable.

Family: The Steepest Drop

The chart drops the hardest here. At 15, time spent with family is over 4 hours a day. By 30, it's under an hour. Then it stays low for the rest of life, with a small rise after 60.

This is American data. India tells a different story, for now. Indian kids often live with parents well into their working years, sometimes after marriage. Elderly parents usually stay with one child, often the youngest, and the rest visit. But this is changing. As nuclear families become the norm in India, I expect our chart will start looking more like this one, a few decades from now.

For me, this chart started even lower than 15. I was sent to Sainik School at 10. After that, I never really lived at home again, except for vacations and short visits.

Siblings follow their own version of this curve. Close as children, then pulled apart by college, jobs, cities. What's left, often, is a phone call around Diwali, or a visit built around when the grandkids are free from school. Parents want more. Time doesn't allow it.

Children: Love, Then Discipline, Then Friendship

Since I already told you about my son at the start, I won't repeat that here. What I will say is this: I always knew it, deep down, even before I saw the chart.

The line peaks around age 35 to 38, near 4 hours a day. Then it falls, steadily, for the rest of life.

One thing worth knowing about this chart: the numbers you see between ages 15 and 20 aren't people with their own kids. That's teenagers, still counted as spending time with "children," because in this survey, children means anyone under 18 in the house. Usually, that's a younger sibling. Not your own child. Worth knowing before you read too much into that part of the line.

Chanakya is believed to have said this: love your child for the first five years. Discipline them for the next ten, till fifteen. From sixteen onward, be their friend.

I believe in this, deeply. In the first five years, a child needs love more than anything else. They're helpless. They're learning the world for the first time. Love here builds something they'll carry for life, a sense that the world is safe, that they matter. From five to fifteen, kids start to test you. Crying, sulking, being stubborn, they've learnt the tricks by now. This is when discipline matters. Don't insult people. Don't throw things. Put your toys away. Don't hit others. Small things, but they build character. From sixteen, kids start to understand the world for themselves. Right from wrong. Responsibility. Their own friends, their own problems. Love and discipline don't disappear, but now, being their friend matters just as much.

Often, we as parents get too busy with our own lives. Fighting with each other. Chasing money. Building a career. And in that noise, we forget something simple: we are raising tiny people who will one day be adults. What we give them now is what they carry forward.

Partner: The One Who Stays

The chart dips a little through the child raising years, the 40s and 50s, then rises again. By the late 60s and 70s, time with partner is higher than at any other point in life. Near four and a half hours a day.

Around 2010, I was staying in a rented house in Indiranagar, Bangalore. I was a bachelor then. My landlords were an elderly couple, the husband around 75, the wife around 70. Big house, prime location, well off. Helpers in the house. They didn't need a tenant like me. I think they wanted company.

They spoke to me often. Offered home cooked food. Asked about my family. I liked them a lot. And it stayed with me, a couple who had everything, yet by that stage of life, spending time mostly with each other.

That's when it hit me. In the end, none of it lasts the way you think it will. Friends drift. Kids grow up and move on. Coworkers disappear the day you retire. The one person who stays, till the very end, is your partner.

Which means your partner has to be your friend. Not just a spouse. A friend, in the truest sense, the kind of friendship that can carry a whole life.

Self: The Most Important Chart

This is the most important chart of the six, and it's also the one we spend the most time on.

From the moment we're old enough to understand ourselves, self is where most of our life happens. Strip away hygiene and daily routine, and what's left is mostly thinking. Contemplating. Stressing. Some of it is development, learning, exercising, creating. All of that adds up over a lifetime. This is also where hobbies are born, and it depends a lot on personality. Extroverts try to spend as little time here as possible. Introverts seek it out.

Here's the part that worries me. A lot of people think they're spending time with themselves when they're scrolling reels. They're not. They're watching someone else's life. That's not self-time. That's one of the biggest wastes of time there is.

For me, time with self means chanting, surrender to the almighty, meditation, exercise, learning, and most of all, thinking. There's a difference between thinking and overthinking, that's a topic for another day.

Self-time is inevitable. You can't escape it. So the only real choice is how well you use it.

My Life in Weeks

There's one more chart I want to share.

The idea isn't mine. It comes from Tim Urban, who writes Wait But Why. He calls it a life in weeks, every week of your life, laid out as a single dot, from birth to the end. I first saw it on his blog, years ago. It stayed with me the same way that children chart did.

So I built my own.

I was born on 28th July, 1979. If I live to 80, my life is 4,160 weeks. As of today, I've lived 2,456 of them. That's 59 percent, gone. 1,704 weeks left.

Each dot below is one week. Each row is one year. Look at it long enough, and something shifts. It's not abstract anymore. It's not "I have decades left." It's a fixed, countable number, most of it already spent.

If you map this out, we have less time than we think. And that's before anything unexpected takes even more of it away. Which makes it worth asking: are we spending the time we do have, well?

There is a beautiful yet sad true story in Jon Krakauer's book, Into the Wild. In 1992, a young man named Christopher McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness alone, looking for meaning in solitude. He lived in an abandoned bus for 113 days, hunting and foraging, until he starved to death at 24. Near the end, in the margin of a book he was reading, he wrote four words: "Happiness only real when shared."

A man who left everything behind to find himself alone, and in the end, realized what actually mattered was the people he'd left.

Quality, Not Quantity

One thing I realized a long time ago, especially with time spent with friends, family, children, spouse, and self, is that it's all about quality, not quantity.

If you meet your friends for a few drinks after a year, enjoy the moment. Showing off, demeaning them, being on your phone, talking about work, that's not time well spent. When I meet my friends, I ask about them and their families. I tell them what new things I've learnt, things that might help them. And most of all, we remember the adventures we had, school, college, work, and we laugh about it.

Time at home, with family, kids, my wife, is the same. When I spend time with my son, I try to give him undivided attention, even if it's just thirty minutes. I ask about his day, his problems. I tell him my own childhood stories, so he can relate. I don't touch my phone, social media, or the TV. If we watch a movie together, it's a movie together.

When we meet the extended family, the annual gathering during festivals, we cook together, eat together, go out, talk, laugh over our childhood adventures. We focus on spending the time, not just ticking a box. That time spent with family, even once a year, is worth more than any amount of time spent apart.

It's not about how much time you spend with everyone. Time is limited. It's how you spend that time that matters.

The Book Itself

Sahil Bloom went to Stanford. Played baseball there. Built a following on Twitter, writing threads on business and money and how to live better. That following became a newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle. Now it has over 150,000 subscribers. The 5 Types of Wealth is his first book. It sold over 500,000 copies. Translated into 39 languages.

The writing style tells you where he came from. Short sentences. Heavy on bullet points. Frameworks with names, made to be remembered and shared. It reads like a long Twitter thread stretched into a book. That's not an insult, it's just what it is. And it explains why the book moves fast but says less than it seems to.

I read 65 pages properly. After that, I skimmed. The ideas aren't new. Time, health, relationships, purpose, these aren't discoveries. What Bloom does is repackage them. Borrowed frameworks, other people's research, dressed up in his own language and delivered with confidence. The best thing in the whole book isn't even his. It's a chart, built from US government data, that someone else collected. He just knew how to use it well.

Rating: 2/5

Further Reading

1. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — Get your copy

   A book about time, and why we can never get more of it, no matter how well we manage it. The title itself is a life-in-weeks argument, roughly the number of weeks in an 80-year life. Connects directly to the Life in Weeks section above.

2. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware — Get your copy

   Written by a palliative care nurse, based on what people actually said on their deathbeds. Time with family and not working so hard come up again and again. A real-world echo of what the charts show, from people who ran out of weeks.

3. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi — Get your copy

   A neurosurgeon's memoir, written as he was dying of cancer, about what actually matters once time becomes visibly finite. Connects to the mortality thread running under every chart in this piece.

4. Together by Vivek Murthy — Get your copy

   Written by a former US Surgeon General, on loneliness and why human connection matters for health, not just happiness. Ties into the Self and Friends charts, especially the point on why time alone isn't the same as connection.

Happy Reading